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| Wife of MASBIA's founder shares life lessons / Mishpacha magazine |
Yitta (Halberstam) Mandelbaum, wife of MASBIA's founder Mordechai Mandelbaum, shares life lessons that give hunger and homelessness a human face.
Excerpt from an article originally published on in Mishpacha magazine. |
Just yesterday, I returned home from grocery shopping on what proved to be the hottest day of the summer, my arms laden with bags, my clothing sopping wet, beads of sweat cascading down my face. I opened up the top buttons of my shirt, and stuck my perspiring face into the freezer, where a blast of arctic air provided some measure of relief. I poured myself a cold drink from a pitcher, and moved towards the living room into which the kitchen flows.
Just as I was about to gratefully plop myself down into the nearby recliner, I had to stifle a shriek, because I discovered – to my shock and horror - that the living room was in fact already occupied. By a man. A man I did not know. By a total stranger who was sprawled comfortably on my couch, snoring contentedly. Suddenly, a familiar hand clamped itself on my mouth, and a voice I’ve known intimately for over three decades whispered into my ear, “Shh, don’t make a sound; you’ll wake him up.” It was my husband. Which explained everything. |
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From the time that I was twenty years old, my good friend Suri Mandelbaum (of blessed memory) commenced upon a campaign for me to marry her brother. She felt that there were many common denominators that bound us: our families were chassidic, our respective fathers were intellectuals who placed a premium on education, and we were both a “little-out-of-the box.” So she naturally thought that her brother and her good friend would be perfect for each other. “Sorry,” I repeated apologetically to Suri over the next four years, feeling awkward to keep turning her down. “Regardless of the fact that my own father dresses like a Hassid, I just don’t want anyone chassidic. I would love to be your sister-in-law, but it’s not going to happen in this lifetime.“
My father heard that “the Mandelbaum boy” was a unique combination: He was learning full-time in a yeshiva, pursuing a Masters Degree in Psychology from The New School at night, and had, on his own initiative, opened up a shelter for homeless men in Boro Park at the tender age of nineteen. “Marry the Mandelbaum boy already!” he would occasionally bang his fists on the table in one of our ongoing altercations about the subject. “Never, never, never!” I would scream back, intractable and assured. “I will never ever marry a chassidic boy!” (We’ve been married 32 years.)
How did we get from there to here, you ask? After five years of fruitless dating, I was finally mature enough to cast off the stereotypes that I had formed about “chassidic boys” and ready to open myself up to new possibilities. But the real deal-breaker was this homeless shelter that I kept hearing about.
I was alternately fascinated, charmed and drawn by the idea of a (then) 19-year old chassidic boy who cared enough about the people who populated the underbelly of society to raise the funds and create a sanctuary for them in Boro Park, all on his own initiative, albeit on someone else’s dime.
Although my parents had never been involved in any enterprises of this kind, my grandparents, Rabbi Yosef and Rebetzin Sorah Leifer (of blessed memory) were renowned for opening their home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and for providing the only kosher, shomer shabbos home in that city where beggars and broken souls alike could regularly find sanctuary. In fact, the third floor of their sprawling home on Bartlett Street in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh was used exclusively for the itinerants who came to stay for days, weeks, months, even years. I grew up in Pittsburgh as a child and my grandparents had always been icons to me, so as a prospective match Mordechai Mandelbaum’s unusual charity activities tipped the scales in his favor. “He’s always shlepping meshugoyim to our parents home,” Suri would often recount her brother’s exploits with a proud smile. “I think you could deal with that, couldn’t you?”
Little did I know. |
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“I want to have an open house,” my husband told me on our first date.
“That is very very important to me. I need a wife who will agree to go along
with this, who will participate fully. I want my home to be a sanctuary for everybody. What do you think?”
Visions of my grandparents (they came later to be known as the “Pittsburger Rebbe and Rebetzin”) danced before my eyes. “Sounds good to me,” I said eagerly. “I can do it.”
Little did I know. |
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Two weeks after we were married and living in Far Rockaway,
I peered out the window anxiously, searching the dark street for any signs of my husband’s approaching figure. Far Rockaway then was “in transition,” and wasn’t such a safe place to live. My husband normally drove his car into Manhattan to attend his graduate classes, but on this particular day his car was at the mechanic and he had taken the “A” train to school instead. Muggings were rampant then on that subway line, and I was becoming exceedingly distraught when hours passed without a phone call (no cell phones yet). When I finally heard the front door squeak open at midnight, relief washed over my tense body.
“Where have you been?” I started to scold. Now that I knew that he was safe and hadn’t been murdered, I wanted to kill him.
“Yittala,” he said, pointing to a tall, haggard figure at his side, “we have a guest. Can you give him something to eat?”
