Throughout the long and painful galus, there have been many sources of tragedy and suffering to individuals and to klal Yisrael as a whole. While some periods were easier and others were harder, throughout it all, the gentiles utilized their power to torture the Yidden and cause them all the more suffering.
In the era that our story takes place, a favorite practice of the Catholics was to kidnap Jewish children and win them over to the Catholic faith. They believed that they were ‘saving’ these children, a noble and worthy cause, and were indifferent to the pain of the bereft fathers and mothers whose children they stole.
When it happened, there was little warning. A child could have been sent outside to play, only to be snatched away moments later before his mother’s helpless eyes. A young Jewish boy could have been on his way to visit his grandparents a few short blocks away only to be plucked off the streets, never to be seen again. While these kidnappings did not happen frequently enough to cause the Jews to exercise the strictest measures of caution and keep their children holed up indoors at all hours, each incident was enough to tear the collective heart of the community into shreds.
The day that Shia’le was kidnapped began innocently enough. The sun rose as usual, spreading its warmth and light over the small village. The birds chirped, the crickets sang, and the frogs hopped in and out of the river. Nothing could have foreshadowed the tragedy that would soon take place.
At five years old, Shia’le had sparkling brown eyes and a mischievous smile, and he loved to romp outside with his friends. On that fateful day, he waved cheerfully to his mother and skipped outside to join the other boys, racing each other back and forth across the fields. When his mother, Sara, peaked out the window a few moments later, she smiled as she watched her son enjoying his boyhood years.
A half-hour later, she was no longer smiling.
Ironically, the sun was still shining, but there was no more merriment on the boys’ faces. Their panicked shouts brought her and her husband, Pinchas, running outside. From down the road, they could see a pair of gentile thugs dragging their precious son away.
Sara began screaming for help on the top of her lungs as Pinchas broke into a frenzied gallop after the brazen kidnappers, but there was nothing he could do to stop them from taking Shia’le away. On horseback, they had significant advantages that he couldn’t compete with, no matter how desperate he was.
“What now?” Sara cried as her husband turned back toward her, a defeated look on his white face.
“We go to the police,” Pinchas said grimly.
“The police! The police hate us!” his wife exclaimed, hurrying alongside him. “Who says they’ll be willing to help us?”
“We have to try,” Pinchas responded, panting slightly as he ran. “There’s no time to lose. Our son was kidnapped, and the chances of having him returned to us are getting slimmer with each passing minute.”
The policeman sitting behind the desk at the local headquarters did not seem to understand the urgency. “Kidnapped, you say,” he echoed slowly, taking a long draw on his cigar. “Do you have any credible witnesses, adults who witnessed the abduction? Perhaps he simply ran away?”
“No, no,” Sara cried. “He was kidnapped. I saw it myself! There were no other adults around, aside for myself and my husband, but we both saw how they dragged him down the street against his will. They refused to return him to us even when my husband chased after them, demanding his release!”
The policeman was not impressed by her tears. “Witnesses,” he said flatly. “Bring me credible witnesses, and then we will look into the story. Until then, my apologies, but there is nothing we can do.”
The distraught parents tried everything they could, from coaxing and pleading to demanding and even threatening, but the coldhearted officer ignored their entreaties. With a pointed look, he ordered them to leave the station.
Pinchas and Sara were not ready to give up on their little Shia’le without a fight. They involved the local askanim, who worked tirelessly on their behalf to locate Shia’le and try to bring him home. It took a lot of hard work and endless bribes, but soon, they had some information about the boy’s whereabouts.
“He’s being held in a monastery, a few days’ travel from here,” Gershon, the devoted askan, informed the parents gently. “And they are being extremely careful about keeping the entire incident under wraps. It took a lot of slippery persuasion, the expensive kind, to even get this information.”
Pinchas felt his pulse quicken dangerously. The monastery! The cursed place where young gentile minds were poisoned to hate the Jewish people! How would Shia’le manage in such a place? “How can we get him out of there?” he asked quietly.
“Can we get him out of there?” Sara blurted, fear written all over her face. “Is there any chance that they’ll let him go?”
A shadow crossed Gershon’s face. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “There’s always room for hope. Hashem has the means to do anything. But it’s definitely not going to be easy or quick. I suggest that you pour out your heart to Hashem. A mother’s tears carry a lot of weight in Shamayim.”
