Rabbi Benzion Milecki - Shabbat Shemos
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of the Rebbetzen’s grandmother, Bobbe Maryasha, on Wednesday evening, 21 Teves, in New York.
Bobbe Maryasha, oleho hashalom, who was born on Erev Rosh HaShana 1900, saw and outlived the great persecutors of our People: the Czars, the Communists and the Nazis. Throughout all these terrible persecutions, and in the midst of much personal suffering, she maintained the highest standards of Yiddishkeit both for herself and for all her children, who she raised alone after her husband was murdered by the Communists for being a Mohel. Her self-sacrifice for Yiddishkeit under the most trying circumstances is beyond description.
Indeed it is impossible to do justice in these few lines, or even in an entire book, to the kind of person that Bobbe Maryasha was. Our children and grandson are indeed lucky to have as their great, and great-great-grandmother, such an illustrious woman.
Bobbe Maryasha is survived by over six hundred descendants, including great-great-grandchildren. They are present in every continent (except Antarctica...) and in tens of countries, as emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe - something of which the Bobbe was justifiably very proud. She once told Henya that she would live until Moshiach. Let us hope and pray that his arrival is now imminent so that “death will be swallowed up forever and the L-rd G-d will wipe away tears from all faces, for G-d has spoken”.
In time, I am sure that more will be written about her. However for now I would like to direct your attention to an article published by the Associated Press (AP) that has just appeared in Yahoo.com and other media.
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106-year-old survivor of czarist pogroms, Nazis dies in New York
NEW YORK (AP) - They called her Bubbe Maryasha - a 106-year-old Jewish grandmother who survived the pogroms of czarist Russia, Soviet anti-Semitism and Nazi terror.
Members of the Lubavitch Jewish community on Thursday announced the death of Maryasha Garelik, the grandmother - "bubbe" in Yiddish - who survived milestone moments of the 20th century, including the Soviet execution of her husband for helping to keep Judaism alive.
Garelik, who died Wednesday night, passed her wisdom on to thousands who came seeking inspiration, said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky of the Lubavitch World Headquarters.
The Hasidic Jewish movement follows the teachings of eastern European rabbis, emphasizing the study of Hebrew scriptures worldwide. Some of Garelik's more than 500 descendants are Lubavitch emissaries in China, Australia, South Africa, France, England and Poland.
When Garelik was five, her father was killed in a czarist Russian pogrom and her grandparents were executed.
Years later, Garelik, her husband and their small children were evicted from their apartment because he refused to do factory work on the Jewish Sabbath. He was arrested in the 1930s under Josef Stalin and shot to death. Garelik did not know what happened to him until 1998, when his fate was revealed in an unsealed KGB file.
When authorities warned her against lighting the Sabbath candles, Garelik fled with her six children. The family moved six times in three years due to harassment from Soviet authorities. One home was a stable.
By 1941, when the Germans advanced, Garelik and her brood escaped to Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, where she made and sold socks to survive. In 1946, they ended up in a detention camp in Germany.
After the war, she moved to Paris, where she established a Lubavitch Jewish girls' school that still exists. She immigrated to the United States in 1953, starting a New York organization whose members visited the sick, and a boys' school for which she collected money into old age.
God gave her "two healthy feet," Garelik would say. "I can walk, I can take care of myself and help others."
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