Mrs. Yached Hertzberg’s Fascinating Story of Strength and Survival

Shani Pruzansky

 

One of my earliest memories is of me as a five-year-old sitting in a gorgeous park on Shabbos afternoon. I’m with my friends, and my mother is nearby, watching me. It’s very hot out, and they’re all eating ice cream. It looks delicious, but I can’t have any.

I’m always different.

 

 

Mrs. Yached Hertzberg is a sprightly great-grandmother who is beloved by all who know her. She laughs often and speaks in great detail, pulling colorful stories and names, dates, and places from the vast treasure of memories she holds close.

Her life has been one long mission of “Mi l’Hashem eilai,” of serving a Higher Power and living for a higher purpose even when surrounded by spiritual desolation.

This is her story.

 

A life apart

Born in pre-communist Cuba, the young Yached was raised to stand apart.

“I didn’t understand why I couldn’t do what all my friends were doing,” Mrs. Hertzberg says. “But I knew I was different.”

After escaping war-torn Europe and a draft order hanging over his head, her father, Rav Yitzchok Yosef Owsianka, settled in Cuba around 1926. After working laboriously for seven years, he earned enough money to send for his wife and three daughters, whom he had left behind in Europe. In the interim, however, his wife had passed on, so his daughters arrived alone to Cuba.

A second match was soon suggested for him, and the young girl, named Esther, traveled from Poland to Cuba to marry Rav Yitzchok Yosef. Yached, called Juanita in Cuba, was born three years later, and the family lived in Cuba for the first 11 years of the young girl’s life.

Cuba was home to approximately 15,000 Jews at the time, but sadly, most of them were completely secular and unaffiliated with anything religious. In fact, shortly after Rav Yitzchok Yosef first arrived on Cuban soil, he was arrested on account of his beard—no one had beards then, and the authorities suspected he was an escaped convict. It took a testimony from his landlord to convince them he was in fact an honest man.

“No one else I knew kept Shabbos,” Mrs. Hertzberg shares. “It wasn’t easy being the only ones.”

There was a shul in the community, but it could barely scrape together a minyan most weeks.

“They would ask my father to say Kaddish for everyone because he was the only one who knew how to. He was the Kaddish zager.”

Leaving and entering the house on Shabbos was complicated. There was no eiruv, no Shabbos lock, and none of the other numerous religious conveniences we take for granted today.

“I remember my mother climbing over the porches to avoid the neighbors’ barking dogs so she could get into the house,” Mrs. Hertzberg remembers.

There were countless other sacrifices the family had to make to uphold their mesorah and values.

Summer in Cuba is a haze of brilliant sunshine and oppressive heat. The children all wore loose, short outfits bought from the local vendors and street markets to cope with the heat. Juanita’s mother, however, sewed special tznius clothing for her daughter. She felt sweaty and hot in them, but she wore them proudly anyway.

In addition, the humidity would send all of young Juanita’s friends to the many beautiful beaches that edge Cuba’s coastline, but she would have to stay home.

Mrs. Hertzberg adds that there was no escaping the heat with a blast of air conditioning or whiling away the afternoon in a perfectly temperature-controlled house. The only relief from the humidity was a dip in the ocean. But not for her.

“There was no such thing as a shvimkleid back then,” she says. “It was so, so hot, and all my friends were going. But Papa did not allow me to join them. You can’t imagine the kind of sacrifice this took from me as a young child.”

Meanwhile, Juanita’s older brother was fighting his own social battles.

“My father expected his ben yachid to walk to shul each Shabbos,” Mrs. Hertzberg shares. “But my brother was the only one in town who covered his head, and this made the walk very difficult. He would be teased mercilessly for it. But he did it anyway.”

Celebrating the Yom Tov of Sukkos posed its own difficulties.

The sukkah the Owsianka family used was on top of their shul and a long walk from their house. The family would have to pass through dangerous neighborhoods, where crime was rampant and law enforcement conspicuously absent.

“It’s a miracle I didn’t get killed walking to the sukkah.”

