To my dearest granddaughter,
You called last night to ask me
about “Great Zaidy’s Box,” and I promised to call back because I was listening
to a shiur. (I did try by the way.) Well,
you got my literary juices flowing, so now you are getting a story to pass on
to future generations.
Many, many years ago, Yaakov
Boehm and Rochel Goldstein were growing up in Eastern Europe, on the
Czech/Hungarian border. They both lived in small villages, not far from each
other. Their families were quite poor, and they lived very simply. Great Bubby’s
favorite doll was made of yarn, and Great Zaidy's favorite ball was made out of
string. But, believe it or not, they were happy and content!
Without computers, telephones,
radios, or even newspapers, they knew very little about the war that was
brewing in Europe in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. They were young
adults, out of their teenage years, actually the same age as your older
siblings, when their world turned upside down.
A major goal of this war, World
War II, as it became known in history, was the annihilation of
European Jewry. Great Bubby and Great Zaidy were both very healthy, so
their lives were spared. Instead of being killed, for the duration of the war,
they were slave laborers, enduring hardships beyond our wildest imagination.
Miraculously, they survived. Incredulously,
throughout the hell that Zaidy had endured, he was able to hold on to his tefillin, his siddur, and a picture of his sister. There was another girl in the
picture, Rochel Goldstein, from the neighboring village who had been taking
sewing lessons from Zaidy’s sisters. When they met after the war, it was
clearly bashert. They had the same hashkafos, the same mesorah, and the same strong desire to rebuild a “Yiddishe shtieb,” a Jewish home based on the
values of their families.
And so, they got married in the
DP camp where they met (another story for another time), and they were blessed
with their first child, a son. Soon they were on the boat to America, to
Baltimore (another amazing story). At first they took whatever job was offered
to them just to get themselves settled. As soon as they could, they
decided to start a small grocery store that would hopefully provide them with a
steady parnassa. They found their
place in the growing frum community,
where they went on to help establish a cheder
that would enable their sons (now there were two) to grow up in the ways of
their mesorah and where they could
send their daughter to a Bais Yaakov, and where they could rebuild their lives.
Jack’s grocery (now Seven Mile
Market) was the business that enabled their dreams to come to fruition. Not
only did it provide them with a steady income, it also enabled them to be shomer Shabbos, to raise their growing
family, and, equally importantly, to do chesed
in beautiful ways.
Finally, to answer your
question: Many of their customers were new immigrants just like them. They were
all so happy to have a heimishe store
where they could find kosher products, chalav
Yisrael, and warm and friendly owners
who understood them and their needs. There were times when these immigrants
could not make ends meet. Their expenses exceeded their cash flow. And, so
“the Box” was created – a discreet and beautiful chesed that Great Bubby and Zeidy mutually agreed upon so that no
one would be hungry or go without food. If a customer couldn’t pay, his receipt
would go into the box to be paid at a later date, without pressure. The box and
the sense of archrayus (responsibility)
to our community has been passed down from them to us, to your parents, and to
all our families, b”H. The Box is no
longer being used but the responsibility and the chesed of being noseh b’ol chaveiro, of doing for
others, in any and every way we can, is b”H,
being passed down from one generation to the next. It should continue!
Love,
Bubby Boehm