A wild-eyed Chasid with an unkempt beard and tattered clothing ascended the steps together with my husband. “Why don’t you wash up a little?”
my husband told him gently. As the man closed the bathroom door behind him,
I hissed: “Who is this?”
“I found him sleeping on a bench at the “A Station” in Far Rockaway.
He says he lives in Williamsburg, but he is afraid to go back home. I told him he could sleep here for the night. I’m sorry,” my husband apologized, “I hope you don’t mind. He seems to be emotionally disturbed, but I just couldn’t leave him alone out there, easy prey for muggers and other miscreants.”
“N-no, no, you did the right thing,” I said. “I’m proud of you. You have such a soft heart. Just one question: Do you mind if I push our bedroom bureau against
the door? I don’t feel quite so safe myself.”
The next morning, when I served the grateful Chassid a hearty breakfast, I was able to see and recognize his humanity, despite his matted hair, glazed eyes, and disheveled clothes. I felt ashamed that I had felt so threatened the night before. If anyone were in jeopardy, it was he. He was vulnerable and defenseless, a victim of the circumstances that had shaped his current life. He was to be pitied, not repulsed. I had just completed Life Lesson 1 from a living, breathing book whose pages my husband would open to me frequently over the next thirty years. |
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Several different traumatic scenarios that I encountered a little later on reinforced the new way that I began to look at people who lived “beneath the cracks.”
In 1980, my husband and I summered in the Catskills where we were befriended by a special couple who were warm, intelligent, and immensely popular. We were newcomers to this vacation spot, but it was this particular couple that reached out to us repeatedly, inviting us to Sabbath lunches, and special occasions. They were both very well-dressed, well-spoken, well-educated.
They enjoyed an easy camaraderie and treated one another with mutual respect. A perfect couple. When the summer ended, we vowed to keep in contact and continue our friendship, but as we lived in different boroughs and disparate worlds, the earnest pledges we had made remained unfulfilled.
We lost touch almost immediately, knowing nothing of the unusual trajectories that would occur to both husband and wife. |
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One year later, I bumped into the woman in a store accompanied by a man whom I did not know. “This is my husband,” she said. I could not contain my surprise. This was not the same husband of the previous summer. The woman pulled me discreetly aside and began to explain:
“This must be a shock to you. Let me tell you what happened. One night my husband (the first one) failed to come home from work. After several hours passed, I became hysterical and called the police. Officially, someone doesn’t become a “missing person” until 24 hours has elapsed, so they didn’t begin their investigations until a day later. I was out of my mind with worry, sure that something ominous had happened to him. The police hunted for him all over the city, and couldn’t find him. He had completely dropped from sight. No one from work and none of his friends were able to offer a clue as to where he could have possibly gone or done.
“The days preceding his disappearance had been utterly normal. We didn’t have any fights or problems. He hadn’t in any way acted differently, nothing unusual had occurred. So everyone was sure he had met with foul play. But why? How? Where was his body? I was devastated.
“Since the police had made no headway, I hired a private investigator. A few days later, he called me to tell me that he had found my husband.
He was living underneath the tracks of Grand Central Station in Manhattan, a place where hobos and street people made their makeshift homes. My husband! My normal, professional husband had become a street person overnight! I was in a state of shock and disbelief. How could this have happened? It was so bizarre, so unreal.
“When the detective brought him home, it became clear that my husband had had some kind of breakdown. His eyes were confused, he spoke gibberish, he was a different human being. It was terrifying. My in-laws and I took him to various psychiatrists, but ultimately he had to be hospitalized. When he didn’t recover in a few months time, I divorced him.”
The woman’s story left me reeling. My husband and I had known this man, he wasn’t merely an abstract figure from a news story with which I lacked connection and thereby empathy. He was from our world. He was someone’s husband, someone’s son. If it could happen to him, I thought, it could happen to
anyone. It could happen to me.
This story left a permanent imprint on my heart. A new softness towards broken people enveloped me. And a phrase that I had heard often, but never fully absorbed before, now became my mantra, and the basis for many actions that would follow for decades afterward:
“There,” I told myself repeatedly, every time I stumbled across a woman sleeping in rags on the sidewalk, a man slumped in alcoholic stupor on a park bench, a teenager curled up in a doorway in a drug-induced haze, “there but for the grace of G-d go I.”
This was Life Lesson #2. |
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In 1981, my husband began a practice that he continues to this day: he began bringing home strangers from synagogue for Sabbath meals, without apprising me beforehand, so that I could prepare in advance. While I appreciated his easy hospitality (today’s buzzword: “chilled out”) I would often become flustered and frustrated because I often didn’t have enough food on hand to accommodate the unexpected guests. Today, I prepare copious, bountiful, gargantuan amounts of food for every Sabbath meal, just in case, and now my husband harangues me for the inevitable waste that results (just how many nights of leftovers can you possibly eat?) But in the early years, I often came up short and felt ashamed.