Once they arrived at the shul, they would climb three flights of stairs until finally, they would reach the sukkah.

The young Juanita was too little to be of much help then, but she remembers her older sisters going back and forth to bring all the dishes and cutlery necessary for the meal. This was decades before paper goods were commonplace, and every single fork, plate, glass, and tureen of soup had to be carried to the sukkah along with the food being served, and on Shabbos in advance. The experience was worlds apart from the beautiful tablescapes and easy cleanups we have today.

“Today, you open your porch door and you’re in your sukkah,” Mrs. Hertzberg notes. “People don’t realize how easy they have it compared to the way we lived back then.”

Keeping kosher was equally challenging.

“We ate a lot of fruit,” Mrs. Hertzberg says, “lots of mangoes and avocados.”

There was a rabbi, aptly called the Cubane Rav, who lived there for two years and shechted the occasional chicken for the family.

“My mother would buy a cute little chicken,” Mrs. Hertzberg says, “and it would be our pet for a while. Then, she would take it to be shechted. But I could never eat it.”

Kosher fish, which does not need to be shechted, was a different story.

“My mother would buy a huge carp each week and put it in the bathtub,” Mrs. Hertzberg relates. “It would thrash around and make a mess, splashing water everywhere.”

Mrs. Owsianka would remove the carp from the water when she was ready to prepare it, and this posed a new challenge.

“The fish wouldn’t stop moving! It would jump all over the place, making a huge mess everywhere.” Mrs. Hertzberg laughs.

Mrs. Owsianka would then clean the fish and prepare it for Shabbos. The children watched, saddened to see their beloved pet meet such a tragic end, and mesmerized by the process all the same. The young Juanita would stare in utter fascination as the fish’s tail continued to move even after it was killed, until finally, it would be subdued and then prepared into gefilte fish for Shabbos.

“I could never eat it,” Mrs. Hertzberg shared. “After watching it swim in the bathtub and then seeing my mother prepare it, there was no way I could taste even one bite of that fish.”

Looking back now, Mrs. Hertzberg is amazed by the tremendous mesirus nefesh her parents had to keep a kosher home.

“It wasn’t easy, and no one else was doing it. They could have easily given up, but they didn’t.”

Yet they refused to give up their standards, maintaining a kosher, shomer Shabbos home despite all odds in a spiritual desert for over two decades.

 

A new life

In around 1948, the family finally procured passports and visas and emigrated to the United States.

“It was a completely different world!” Mrs. Hertzberg recalls. “The language, the culture, the weather—everything was different.”

The Oswiankas settled in Brownsville, which had a very modest population of frum Jews at the time.

Juanita was 11 years old at the time. The family moved at the beginning of the summer. School was far in the distance. The question was, what would Juanita do for the next two and a half months?

Rav Owsianka enrolled her in Camp Bais Yaakov.

“Going to Bais Yaakov that first summer saved her Yiddishkeit,” her daughter-in-law relates. “Had she not attended camp, she would have nothing to do but be out on the streets all day, and since she mainly spoke Spanish, she would have quickly assimilated with the Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood.”

When she arrived at camp, it was quickly discovered that Juanita, now called Yached, did not own a single article of clothing that fit the camp’s tznius standards. Rabbi Neuhaus somehow managed to procure a dress for her, but it was a heavy woolen dress. Yached wore it happily the whole summer long.

At the start of the school year, her parents enrolled her in Bais Yaakov of East New York.

“There was a total of 11 children in the fifth and sixth grades,” Mrs. Hertzberg remembers. “They combined the two grades because there were so few girls.”

For the first time in her life, the young Yached was surrounded by peers just like her, frum girls who were also shomer Torah u’mitzvos, who also kept Shabbos and only ate kosher. It was a completely new experience for her.

But it was her teacher Rebbetzin Wesel who really made a lifelong impression on her. Yached was her first student.

“Rebbetzin Wesel had to prepare for two grades,” Mrs. Hertzberg says, “and she was an incredible role model. She was one of the very few frum women at the time who covered her hair, and she always looked so beautiful, so classy and regal.”

