Once I was traveling with my family from Ukraine to Israel after visiting the places in which my ancestors used to live. We had too many bags, and one of the Ukrainian flight attendants ordered us to get them checked to make sure they fit the size of carry-on allowed on board.
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One of our bags was an inch bigger than allowed, and we were ordered to pay 70 euros. I handed the flight attendant my credit card. Then a Chabad Jew approached me and said, "Is the bag worth 70 euros to you? If not, why not leave it here?" He was right. My children and I emptied the bag and were refunded the money. After boarding the plane, I looked for the Chabadnik to thank him.
He asked me my name and what I was doing in Ukraine. I told him that my name is Ariel Kahana and that I was on a heritage trip in Ukraine.
My grandfather, Rabbi Chaim Meir Kahana, was born in 1910 in the village of Viseu in northern Romania. He was the eldest son of seven siblings. He was smart, charismatic, strong, and was destined for greatness from a young age. He studied in the yeshivas of the Vizhnitz Hassidic dynasty, and at the age of 20, moved to Chernivtsi in the Bukovina region, on the border of Romania and Ukraine.
He received an education in Chernivtsi, which had a well-known university, learned German, and for the first time in his life encountered secular, reform and Zionist Jews. He soon joined Agudat Yisrael and became the party's secretary in the city and the editor of the Haredi newspaper.
Also there, grandfather met Gertrude Lange, an ultra-Orthodox young woman who had been invited by Agudat Yisrael from Hamburg, Germany, to train ultra-Orthodox teachers in Chernivtsi. In 1937 they got married. A year later, my father, Michael, was born. Two years later, they also had a daughter named Tova.
The Kahanas led a simple life in Chernivtsi. The parents continued to be active in the Jewish community. Gertrude was not particularly excited about raising children, and her young sister-in-law Lottie, Chaim Meir's sister, came to help. So did Chaim Meir's brother Yehuda.
Among his many occupations, Rabbi Kahana was also in charge of distributing immigration permits to the land of Israel. In the 1903s, he visited the land twice, with the intention to immigrate at a later date. He kept four such permits for his family but eventually gave them to another member of the community who was in dire need. Those permits turned out to be the last ones to be handed out by Agudat Yisrael in Chernivtsi, and so the family remained in the city with no ability to escape from the persecution that was lurking around the corner.
The Red Army invaded the town in 1940 and made a name for itself by confiscating the majority of the Jewish community's property. As severe as the blow seemed at the time, it turned out to be nothing compared to the Nazi-Romanian occupation in 1941. Romania was Hitler's ally, and in Chernivtsi, they imposed never-ending decrees against the Jews. To save her life, Lottie traveled back to her parents to the Beclean village in northern Romania. Yehuda remained with Chaim Meir and Gertrude.
First, the Jews of Chernivtsi were sent to a small ghetto, with its unbearable living conditions, hunger, and disease. My grandparents set up a make-shift soup kitchen in the building's basement in which they made food for the needy. The basement was also a shelter in which the family hid when the city was being bombed. My father was three years old, and his sister only a few months old. "I remember the sounds of the bombings to this day," he often told us.
The relief, as terrible as it may sound, came with the liquidation of the ghetto. The Nazis, Romanians, and Ukrainians led hundreds of Jews to their deaths, to Transnistria, across the Dniester River. Group by group, Jews were deported from Chernivtsi, first by trains, later on foot to the frozen plains of Ukraine. In the fall of 1941, the Kahana family was deported as well.
In a book my grandfather wrote towards the end of his life, he described the horrors he had experienced – the frost, the mud, the hunger, the thirst, the dogs, the shots of the policemen, and their sharp blows. Jews were forced to cross the wide and deep Dniester River, where thousands of Jews before them had drowned. My grandfather and his friends buried Jewish bodies in a nearby forest.
Jews were also ambushed on the road by the Ukrainians who tried to snatch from them the few belongings they had left. Someone grabbed what my grandmother was holding in her arms too. When the thief realized that my grandmother wasn't holding a valuable belonging, rather her daughter, he threw the baby to the ground.
Tova was mortally wounded. "We saw in her eyes how her strengths diminished and abated," grandfather wrote. The next morning he dug his daughter's grave with his bare hands, somewhere near the town of Yampil, about 400 km (250 miles) east of Chernivtsi.
