This story is about Regina.
Looking at her, people see an old woman, but that is just part of the picture. Like all of us, she’s many ages at the same time…
When she doesn’t look at the mirror, inside her head she’s the little 7-year old girl, being an absolute pest, pulling at her mother’s skirt. Her mother is kneading dough for a cake that won’t be ready for far too long for Regina’s impatience…
She’s also thirteen, fighting with Joseph, or Yozhi as they call him, her younger brother who has taken over the ‘absolute pest’ role in the house…
Then, of course, when she closes her eyes, Regina is seventeen…pretty as a flower, and taking her budding, lithesome body for granted as if it’ll remain young forever…
…She sees herself shaking her thick head of glossy, gorgeous hair in the sun… her care-free laughter echoing, rolling, just before the dark clouds gathered. Everyone was talking. They were saying how there’s going to be war for sure - but kept on going about their business as usual because it was so unreal…until the war really came.
First came the airplanes. Ugly black things with fixed wheels that dove, shrieking like a banshee, dropping bombs that spread death and destruction. Entire neighborhoods turned to rubble. She can still smell the sickening odor of the ruptured gas lines and see the volunteer fire-fighters carrying buckets of sand as they step over a dead horse lying in the street…Regina thought it was the end of the world. But it wasn’t. Regina wasn’t that lucky.
After weeks of disease and hunger came the grey-clad German soldiers with their Nazi beetle helmets, clumsy boots and heavy, unwashed smell…and after them, clean and elegant in their black and silver uniforms and polished high boots, came the SS. These were the Gestapo - the secret police with a silver grinning skull of death insignia on their caps. THAT was the end of the world.
The next two years where flooded with a blur of pictures:
Seeing her parents led away, never to be seen again… people dying of thirst in the locked train-cars on the way to the concentration camps… the beatings… the hunger…How she survived it all is a story all its own, but next, Regina remembers herself a 19-year old skeleton, watching with vacant eyes the shocked American G.I.s that liberated the camp. In her mind Regina is standing, remote and silent, as the doctors in the G.I hospital examine the horrendous scars on her back and legs as if it were someone else’s body …
At 20 she was somehow successful in closeting the worst memories in a secret compartment in her mind that only burst open unimpeded while she slept. Regina is leaning over the rail of a small, rusty ship, overfilled with refugees, heading for the Holy Land…to a new life?
And inexplicably, because humans are so amazingly resilient, a mere few years later, a part of Regina can even laugh! Here she is 25, married to Moshe, a gentle refugee like herself, holding her own baby boy, Yossi. It’s short for ‘Josef’, named after her brother who was gassed in Auschwitz. Life, in those early days in Israel, was hard and wars came often, but somehow a fledgling new life was created from the ashes. Everyone believed. It was incredible.
Sure, Regina and her husband made sacrifices and worked hard, but it was all worth it. They watched proudly as Yossi grew and became a man, free of fears and independent, a product of a new age. At 45 Regina is almost content. She is looking forward now to becoming a grandmother. And then war rudely entered her life once again …
And this time she fell apart.
Regina still sees the officer, doctor and Rabbi at her door, the three of them telling her that her Yossi was dead…telling her how terribly sorry they were…telling her that the State of Israel ‘owes its existence to her sacrifice’ and other such words and sounds Regina couldn’t understand anymore…Yossi?? Her Yossi??
Gone???
The years that followed are somewhat of a blur, but age 67 stands out in her mind for the sole reason that that was when her gentle husband Moshe passed on, quietly as he had lived his life…
And Regina is alone. Again.
Often she doesn’t even know how old she is anymore… At night, in her freezing little room, Regina sometimes dreams she sees Yossi in a crowd, or is told he is there somewhere, and she looks for him and can’t find him. Sometimes she sees his face and it changes and he’s Yozhi again, looking at her with big round eyes, seemingly trying to say something that makes no sense because it was just all so, so long ago… During the day, forgotten by the country she has given everything to, Regina is in the street foraging for food in garbage cans.
This is where we found her. In the dumpsters.
