Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Zaltzman
I was born in 1956 in a city called Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, 1,500 miles from the Lubavitcher communities in Tashkent and Samarkand, in Uzbekistan. In order to immerse in a mikveh, my mother had to take a thirty-six-hour train ride, each way, to Samarkand.
My parents had only come to Dushanbe for a business opportunity, so we didn’t stay for long, and I grew up between Samarkand and Moscow, where my grandparents lived. My parents had six children in Russia, which was such an achievement that the government gave my mother a medal. She was called a “Heroic Mother,” and received eleven rubles every month to buy additional milk.
Every child in the Soviet Union had to go to a government school. It was mandatory. If parents were caught not giving their child a communist education, it was three years of jail, and up to twenty-five years if they decided to take it to court. During that time, their child belonged to the government, and would be sent to grow up in government institutions.
So, when I came of age, my parents told me, “We want you to continue in yeshivah and we don’t want you to go to the Russian school.”
“Sure,” I said. “that’s fine.”
“Well,” they continued, “for that, you will have to disappear.”
What does it mean to disappear? It meant that, starting from September until mid-June, when children are in school, you cannot go outside or near the window. Nobody can know that you exist. (more…)