In that great chaos, my father, a 3-year old child, got lost. He almost froze to death. Someone recognized him and returned him to his parents, who were shocked by grief over the loss of their daughter. His uncle Yehuda helped him warm up and thus saved his life.
A turning point occurred when Yehuda and Chaim Meir disguised themselves as construction workers and obtained a residence permit in an abandoned Jewish home in the Yampil ghetto, where the death march had arrived. Not only did they save themselves, but also a group of other Jews my grandfather took under his wing on the way.
In the shabby building in Yampil, food was almost non-existent, and yet the resourcefulness of Chaim Meir and Yehuda saved the family from starvation and extreme cold. One day Yehuda sold needles that he had brought with him, the next the two built an oven for a local resident. Every day was a new battle for survival, and survive they did.
Conditions became a little bit more bearable when spring arrived. My grandmother recovered and began teaching her son and other children about the weekly Torah portion and to read and write. My grandfather managed to procure some money, which they used to buy food and clothes for the tiny community that was created.
A year later, when the Nazis were pushed back by the Soviets, the heads of the Romanian government started to look for ways to save face by making up for their crimes. For example, together with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, they transported orphaned children to ghettos in Transnistria in 1944, as the outskirts were safer than the cities.
After some hardships, my grandparents decided to send my father on one of those trains. Their plan was to send him to Beclean, where he would live calmly with his extended family until the end of the war. Or so they hoped.
On a frozen Ukrainian morning, my father Michael and my grandmother Gertrude went to a train station in the town of Mohyliv-Podilskyi near Yampil. My father had to call his mother "aunt", as only orphans were allowed on the train. "We thought it would be a short farewell which would end soon," my father said to me, "Who would have thought it would turn out to be so fateful?"
Gertrude returned to Yampil, and father, accompanied by a girl from the ghetto, traveled to the south of Romania.
The train ride turned out to be a nightmare. "We were crammed into cattle trucks," my father said. "There was very little food. A third of the carriage turned into a toilet. The suffocation and the smell were terrible. It was one of the most shocking experiences of my life that I can remember."
In the city of Iasi, my father bid farewell to the young girl who accompanied him and was transferred to another train accompanied by a non-Jewish maid who was sent, in coordination with the family, by the mayor of the town of Turda, to be transferred to one of his aunts.
This ride was already more comfortable. My father, surprisingly, befriended the German soldiers who were on the train. The soldiers enjoyed the German he had heard from his mother and taught him paper folding – an art many years later he taught to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren too.
From Turda, my father was supposed to continue to Beclean but couldn't. The border with Hungary shifted south, and Beclean was now Hungarian territory. Had my father made it there, he would have been taken with his grandmother, uncles, and cousins to the Auschwitz camp, for in those very weeks, Nazis were carrying out the rapid extermination of Hungarian Jewry. My father's life was saved again.
In Turda, my father was raised by his aunt, Suri Kahana, whose husband, Israel, Chaim Meir's brother, was serving in the Romanian army. However, very soon, they had to flee again from German planes that were bombing the region.
"I remember the horrible rattle, the frightening sound of the planes, and the screams of the victims," my father said. "During one of the attacks, I almost suffocated when people fled the inferno and trampled each other."
The war in this part of Europe ended soon. Israel Kahana returned home, and together with Suri, they became my father's adoptive parents. Later, uncle Yehuda arrived from Yampil and said that Chaim Meir and Gertrude remained in Chernivtsi. They feared that my grandmother would not survive the hardships of the trip to Romania and wanted to arrange a home for the family first.
A year later, Lottie returned from the displacement camps in which she stayed after Auschwitz. She headed a group of Agudat Yisrael pioneers and told my father Michael, "I am going to the land of Israel, and you are coming with me."
The year was 1946. The Jewish state had not yet been established, and immigration was illegal. But my 8-year old father did not care. He was smart, strong, and mature for his age and decided to set out on the journey.
After many weeks of waiting, 4,000 people were crammed into the Knesset Israel ship that left from Italy on Nov. 8, 1946, with my father and his aunt on board.
The journey was exhausting. The ship was old and crowded, and many suffered from seasickness. Lottie used to say that the pressure was worse than in Auschwitz.
"Even the space between the bunks was smaller than in the camp," she said.
