Our Family’s Gimmel Tammuz Moment at Penn Station

From the COLlive Inbox: On Gimmel Tammuz, a family traveling through the bustle of Penn Station set out with a simple mission—and an unexpected encounter transformed an ordinary journey into a powerful moment of Jewish connection.

By Aidel Kazilsky

Nobody plans a bar mitzvah at Penn Station.

But then again, nobody plans most of the things that matter.

There were ten of us this morning — ten Jews marching through one of the busiest transit hubs in New York City, trailing eighteen suitcases, backpacks straining at the zippers, tefillin bags tucked under arms, prams and packages…and the particular energy that only a large Jewish family group can generate. We had just concluded a whirlwind visit to Crown Heights to celebrate the Hanochas Tefillin of our twin grandsons at the Ohel. We moved with focus, trying to keep everything together.

We were looking for the boys with the red caps.

Today is Gimmel Tammuz. For Lubavitchers, this is one of the most charged days in the calendar. A day of reflection, of farbrengens, of rededication to the Rebbe’s mission. And what is the mission, distilled to its essence? Find the lost Jew. The one who has drifted. The one who doesn’t know you’re looking. Go out into the street — into the marketplace, the airport, the train station — and bring them home, one mitzvah at a time. The Rebbe didn’t believe in writing anyone off. Not the alienated, not the assimilated, not the ones who had forgotten they were Jewish until someone asked. Especially not them.

The red-capped porters are a Penn Station institution — the men who materialise from the crowd when you are hopelessly outnumbered by your own luggage. We thankfully found two of them. Both had the particular unshakeable calm of men who have seen everything this city can throw at a person and remained standing.

Our son-in-law, Rabbi Aron Grinshtein, a born American, and way more outgoing than us shy South Africans, got talking to them both. This is not unusual. He gets talking to everyone. Waiters, taxi drivers, security guards, toll booth operators. It is, frankly, exhausting, and also one of the great joys of travelling with him.

The one porter, it emerged, was Jewish.

You could feel the air change. A certain stillness came over our group, the way it does when something significant is about to happen and everyone recognises it before anyone says a word.

“Are you Jewish?” Aron asked. “I am culturally Jewish,” the man replied.

“Is your mother Jewish? Did you have a bar mitzvah?”

He hadn’t. Life had intervened, as it does. The Jewish thread had thinned somewhere along the way, as threads sometimes do. He carried the identity — quietly, privately — but the bar mitzvah had never happened. He was, as we say, a karkafta — a Jewish man who had never put on tefillin.

In Chabad, this is not a minor thing. The tefillin bind a Jew to something ancient and unbroken. Every Jewish man, we know, carries an obligation that belongs to him alone. It doesn’t expire. It doesn’t care about your schedule.

The tefillin came out.

Right there, amid all the other rushing commuters and the departure boards and the smell of pretzels and diesel, we gathered around this man — this stranger who was suddenly not a stranger at all — and we gave him his bar mitzvah in our train cabin. Decades late and right on time. My son-in-law helped him with the straps and led him through the Shema. We watched with quiet, respectful awe.

He didn’t say much afterwards. He didn’t need to. There was something in his face that hadn’t been there before — not quite wonder, but adjacent to it. The expression of a man who had just been handed something he didn’t know he was missing.

This is the thing about doing a mitzvah… Yiddishkeit is not only about belief. It is about the essence. About keeping it intact. About the stubborn, sometimes impractical, often inconvenient insistence that no Jew gets left behind — not in Penn Station, not anywhere.

On Gimmel Tammuz, we remember the Rebbe by doing what he taught us to do. Not by sitting still. Not by just meditating in shul. But by going out — into the street, into the noise, into the chaos of ordinary life — and finding the one who is waiting to be found. Even if he doesn’t know he’s waiting. Even if he’s pushing a luggage trolley in Penn Station and has never given it a second thought.

We packed our bags onto the train. We thanked the porters. We went on our way.

Eighteen suitcases. Ten Jews. One bar mitzvah.

Penn Station has seen stranger things. But I doubt it has seen many holier ones.

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