While his parents prayed, and while the askanim expended tremendous efforts on his behalf, little Shia’le was undergoing a tumultuous time in the monastery. At first, he was too terrified of the priests to do anything other than crawl up into himself and cry. But as the days and weeks passed, their bald heads and long, black robes no longer seemed as frightening to him.
The priests were kind, giving him nice, new clothing and chatting with him like old friends. Even the food they gave him was the kind of food he was used to, nothing suspicious looking to arouse his rebellion. But the five-year-old Shia’le couldn’t have realized that the new clothing he’d received had been purposely woven from shatnez, and that the food he enjoyed had been mixed with human blood, all intended to plug his heart and mind.
The effects of these forbidden things, along with many others, were exactly as the conniving priests had hoped. Shia’le slowly transformed into Stanislaw, a full-fledged member of the monastery, fitting in perfectly with the other boys there. The purity in his eyes had dulled, and the memory of his parents’ home faded. In their place, the indoctrination of the priests began to seep in.
For seven long, trying years, Pinchas and Sara did everything they could to get their son back. Even after hitting so many painful rejections and failures, they did not give up, turning over the world in their efforts. They tried bribery, they tried involving influential government members, but the Church stubbornly refused to relinquish its prize.
It seemed that they had hit a dead end. They had pursued every possible avenue, returning empty handed every time. They’d tried everything humanely possible until there was nothing left to try. But how could they just give up on the son that Hashem had given them? How could they abandon their precious Shia’le to a life of impurity and sin?
“I need something tangible to hold on to,” Sara told Gershon, the askan who’d been involved in the case the entire time. “I can’t hear that there’s nothing else to try, that I should just go home and give up. There must be something else, a small measure of hope, that the situation can change!”
Gershon turned to the grieving parents with sympathy. “I don’t want to give you false hope,” he said quietly. “As the situation stands now, there is nothing more to be done. However…”
“Yes?” both parents asked anxiously.
“As you know, when a new king takes office, on the first day of his reign, he grants favors to those who request it,” the askan said carefully. “Our king, may he live and be well, is not a young man, and it is no secret that he is ill. One day, his heir will take over. And on that day, you will have the opportunity to ask him to return your son to you.”
This faint hope was enough to revitalize the distraught parents, giving them the strength to soldier on. One day, there would be a new king, a new opportunity to try to rescue Shia’le from the evil clutches of the Church.
Not long thereafter, the country was plunged into mourning when their elderly king, a mighty monarch, passed away from his illness. His son and heir, the crown prince, was a mild-mannered man in his fifties, and a date was set for his coronation.
This was the moment that Pinchas and Sara had been waiting for. With renewed hope, they traveled to the capital city, along with Gershon, who was much more seasoned than they were, to try to secure an audience with the new king. They were not the only ones seeking his favor, and it was not certain that they would succeed in giving over their request, but they davened to Hashem that their efforts bear fruit.
The day of the coronation finally arrived, and along with a huge crowd of people, Shia’le’s parents stood on line to speak to the newly crowned king. They waited for hours as the line inched forward until it was finally their turn. With so many people hoping to see the king, they were granted an audience of just minutes.
It was their first time in the presence of royalty, and both Pinchas and Sara were overwhelmed by the majesty, but they could not allow themselves to be distracted. With tears in their eyes, they described to the king how their son had been so cruelly abducted, and all the efforts they’d invested to get him back.
“The Church refuses to return him, no matter how many influential people exert pressure on it,” Pinchas explained. “We humbly request of His Majesty to accept our son’s case and order the Church to return him to us.”
The king was moved by the pain in Pinchas’s words, and he agreed to his request. With a flick of his finger, he motioned to an aide to take care of having their request fulfilled as Pinchas and Sara were ushered out and the next petitioner was brought before the king.
The audience had gone exactly as they’d hoped, and now all Pinchas and Sara could do was daven and wait. While the king had signaled his intention to help them, and the Church couldn’t just ignore an order from the king, they knew it would not release Shia’le from its clutches without a fight.
Gershon went to follow up with the king’s staff a few days later, and he returned with the distressing, but not unexpected, news that the Church was resisting the king’s order. “They don’t want to give him up, and they are putting pressure on the king to allow them to keep him,” the askan explained. “On our end, we will continue to place counter-pressure and hope that the king will not forget about you.”
It was a very stressful time for Pinchas and Sara. Their salvation was so close, just within arm’s length, but at the same time, it was too far to grasp. They redoubled their prayers as Gershon toiled on their behalf in the king’s court.