As the ship entered the Haifa port, a confrontation broke out between the Jews and the British soldiers. The ship was ordered to sail to Cyprus. At the age of 8, my father found himself in a new land yet again.
They stayed in Cyprus for about six months until fate knocked on the door again – my father won the lottery by receiving an immigration card to Israel distributed by the British.
What was to be done? My father was nine years old, his aunt was not allowed to join him without a ticket, and his parents were not with him. Finally, after lengthy correspondence between the uncles, they decided not to miss out on the opportunity.
And so, in the summer of 1947, my father arrived in Israel on a British ship alone. He was sent to the Atlit Detention Camp, as was customary at the time, but in his mind, he had reached heaven. That is how Jews in the Diaspora perceived the land of Israel at the time: heaven.
Relatives on his mother's side came to visit my father but were not financially able to raise him. After months in the camp, following another correspondence between uncles, it was decided that my father would be sent to the religious Hafetz Chaim kibbutz near Gedera.
Little Michael left on a bus from Haifa to Tel Aviv alone. He was supposed to transfer to another bus at the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station but got lost. He wandered the streets in tears until a wealthy ultra-Orthodox Jew, whose identity we'll never know, took my father to his house, but not before buying him new pajamas, and the next day put him on the right bus to the Hafetz Chaim kibbutz.
"When I arrived at the kibbutz, I was reborn," my father said. As a 9-year old he was adopted for the third time by relatives Jup and Tzala Auerbach, his mother's cousins. The high school studies my father completed in Jerusalem and returned to the kibbutz during vacations. At the age of 17, he began to earn a living as a counselor at an orphanage in Jerusalem. In 1956 he enlisted in the Nahal Brigade, and upon completion, fulfilled his dream of studying economics at Hebrew University.
His family members immigrated to Israel over the years. Only his parents, Chaim Meir and Gertrude, were left behind.
When the war ended, Chaim Meir and Gertrude returned to Chernivtsi to rebuild the devastated Jewish community. My grandfather set up a Torah-learning school and a fund that helped the many widows and orphans with housing, food, and anything else that was needed.
Joseph Stalin was the ruler in those days, and he declared an all-out war on religion, Judaism in particular. Grandfather realized that the Soviet rule was closing in on him. He kept his activities to a minimum and tried to cross the Iron Curtain with my grandmother, but it was too late.
In 1944, after having survived the hardships of the Holocaust, my grandfather was arrested by the NKVD, the secret service of the USSR at the time.
He was tortured and starved, but refused to reveal his "accomplices in the crime" of rehabilitating the Jewish community. He was transferred from jail to jail and interrogated again and again. He ended up hospitalized in the jail hospital on the verge of death until a judge sentenced him to seven years of harsh labor in Siberia. To these were added two more years of "exile" in Chernihiv on the border with Belarus.
Yet somehow, my grandfather survived in Siberia. Even under those inhumane conditions, he managed to preserve a Jewish way of life: he smuggled tefillin into the camp, procured matzah for Pesach. In the most unexpected moments, someone would whisper to him, "I am a Jew like you," and helped him. And my grandfather helped in return.
Gertrude remained in Chernivtsi. She lived in a cramped and neglected neighborhood, so relatives from Israel and Switzerland secretly sent her money and medicine. At some point, she was offered the opportunity to leave the USSR alone and reunite with her young son in Israel, but after much deliberation, she decided to wait for her husband.
"I knew Michael was alright," she later said. "But if I left Chaim Meir there, no one would ever know what happened to him."
From time to time, she sent food packages to her husband in jail. She loved him so much she even traveled to Siberia once, thousands of miles away. With the help of local Jews, she even managed to meet with him there, at the edge of the world. She brought him food, wrapped in the pages of the Talmud, the Mishna, and the prayer book.
"Those were the days of comfort and hope between us," grandpa wrote. "Three years after parting with our only son, she gave me a picture of him and letters that he wrote."
The journey almost killed Gertrude. She contracted severe pneumonia and was hospitalized in Chernivtsi. Only an experimental operation, which included amputating one of her lungs and moving her heart out of place, saved her life.
The only consolation for Chaim Meir and Gertrude throughout the years was the correspondence with family in Israel. My father and uncles in Israel updated my grandmother on what was happening to them and vice versa through secret writings as the Soviet censorship was eyeing them closely. Here and there, someone from Chernivtsi immigrated to Israel and had a more detailed update on the family's life back there or brought more coded letters that had to be deciphered.