Alerted by her neighbor, Yael and Tova, two young
Light Up The World volunteers, found her and took her home. Entering the tiny apartment was pure shock. It was cold outside the apartment – inside was like an icebox. The bundled girls were literally shivering. The place was in a shambles. The kitchen sinks had layers of caked-on crud that had the girls scrubbing their fingers raw. The tiny refrigerator was grimy and empty. The only thing there was plenty of was dust and grime. Everywhere. Covering every surface, including a large number of sepia-tone pictures of long-dead relatives who peered out of frames all over the room. The place felt like a tomb.
The girls immediately called Light Up The World. Light Up The World provided a space-heater , the girls requested hot food be sent to Regina, and with cleaning supplies provided by Light Up The World the girls started cleaning.
At first, Regina just watched them with confused eyes and said nothing, but suddenly she got scared and asked them to leave. The girls, used to working with the elderly and infirm, smiled and promised to leave “in a few minutes, right after they get her a bowl of hot soup and cleaned up a bit”, and Regina calmed down. Soon the heater and food arrived. Yael and Tova set the food in front of Regina and went back to work. And when they were done, they didn’t leave just yet. They did something that is uniquely Light Up The World:
They sat with Regina and talked.
“You’re angels”, Regina said, tears rolling down her gentle, withered face. “You’re angels…” Information about Regina was shared with her legal guardian and the welfare authorities to make sure her bills are paid on time and that her doctor is ‘on the ball’ as well. Our volunteers check on her once a week, bringing food and doing some light cleaning. One way or another one thing is assured:
Regina is alone if she wishes to be – but she’ll never again be lonely or abandoned.
We’re
Light Up The World Foundation and what we do is pick up G-d’s broken children, whether old like Regina or as young as toddlers, because poverty knows no age or season.
The problem, you see, is that Regina is just one of so many! In modern Israel, unbelievably,
one of every three childrenin Israel today lives under the poverty line, shivering in the cold winters, wondering where his or her next meal will come from!
The need is not only huge – it’s vitally urgent: If we hadn’t gotten to Regina in time, she could have easily died, cold and alone, Heaven forbid. Heaven have mercy, her neighbors would have discovered her plight only once it has announced itself with the stench of her decomposing body. Regina was lucky - but many others are not!
This is often a matter pf life and death. For every Regina we manage to help, there are still thousands out there that desperately need us.
Elderly Holocaust survivors…lonely old folks with no one to take care of them… families with children that go hungry or freeze in the winter because, for them, the choice is either medicine or clothes or food … Besides unimaginable misery, it is far too often a question of literally life and death - and this is why I am writing this letter to you today.
We must reach them while there’s still time and there’s simply no way we can reach and help them – and there’s no way we can do any of it without you. True, the need is enormous – but the stakes are huge and so
little can make such a HUGE difference!Here, look:
• As little as $54 will enable us to buy warm clothing, a quilt and one high quality heater for a freezing cold bedroom of a newborn baby.
• An astonishing, heartfelt gift of $1475, will feed a defenseless widow and her children for almost 8 months during the hardest time of their lives!
• A generous gift of $90 to provide a small radiator and pay the monthly electric bill for a lone Holocaust survivor like Regina in Jerusalem and save her life!
• And a loving gift of $540 will purchase 10 high quality electric space heaters that will keep the homes of poor, destitute families in Israel warm and safe from illness all winter – and the next winters to come as well!
Their lives are literally in our hands – please, please join us now.
I just pray with all my heart that you won’t say “someone else will help” – there IS no someone else!! The poor and destitute of Israel need you and me desperately right now.
I beg you – and I’m not ashamed to beg on behalf of broken souls like Regina – please don’t leave G-d’s children out in cold.
Believe me when I tell you:
Nothing will warm your heart more than saving the life of someone like Regina by feeding her and keeping her warm this winter.So please dig deeper into your pocket than ever before. I’m anxiously waiting for your response of love and affection. They won’t make it through the winter without you.
Do it now. Please
click here to donate right now.
There’s isn’t a minute to wait.
Yours, truly
R. Nathan Bibi
Director
Light Up The World Foundation
No comments:
Post a Comment