It was then that the young Yached decided that she, too, would one day cover her hair. One day, she would look just like Rebbetzin Wesel.

 

New challenges

Adjusting to a new country wasn’t easy. There was the language barrier to transcend, a new culture to learn, and a brand-new neighborhood to adjust to.

As a girl who was fluent in Yiddish, Yached managed to communicate with several of her classmates until she picked up enough English to get by. She steadily improved, and today, she speaks a perfect, accent-free English.

Adapting to the neighborhood was not easy either.

“We were finally among other frum Yidden,” Mrs. Hertzberg says, “but we still had so little.”

She describes the two esrogim the entire community shared each Sukkos, passing the minim around shul so everyone could have a chance to use them. The family sukkah was still several flights up.

“But we were so grateful to have escaped Cuba before communism took over, so we didn’t complain.”

The first year in the United States meant a first winter for the young Yached.

“I was so looking forward to seeing snow, to going sledding!” Mrs. Hertzberg shares. “But I was completely unprepared for the long, cold and dark winter.”

 

Inspirational summers

Growing up, Yached spent her summers at Camp Bais Yaakov.

“It was amazing to be around so many frum girls!” she remembers.

Those summers spent were instrumental in Mrs. Hertzberg’s life.

“The camp was always bringing in speakers for us, and they were all very inspiring. I especially remember a Rabbi Berman addressing the camp and feeling very uplifted from his message.”

Yached spent several summers as a camper in Camp Bais Yaakov and a few more summers as a waitress there. The warm, positive atmosphere of the camp, among hundreds of other frum girls, impacted her life choices until today.

 

A match made in heaven

Mrs. Hertzberg sees Hashem’s hand clearly in every aspect of her life, but the circumstances that brought about the shidduch between her first husband and herself are nothing short of miraculous.

Mrs. Hertzberg is very close to her brother, Rav Akiva Owsianka. Akiva was in Camp Yeshiva one summer with Mrs. Hertzberg’s future husband Yisroel Hertzberg.

One day, Akiva slipped on some glass. There was blood and it was an emergency—but this was in the days before Hatzalah and walkie-talkies and golf carts. Akiva was hurt too badly to walk. Yisroel jumped to the rescue, kindly offering to carry Akiva to the infirmary so he could receive the proper medical attention he needed.

That same summer, Yisroel Hertzberg, who worked as a lifeguard in the camp, jumped into the pool to save Akiva, who was drowning.

Needless to say, Akiva was very fond of Yisroel.

The next summer, Yisroel worked in Camp Bais Yaakov as a waiter. One day, Akiva dropped by the camp to visit Yached. At the camp, he bumped into Yisroel. The two started talking, and Akiva explained that he was there to visit his sister, who was working in the camp as a waitress. From that day on, Yisroel would periodically ask Akiva if his sister was in shidduchim yet.

“I was only 17 at the time,” Mrs. Hertzberg remembers. “But he kept asking until finally, when I was 18, we went out and got engaged.”

And the rest is history.

 

Building a family

As a kallah, the young Yached knew she was going to be one of the few frum women in 1957 who would cover her hair.

“I was going to be like Rebbetzin Wesel,” she says. “I wanted to look like a queen, like she did.”

She still remembers the feeling of purchasing her very first sheitel—for $200!—and later, as a married woman, wearing it with an unadulterated pride. It was the same pride she had witnessed in her father for so many years, stemming from the courage to make the right choice no matter what the rest of the world is doing.

After their marriage, the young Hertzbergs settled in Crown Heights in East Flatbush. The neighborhood had a relatively large presence of frum Yidden, with approximately 18 families living there who were shomer Shabbos.

“The kids had friends on the block, and everyone davened in the same shul,” Mrs. Hertzberg shares. “The Kossover Rebbe, Rabbi Rottenberg, lived there at the time. It was a really nice community, like family.”

They were close to the Novominsker Rebbe as well, and went to him with all their questions.