Finally, the askan returned with some news. “Good news and bad news,” he said carefully. “The king’s court came to a compromise with the Church. They will allow you to visit your son for three minutes on the clock. If, after those three minutes, your son agrees to come home with you, then you are free to take him home. If, however, Shia’le chooses to remain in the monastery, you will have no choice but leave him there.”
Sara began to cry as her husband began questioning the devoted askan. “What are the chances that Shia’le will want to remain in the monastery?”
“Unfortunately, there is very strong likelihood that he will choose to stay there,” Gershon said softly. “You must realize that he hasn’t seen you in more than seven years, ever since he was a small child. He’s nearly an adolescent now, and he spent the past seven years undergoing intense indoctrination against the Jewish people. The monastery is familiar to him, and he might just want to stay.”
Now Pinchas began to weep as well, and Gershon tried to console the distressed parents. “You are not in this alone. We will go the great tzaddik, the Nachal Eshkol, and ask him to advise you on what to say to your son during your short visit to convince him to return home. This is not something you will need to decide on your own.”
The Nachal Eshkol was a great gaon and tzaddik, and was the rav in the region where they lived. He was known for wearing his tallis and tefillin the entire day, his thoughts constantly occupied with holiness. He is renowned for his commentary on Eshkol, a difficult sefer written by one of the rishonim.
Gershon’s words had an immediate, calming effect on the couple as they felt the weight of their burden lift off their shoulders slightly. The Nachal Eshkol would guide them and assist them. As Gershon had said, they were not in this alone.
They went together to see the rav, and the worried parents poured out their hearts to him. “In those three minutes, if we don’t manage to persuade him, he and all his generations may be lost to Yiddishkeit forever,” Pinchas said, tears streaming from his cheeks, as his wife sobbed quietly beside him.
The Nachal Eshkol covered his face with his tallis for a long moment. When he uncovered his face again, he said calmly, “You don’t have to worry. I will come along with you during the meeting with your son, and I will speak to him. You won’t have to say anything.”
Pinchas and Sara were extremely grateful for this offer, and they immediately agreed to have the Nachal Eshkol joined them. “But remember,” he cautioned them. “Even if it will be hard for you, do not say anything. I will do all the talking.”
He asked the couple to wait a few moments while he prepared himself for the journey and went into the next room, where he carefully donned his yom kippur attire. He put on his sparkling white kittel and yarmulka and wrapped himself in his tallis. On top of this, he wore his coat, so that his interesting choice of dress would not be visible to others.
Together with the rav, Pinchas and Sara began the journey to the faraway monastery. The atmosphere was very solemn, even tense, and few words were exchanged the entire trip. The only audible murmurings were Tehillim and other prayers, as they beseeched Hashem to grant them their son again.
The monastery was exactly the way they’d imagined it, cold and austere, with tall stone walls and domed windows. Wherever one turned, they were greeted with the sight of Christian symbols and pictures, causing Pinchas, Sara, and the Nachal Eshkol to direct their gaze at the floor as they followed a black-robed priest down the dim corridors.
Soon, they arrived at a large room. A single table stood in its center, surrounded by chairs. Symbols of their faith hung everywhere. Sara squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to associate this evil place with the son she missed and longed for.
“You may sit here,” a priest instructed, pointing to three adjacent seats on one side of the table. The Nachal Eshkol gingerly sat down on one of the chairs, with Pinchas seated beside him. Sara took the seat near her husband, clasping her hands nervously on her lap.
Once they were seated, the priests slyly placed a few more symbols of their faith behind the rav. He could not see them, but the boy most certainly would, after he would take his seat across from the rabbi. They hoped that the impure artifacts would help counter the rabbi’s words, strengthening the barrier inside the boy’s heart and mind so that no influence would penetrate.
The Nachal Eshkal was no fool, however. He sensed the movement behind him and understood immediately what the priest had done. Nevertheless, he remained silent.
“We are bringing the boy in now,” one of the priests suddenly announced. “We will give you exactly three minutes on the clock and not a second more.”
The door opened, and Shia’le was brought in. Sara bit down hard on her lip to stifle the scream that welled up within her. She glanced at her husband, finding that his face was pale and his eyes were clouded with pain. Shia’le appeared to be a gentile youth in every way, and even though they’d known to expect it, his appearance was still shocking.
“Shia’le, come home!” both parents wanted to cry out, but they knew that it was against their best interest to do so. With superhuman control, they suppressed the words bubbling on their tongues and waited for the Nachal Eshkol to speak.
