2 Families Connected in 2 Yeshivas on 2 Continents

Motzoei Shabbos Story: An encounter at a snowy airport led the Balter and Raichik families to rediscover a bond that began at the Lubavitch yeshiva in Poland.

By Dovid Zaklikowski for Hasidic Archives

It was a harsh winter night at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport in Cheektowaga, New York. The Balter family of Toronto had just returned from Baltimore, Maryland, where Mrs. Carmela Balter’s extended family resided.

They had gone there to celebrate an early bar mitzvah for their son Ephraim, so all the family members, not used to the Canadian snow, would not need to shlep there. However, in that moment, amid freezing weather in upstate New York, they were looking for their car under heaps of snow.

Also at the airport was Abba Raichik, who was also returning from Maryland, where his parents are shluchim in Gaithersburg. He was waiting for the bus to return to yeshiva in Toronto. While he waited, the Balters dug their car out. When the family was done, Abba was still waiting. They asked him what he was waiting for, and when he told them, they offered to give him a ride to yeshiva.

The Raichiks and the Balters were no strangers. Ephraim’s grandfather, Yehonoson Balter, was sixteen at the time when he went to the Lubavitch Yeshiva in Otwock, Poland. It was 1939, and being young and unfamiliar with Lubavitch surroundings, he came to the yeshiva with a measure of trepidation and uncertainty about his bearings.

There, a young man named Shmuel Dovid Raichik (Abba’s grandfather) approached him, took him around, and made him feel at home. When Yehonoson asked where the sleeping quarters were, his newfound friend told him not to worry about anything. “It’s all settled,” he said, and showed him a bed. The teenager was relieved and slept well in his new lodgings.

Weeks later, it occurred to him that space was at a premium at the yeshiva, and he wondered why he had been so fortunate to obtain such a bed. As time progressed, he wondered even more. One day, an older student bluntly told him, “Your friend gave up his bed for you.” Taken aback, he asked where that student had been sleeping. “On a bench in the study hall.”

“Rabbi Raichik was emblematic of a chossid,” Rabbi Yehonoson Balter is quoted in Shadar: Touching Hearts, One Person at a Time, “entirely selfless, dedicated to the well-being of others, with no regard for worldly comfort, much less his own.”

Back in the car, there was no discussion about the Raichik-Balter connection. But Abba took a liking to Ephraim, gave him Chanukah gelt when they arrived at the yeshiva, and told him to keep in touch.

Nostalgic by nature, Ephraim said, “I connected to the Lubavitch aspect of my grandfather’s life.” It didn’t take much to push Ephraim to keep in touch with Abba. The two were soon learning together every week at the Toronto yeshiva. “It gave me a much stronger foundation for my connection,” Ephraim said.

After months of study, Abba completed his studies at the Toronto yeshiva. While Ephraim at the time wanted to join a Lubavitch yeshiva, his father Akiva said: “While Abba is well connected in Chabad and can easily find a position as a shliach, Ephraim needs a degree to be able to support himself.” He thus continued his studies at a local yeshiva high school.

However, Ephraim never did connect with the yeshiva atmosphere there, and his parents agreed that he study at the Baltimore Lubavitch yeshiva, close to his mother’s family. There, he ended up being roommates with Abba’s brother Shmuel Dovid Raichik. The two soon learned of their grandparents’ connection.

What began with another Raichik, over eight decades later, saw Rabbi Ephraim Balter and his wife Shprintza selflessly dedicate their lives to be on Shlichus. They are the Shluchim of Chabad of the Meadowlands in New Jersey, serving the needs of the Jewish community in South Bergen County.

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