After some years passed, however, a different kind of crowd started moving into the neighborhood, and the Hertzbergs settled in Far Rockaway in 1985. There, too, the neighborhood had a relatively large frum population, a quality Mrs. Hertzberg will never take for granted after her own childhood.

In Far Rockaway, the Hertzbergs continued to raise their family, watching them grow into wonderful ovdei Hashem, lomdei Torah and ba’alei middos who would make any Yiddishe mamme proud.

“My children are wonderful!” Mrs. Hertzberg enthuses. “Every one of them, my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are metzuyanim, kein ayin hara,” she says, her voice laced with pride. “I have so much to be grateful for.”

Several years ago, Mrs. Hertzberg relocated to A Country Place in Lakewood, where she continues to enjoy her well-deserved nachas.

When asked if she believes that her beautiful, growing family today is bentched in the zechus of her father’s mesirus nefesh, Mrs. Hertzberg enthusiastically agrees.

“They’re still davening for us,” she says. “I can feel it.”

 

SIDEBAR:

Strength in Isolation

Who was Rav Yitzchok Yosef Hertzberg, who had the strength and the courage to remain frum in the spiritual desert that was Cuba?

“My father was a miracle child, born to his father’s third wife when his father was already 60 years old,” Mrs. Hertzberg shares.

As a young father in Poland during World War I, Rav Yitzchok Yosef was deathly afraid of being conscripted into the army. Though not a chassidish man, he went to seek the advice of the Novominsker Rebbe.

“The Novominsker Rebbe told him, ‘Go up on the roof and don’t move. Just sit there and say Tehillim,’” Mrs. Hertzberg recounts.

And that is what Rav Yitzchok Yosef did. When the army came to his town looking for eligible men to draft into service, he climbed up on his roof and said Tehillim. He sat there for hours, not daring to move. The officers searched everywhere, moving furniture and looking for secret hideouts, but they didn’t find him.

The Rebbe’s advice may have saved his life.

At the time, Rav Yitzchok Yosef had three young daughters. He had no visa and no passport, but he knew he needed to flee the horrors of war unfolding around him. His goal was to reach America, but when he consulted with the Novominsker Rebbe about his plans, the Rebbe told him not to go to the “treife medinah.” (In the early 20th century, the United States was generally believed to be a place where ruchniyus could not survive, where the thousands of Jewish immigrants arriving on her shores were leaving their religion behind in Europe.)

Instead, Rav Yitzchok Yosef settled in Cuba.

There, he quickly learned that while America may have had its own challenges, Cuba was a virtual wasteland when it came to anything Jewish.

He lived in Cuba with his three young daughters and only one other frum family for seven long years.

“He had no wife, no Rebbe, no community, no mother—no one to answer to,” Mrs. Hertzberg says. “He could have done whatever he wanted, but he didn’t. He was careful to uphold Halachah every single day he was in Cuba.”

In 1936, Rav Yitzchok Yosef’s oldest daughter suggested a match between him and a young poor girl who lived in Poland at the time. Aside from a brother who moved to Australia and abandoned his Yiddishkeit, Esther Starkstein was the only surviving member of her family. Esther had not met or spoken to Rav Yitzchok even once, yet she moved to Cuba to marry Rav Yitzchok Yosef and help him raise his family. The couple had two children together.

They remained in Cuba for another 14 years, and through it all, Rav Yitzchok Yosef continued to maintain his standards, davening in shul, keeping mitzvos, and celebrating every Yom Tov. The isolation was crushing, but his faith never wavered.

Rav Yitzchok Yosef used to compare himself to Yosef Hatzaddik. He was alone in a foreign country, devoid of all Yiddishkeit for 22 years, and resisted powerful temptations from his surroundings. Like Yosef, he was ultimately rewarded tenfold for his strength despite the trying times.

Today, Rav Yitzchok Yosef is survived by hundreds of frum grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren, no doubt testimony to the outstanding mesirus nefesh he displayed during his galus in Cuba.