Shia’le took his seat across from his parents and the rav. He peeked at his father, who was looking back at him with painfilled eyes. His gaze flicked to his mother, who was weeping silently. Behind them were the familiar statues and symbols that he knew so well from his upbringing in the monastery, and they seemed to be winking at him comfortingly.
The Nachal Eshkol stood up and took off his overcoat, revealing the stark white kittel he was wearing underneath. Then he took off his hat and lifted his tallis over his head. He closed his eyes and began to sway ever so slightly. “Al daas hamakom, v’al daas hakahal…Kol Nidrei…”
The words poured from his lips in the stirring melody he used every year when he ascended to the bimah on the evening of Yom Kippur. The holy tune, which filled the hallowed halls of batei midrashim the world over, now wafted within the cold stone walls of the monastery. A minute passed, then two, as the rav continued reciting Kol Nidrei.
The third minute began, and the holy words continued to swirl around them. Suddenly, Shia’le tore the necklace he was wearing off his chest and ran to his mother. “Mama, take me home!” he whimpered, running into her arms. “Mama, I want to go home!”
The haunting Kol Nidrei melody had awakened the memories of his childhood, long dormant, and had opened his mind and heart to repentance. For the first time in years, he recalled his beautiful childhood and all that he’d learned from his parents prior to his abduction. All the values they’d inculcated in him from birth suddenly came to the forefront, overriding the foreign ideas that the priests had brainwashed him with.
“Mama, I want to go home,” Shia’le said again, and there was no more time to lose. The three minutes were up, but they had succeeded in securing his desire to come home with them.
Together, the four Jews ran out of the monastery toward their waiting wagon, wanting to put as much distance between them and the monastery as possible, lest the priests change their minds. Pinchas, overwhelmed by the miracle they’d just experienced, could not hold himself back from hugging and kissing the rav, thanking him for being the proper messenger to save his son.
“Please tell us how you knew,” the couple asked the Nachal Eshkol. “How did you discover the key to Shia’le’s heart?”
The Nachal Eshkol smiled. “What you saw just now was an amazing principle in chinuch,” he explained. “Whatever one grows up with when he is young, that is what stays with him forever. Even after he leaves the shelter of his parents’ home, and finds himself in places where the customs are different, that which he learned in his youth will never be fully forgotten.
“When your young Shia’le came to shul with you on Yom Kippur night,” the rav continued, turning toward Pinchas, “He heard the Kol Nidrei being recited in this very tune. He likely didn’t understand what was going on or what it meant, but he heard Kol Nidrei. The words, the melody, seeped deep into his impressionable soul, where they will always remain.
“No matter how much filth and grime those priests tried to heap on Shia’le’s soul, the tiny spark that represents all that he learned in his youngest years could never be extinguished. It didn’t take even three minutes for that spark to be rekindled into a beautiful flame when he heard Kol Nidrei again.”
The words “reishis chachmah yiras Hashem,” which we recite every morning upon awakening, can also mean that it is of primary importance that the early years of one’s life be saturated with yiras shamayim, because this kind of yiras shamayim is one that we can hold onto forever.
It is so important to let our children soak in as much holiness as possible, because what goes in when they are young will never come out.
***
The Gemara praises the great Rebbi Yehoshua ben Chanaya with the words, “Ashrei yoladeto, praised is the one who gave birth to him.” The Bartenura explains that when Rebbi Yehoshua ben Chananya was an infant, his mother would place his cradle inside the bais hamedrash, so that her tiny son would hear the kol Torah.
Why did Rebbi Yeshoshua ben Chananya become a gadol hador, one of the greatest leaders of his generation? Because of his mother, who was so careful to ensure that he would be immersed in Torah, even before he could understand what was happening around him.
***
When my children were small, Rav Moshe Feinstein was already very elderly, and I wanted my children to have a chance to see him. Appointments were only being scheduled right after davening, but I made one anyway despite the inconvenience, because it was very important to me.
My children waited outside until after davening, and then we went in to receive a brachah from the gadol hador. First, he took his holy hands and blessed me. Then, I told him that I had brought my family, including my newborn son who’d just had his bris, and requested brachos for them as well.
Rav Moshe Feinstein wished us mazel tov and blessed the children, including the newborn. What an incredible gift my young son received, to have received a brachah from such a holy tzaddik in the first weeks of his life! The holiness of that moment would remain with him forever!
Have a Wonderful Shabbos!
This story is taken from tape #TB92