One Friday night, my husband came home with a middle-aged man named Berel to whom I took an instant liking. He was garrulous and funny, well-read and
informed, commenting intelligently on the burning issues of the day.
I enjoyed his company immensely, and before he left, warmly invited him back.
“What a nice guy!” I told my husband enthusiastically.
“Yittala,” my husband smiled, “I deliberately didn’t tell you before because I wanted your heart to be open to him, but do you know where he lives?”
“Where?” I asked innocently, wondering why my husband could possibly think I cared about Berel’s home address.
“In the synagogues.”
“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?” I blinked, confused.
“He’s homeless. That’s where he lives.”
“Impossible! He’s so normal; he’s dressed so well. He doesn’t act or look like a homeless person.”
“What does a homeless person look like?”
Life Lesson #3. |
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Berel became an integral part of our lives for 29 years. I was young and naive, and absolutely devastated that a man should – and could – live the way he did. He came for supper practically every weeknight, and was in attendance for both Sabbath meals. I idealistically believed then, that with a little nurturing and encouragement, his circumstances could be vastly altered, and that he could
reinvent himself. So I made countless calls to various social service and city agencies, making rounds of appointments for him to meet with officials to acquire benefits, welfare, housing. I contacted the local Senior Citizens Center, then the only place that offered seniors a free kosher lunch daily, and persuaded them to include Berel in their roster, even though he was in his mid-forties then, and didn’t really qualify. But despite my prodding and making all the arrangements for him, Berel never showed up at a single one of these hard-won appointments.
“What!?” he protested, indignant. “I should take money from the government! I’m not that type of person!” Interestingly, Berel didn’t seem to have the slightest problem taking money from congregants whom he supplicated as they streamed out of the synagogues where he set up shop. He also didn’t hesitate to inquire every time he came to our home: “So….do you have a little something for me?”
Life Lesson #4. Homeless people are often emotionally ill, and do
not look at life through the rational eyes that we (mostly) do. Berel had no compunctions about taking money from a struggling young couple, but
was too proud to apply for welfare. Go figure.
Still, Berel retained a special place in our hearts. He told us that he had been a graduate student in physics at City College, when life dealt him three major blows in rapid and cruel succession. Within a period of two months, his father died, his brother died, and his young fiancee died. Although he never spelled it out, he alluded to having had a breakdown. We were never able to confirm the
veracity of his story, and the mystery of how he came to be homeless unsettled me, although I had my suspicions. In the 1970’s, Mayor John Lindsay had emptied thousands of mental institutions of its patients, and I often wondered if Berel wasn’t one of the newly disenfranchised. He often made joking references to “Creedmoor” and names of other obscure mental institutions that few people had head heard of. The only reason that I knew what he was talking about was because I had worked as a secretary in the chaplaincy department of a rabbinic organization when I was 18, and had been in charge of the mailing lists.
Berel often slept in our basement, and during the intermittent periods it was rented out, on our couch. I always believed that with his high intelligence and affable personality, he would one day surely rebuild his life. I kept waiting for the metamorphosis to take place; I just couldn’t believe that he would live out the end of his days homeless.
But two years ago, Berel - and his possibilities for transformation – died, and I realized then that sadly that the prospects for change for most of the homeless population are very dim. Some of them are quite competent at getting food into their bellies, (by going, for example, to MASBIA; or parasiting on refreshments at synagogues, mainly at thelegendary 24-hour synagogue in Brooklyn) but most are too ill to actually change their lifestyles in any significant way. Life Lesson #5.
My husband didn’t tell me that Berel had died until six months after the fact; he had wanted to protect me from the news, and I did in fact, sob convulsively for
about an hour after I heard the news. When I regained my composure, I asked my husband if Berel had had a respectable funeral, and if he had been in attendance.
My husband shook his head no; Berel had apparently died while we were in Israel,
but he had heard that the Chesed shel Emet (the voluntary group that takes care of the burial procedures) had been terrific, and Berel had been given a dignified funeral. Many of the people into whose lives he had become interwoven came, including a long-lost cousin of Berel’s from no-one-knew-where.