In 1951 my grandfather was released from Siberia, but he had two more years to spend in Chernihiv. Having just been released from prison, my grandfather resumed his Jewish activities immediately.
Upon returning to Chernivtsi after two years, grandfather remained true to his Judaism and once again integrated into the secret life led by the tiny local ultra-Orthodox community. Under the noses of the authorities, he participated in prayers, holiday celebrations, and the construction of a mikveh in the synagogue.
He also began to give secret lessons to a boy named Ben-Zion Vishtzky, whose father was imprisoned for Jewish activities. When they first met, my grandfather cried, "I didn't think that I would merit to see another Jewish child study Gemara," he told the boy.
Ben-Zion was six years old, and he and his friends came to my grandfather's Gemara lessons. If the Soviets did know about this, they chose to ignore it.
Nearing the age of 60, stuck behind the Iron Curtain, cut off from their only son who they had not seen for a decade, cut off from their extended family, and shattered by grief, the hardships of the Holocaust and the Soviet government – the only thing my grandparents wanted to do was to immigrate to Israel.
However, the USSR authorities repeatedly rejected their requests to leave the country and reunite with their son in Israel.
At the same time, my father and uncles approached everyone in Israel about obtaining permits for my grandparents. "It became a regular practice," my father said. "Each time one request was denied, we submitted another one."
At some point, President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi intervened, as did Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a symbol of the struggle for human rights. Nevertheless, the Soviets did not budge.
The matter reached its peak when my father was once again taken for interrogation by the KGB. "We know everything you do," the interrogator snapped at him. "There is no point in submitting more requests. You will not come out of this alive, and you will never see your son." My grandmother was interrogated as well.
The two returned home crushed. "The world was dark for us," my grandfather wrote in his book. "We were shocked to the depths of our souls. Twenty-two years we waited to move to Israel, 17 of those we did not see our only child."
My grandparents then sent my father a recording. For the first time in so many years, he heard their voices. The recording included many quotes from rabbinical literature. They said that they were praying for my father's well-being, that they thought of him constantly, and asked him to continue to walk on the path of the Torah.
When my dad and uncles heard the recording, it was clear to them that Chaim Meir and Gertrude lost all hope of leaving the USSR. But in the summer of 1961, when everything seemed lost, and just on my father's birthday, he received a telegram with the words: "We received a permit to immigrate to Israel." Thus, without prior notice, and for reasons unknown, the Soviets decided to let my parents go. The most unbelievable thing was happening.
"Those were the days of euphoria," my dad said.
On the holiday of Shemini Atzeret in 1961, Chaim Meir and Gertrude crossed the border into Hungary and from there traveled to Austria. The Israeli ambassador in Vienna personally hosted them and helped them with anything they needed. The next day, 19 years after having been separated from their 5-year-old son Michael, they met again. This time, in Tel Aviv.
My grandparents lived for many more peaceful years in Jerusalem. My grandfather dedicated his life to Soviet Jews. He established an international foundation that operated for decades and sent thousands of food and aid packages to his friends in Chernivtsi and other cities in the USSR.
Grandmother worked in education in the ultra-Orthodox sector. She was in charge of a home for girls who left their homes and began teaching the weekly Torah portion again.
Their house was full of guests from the USSR. Through my father, they had five grandchildren and even got to see two great-grandchildren.
From the day he arrived in Israel, my grandfather said that the USSR was founded on lies and predicted its collapse. He was privileged to witness that before he died.
After his death, my grandmother told us that she had "finished her job in the world" and passed away six months later.
My father grew up to be a senior official at the Finance Ministry. He and my mother were among the founders of the Beit El settlement and are blessed with many grandchildren and great-grandchildren today.
I thought of telling all this to the Chabad Jew who helped me save 70 euros – that my wife and I visited Chernivtsi, where my father was born, where his family hid in the basement, the story of my grandparents, and their daughter, and the immigration to Israel. But to my own surprise, I did not have to tell him that.
"I know who your grandfather was," he told me. "My wife's father is Ben-Zion Vishtzky. Your grandfather used to teach him Gemara in Chernivtsi after he returned from Siberia. My father-in-law speaks of him all the time."
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