Dr. David Portowicz
When World War Two broke out in 1939, my father, Rabbi Yosef Portowicz, was studying at the Lubavitch yeshivah in Otwock, near Warsaw, Poland. Along with his fellow students, he fled east and, by the grace of G-d, found refuge in Shanghai, which was then an international city. There, the Lubavitch yeshivah was reestablished and he studied there until the war ended and he immigrated to the United States.
By then he was already married – to a Jewish refugee girl in Shanghai – and he settled with my mother in New York, where I was born in 1949. But, although he was a highly-respected Torah scholar, he found it hard to earn a livelihood not knowing English, and he struggled to support his family.
That’s when the Rebbe came to his rescue. At the time the Rebbe was not yet the Rebbe – he was assisting the Previous Rebbe and running (among other things) Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, Chabad’s central educational arm. He suggested that my father become a fundraiser for this organization, and he told him exactly how to raise money. My father was to visit various synagogues in the New York area for Shabbat and speak there. During his speeches, he was to explain the outreach work Chabad was doing; then as people from that community would donate money to Merkos after Shabbat, the organization would pay him a percentage.
So this is what my father did, with varying degrees of success. Every Shabbat, he would leave our family and travel to some other place and try his best.
Along the way, an amazing thing happened. As a child, I never ceased hearing about the Friday afternoon when my maternal grandfather came running to our house to summon my father to his telephone. My grandfather was the only person in our Brownsville neighborhood who had a telephone at that time – this was the late 1940s after all. What was so urgent? The Rebbe had called three times and needed to speak with my father before the onset of Shabbat. (more…)