Aside from my personal grief at Berel’s passing, I almost plotzed at the lost opportunity to finally be able to discover the truth about Berel’s trajectory from someone who would have known. I asked my husband if the Chesed shel Emet had by any chance taken the cousin’s name or contact information, but no one else was apparently as consumed as I to know the truth about Berel’s sad history and origins. To this day, I look for Berel’s ubiquitous figure in Boro Park, laden with the plastic bags that constituted his entire worldly possessions, hurrying down the streets as if he had somewhere important to go, the mystery and tragedy of him forever unresolved. |
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My son Eli has recently started dating so I’ve begun to look at the interior of my household with a new assessing eye. There’s a lot that’s battered and needs repair, but what stands out especially is the frayed condition of the couch. Much of the fabric from its back has been rubbed out and begun to unravel unbecomingly, and there are a few grease spots splattered near the front. I know exactly how the parts of my sofa acquired these scars, and although right now I feel a sense of shame as I gaze at them (for they could be considered evidence of – perish the thought – my poor housekeeping abilities), I know my husband would see them as badges of honor.
For here, on the front of the couch, alternately rested the heads of Chaim, a profoundly retarded man whom my husband found one day banging his head against a wall; Shlomo, whose Yeshiva-principal-father threw him out onto the streets of Jerusalem when he discovered signs of rebellion; and Yoeli, who suffered from bi-polar disorder and couldn’t hold down a job.
The feet that dangled from the couch and made it threadbare on the other end alternately belonged to an elderly woman whose apartment went up in flames one late night (a friend of ours passed by the apartment house and saw her weeping outside and brought her to our home); a single mother and her three children who
were abruptly evicted from their home (they came home from work and school respectively one day to find their front door home boarded up with a sherrif’s eviction notice plastered onto it); and a young boy from Israel who needed a place to live for a few days and ended up staying for three years. When I look at the ragged couch, I am reminded of these scenarios and many more, and am almost rueful that I when I finally reupholster it, the memories associated with its scruffy shape will be covered over, too.
In all honesty, I cannot say that each scenario that I conjure up while looking at the couch provides me with unbridled joy and gratification. The boy who stayed for three years turned out to be a freeloader and the elderly woman who was rendered homeless by the fire turned out to be a misanthropic multi-millionaire. She so much enjoyed being wined and dined in our home that she refused to leave even after a new apartment was found for her by a social worker. She chose to stay with us for an unnecessarily long period of time until we were finally forced to ask her to go.
Ironically, when both left, neither the boy nor the woman who had overstayed their respective stays said thank you or even goodbye. They were, as a matter of fact, downright miffed about what they viewed as their pre-mature departures.
Life-lesson #6. There are some people around– but thankfully, not many – who take advantage of other people’s idealistic impulses.
Still and all, most of the people who have passed through my house have been broken, sweet and innocent souls, rendered helpless by life’s crushing blows or bad chemistry, and when I look at them, I always feel, genuinely and to the core of my being, “There but for the grace of G-d go I.” Not much separates my fate from theirs, maybe just a little luck, and perhaps some better parenting, at best. It could just as easily be me. I understand that fact fully and that fact humbles me deeply.
So, when I look at the tattered couch, I like to think that although we couldn’t ultimately change these peoples lives, perhaps we did, for just a brief moment of time, offer them a little respite and a little nurturing, a place to lay their heads and know they were safe.
And I recognize that I would never have had a chance to touch their lives, if only fleetingly, were it not for my husband’s initiative and strong conviction that we are here on this earth to minister to one another, and give each other love.
I thank him for the life-lessons he has taught me, and for the most important one of all: the need to see beyond physical appearances, and to look always - first and foremost - for the spark of divinity that resides within each and every soul we meet on our journey through life. |
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Postscript: I wrote this article at the urging of Mishpacha’s editor, Rechy Frankfurther, in an attempt to awaken readers’ consciousness about the ongoing problem of homelessness among Jews. Many people deny that such a problem even exists; but if you peek into the 24-hour synagogue in Brooklyn, where all are welcome, any given night (run by two amazing righteous people) you will see countless homeless men curled up on its benches sleeping out the night.
The question is: Why is the 24-hour synagogue the only one opening its doors to
the Jewish homeless? Neighborhood churches in the hundreds do it all the time. Many synagogues have empty rooms or basements that could – and should - be transformed into places for them to sleep. And where should Jewish homeless women go? Just this week alone, two women called me who are staying in city shelters.
This is my personal appeal to you, dear readers: If you have an empty
basement, attic or rooms in your house, please consider opening up your hearts and your extra rooms to these people. There is no organization or place anywhere in the Jewish community where the homeless can go. Also: Please ask your local politicians and officials of Jewish community organizations why this population has been allowed to fall through the cracks. Why hasn’t city funding been acquired to create a clean, safe, dignified
sanctuary for them – either a SRO building, a shelter, or something along the lines of an assisted living residence?,
If you would like to offer a place for these people to stay, please contact me and I will gladly refer people to you. |
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Editor’s Note: Yitta’s husband, Mordechai Mandelbaum, is the founder and president of MASBIA, the free glatt kosher soup kitchen in Boro Park that feeds 160 people nightly.
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