Jewish Herald Voice, Pg. 12
By Menachem Posner
The year was 1927. The place was Simferopol, southern Ukraine, then part of the USSR. Rabbi Peretz Mochkin was a marked man. As a devoted follower of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the 6th Lubavitcher Rebbe, active in the Chabad’s underground network of Jewish institutions, he lived his days in constant fear of the secret police and their proxies.
Just before the joyous holiday of Sukkot, Peretz fell ill with typhus and felt that his days were numbered. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door. His old friend Yankel, rabbi from the town of Zhuravitz, had made the 1,200-kilometer journey to visit and bring the Mochkin family some much-needed holiday cheer. Peretz’s daughter, Mrs. Guta Schapiro, would later recall to her grandchildren that “the sukkah was very small and very poorly built—we did not want the KGB to know about it—and Rabbi Yankel was a large man, so when he sat in the sukkah with my father, there was no room for anyone else.”
The men began singing “A sukaleh a kleinier,” a yiddish folk song about a Jewish family in a rickety sukkah. As winds howl outside, the father in the song reassures his family that the holiday candles will not blow out and the sukkah will remain standing. As the two men sat and sang, and the makeshift sukkah swayed back and forth with their every movement, and the children were knew in their hearts that no one—not even Stalin—would extinguish the flame of Judaism.
Peretz eventually recovered and escaped the Soviet Union in 1947. By then, Yankel had been arrested in 1937 by the KGB and shot for his “counterrevolutionary” activities.
By a twist of Divine humor, Yankel’s great-granddaughter, Chanie Galperin, married Peretz’s great-grandson, Chaim Lazaroff. The Russian communists are long gone, but Peretz and Yankel's lineage is going strong.
Nearly 90 years later, Rabbi Chaim and Chanie Lazaroff, co-directors of Chabad of Uptown have made it a tradition to host 100 people in their gargantuan sukkah every year on the first night of Sukkot as a tribute to their forbears and the triumph of the Jewish spirit.
“It’s a beautiful evening of singing, lots of delicious food, and a heart-warming celebration of unity, with so many Jews packed into one sukkah together,” says Rabbi Chaim Lazaroff.
This year, the first night of Sukkot is on September 18. Prayer services begin at 7:00 pm, followed by dinner at 8:00. Reservations can be made online at www.chabaduptown.org/1308048.
Rabbi Schleima Galperin, grandson of R' Yankel of Zhuravitz and father of Chanie Lazaroff, gives a moving talk in October, 2012, of his experiences when living in Communist Russia. Among his many anecdotes he shared, "In the 22 years I lived in Russia, I was never in a shul, rather davening with the "underground". Even as I was leaving Russia, I toured the palaces and the grand shul in Leningrad / S. Petersburg, an undercover KGB agent greeted me there. He wanted to know who I was and where I was from. I told him - A Yid".