“And how do I recognize the true Messiah?” Yakov challenged.
“The question is not whether Yakov Rabinsky recognizes the Messiah. The question is whether the Messiah will recognize Yakov Rabinsky. If Yakov Rabinsky begins to stray from His laws and listens to false prophets, then the Messiah will be quite certain that he is no longer a Jew. I suggest to Yakov Rabinsky that he continue to live as a Jew as his father and his people are doing.”
CHAPTER FOUR: “Kill the Jews!”
A rock smashed through the seminary window. The rabbi hurried the students out through the back to the safety of the cellar. In the streets, Jews scampered wildly for cover ahead of a frenzied mob of over a thousand students and Cossacks.
“Kill the Jews!” they screamed. “Kill the Jews!” It was another pogrom inspired by Andreev, the humpbacked headmaster of a local gymnasium-high school-and foremost Jew hater in Zhitomir. Andreev’s students swaggered down the streets of the ghetto, smashing up store fronts and dragging any Jews they could find into the streets and beating them mercilessly.
“Kill the Jews … kill the Jews … kill the Jews!” Yakov and Jossi raced from the seminary. Using a route
through back alleys, they sped over deserted cobblestone streets to reach their home and protect their parents. They ducked frequently for cover and worked away from the sounds of hoofbeats of Cossack horses and from the bloodcurdling screams of the students.
They turned the corner into their street and ran head on into a dozen hoodlums wearing university caps-disciples of Andreev.
“There go two of them!”
Yakov and Jossi turned around and fled, leading the pack of pursuers away from their own home. The students howled with glee as they sprinted after the brothers. For fifteen minutes they wove in and out of streets and alleys until the students trapped them against a dead-end wall. Jossi and Yakov stood with their backs to the wall, dripping sweat and panting for breath as the students formed a semicircle and closed in on them. His eyes gleaming, the leader stepped forward with an iron pipe and swung on Jossi!
Jossi blocked the blow and snatched up the student, spun him around, lifted him over his head, and hurled him at the rest of his companions. Yakov, whose pocket full of rocks was for just such occasions, bounced two stones off the heads of two students, sending them to the ground unconscious. The other students scattered in flight.
The boys dashed home and flung open the door of the shop.
“Mama! Papa!”
The shop was a shambles.
“Mama! Papa!”
They found their mother cowering in a corner in a state of hysteria. Jossi shook her hard. “Where is Papa?”
“The Torah!” she shrieked. “The Torah!”
At that instant, six blocks away, Simon Rabinsky staggered into his burning synagogue and fought his way gagging to the end of the room where the Holy Ark stood. He threw back the curtains with the Ten Commandments inscribed on them and pulled down the Sefer Torah, the Scroll of the Laws of God.
Simon pressed the holy parchment against his breast to protect it from the flames and staggered back to the door. He was badly burned and choking. He staggered outside and fell onto his knees.
Twenty of Andreev’s students were waiting for him.
“Kill the Jew!”
Simon crawled a few yards and collapsed, covering the Sefer Torah with his body. Clubs smashed his skull. Hobnailed boots ripped his face….
“Kill the Jew!”
In mortal agony Simon Rabinsky screamed out… “Hear, O Israel… the Lord is our God … the Lord is one!”
When they found Simon Rabinsky he was beyond recognition. The Sefer Torah, the laws which God had given Moses, had been burned by the mob.
The entire Zhitomir ghetto mourned his passing. He had died in the noblest way a Jew could meet death-protecting the Sefer Torah. Simon was put to rest along with a dozen others who had been murdered in Andreev’s pogrom.
For Rachel Rabinsky, the death of her husband was but another tragedy in a life which had known little else but sorrow. But this time her strength and will were gone. Even her sons could not comfort her. Rachel was taken off to live with relatives in another town.
Jossi and Yakov went to synagogue twice each day to say Kaddish for their father. Jossi remembered how his father had wanted to live as a Jew so that the Messiah would recognize him. His whole mission in life had been to protect God’s laws. Perhaps his father had been right-perhaps it was not theirs to live from the fruits of the earth but to serve as the guardians of God’s laws. In his sorrow Jossi probed to find a reason for bis father’s brutal death.
Yakov was different. His heart was full of hatred. Even as he went to say the mourners’ prayers, his soul demanded revenge. He seethed and smoldered-he was restless and angry. He muttered time and again that he would avenge his father’s death.
Jossi, knowing his brother’s state of mind, barely let him out of his sight. He tried to soothe and comfort Yakov but Yakov was inconsolable.
A month after the death of Simon Rabinsky, Yakov slipped from the shop in the middle of the night as Jossi slept. He took from his father’s bench a long sharp knife and hid it in his belt and ventured from the ghetto toward the school where Andreev the Jew hater lived.
Jossi awoke instinctively a few minutes later. The instant he saw Yakov was gone he dressed hurriedly and ran after him. He knew where his brother would be going.
At four o’clock in the morning, Yakov Rabinsky pulled the brass knocker on the door of Andreev’s house. As the demented hunchback opened the door, Yakov sprang from the shadows and plunged the knife deep into his heart. Andreev emitted one short shriek and rolled to the ground, dead.
A few moments later Jossi rushed onto the scene to find his brother standing hypnotized over the body of the slain man. He pulled Yakov away and they fled.
All the next day and night they hid in the cellar of Rabbi
Lipzin’s house. Word of Andreev’s murder spread quickly throughout Zhitomir. The elders of the ghetto met and came to a decision.
“We have reason to fear that you two were spotted,” the rabbi said when he returned. “Your red hair, Jossi, was seen by some students.”
Jossi bit his lip and did not reveal that he had only been trying to prevent the crime. Yakov showed no remorse for his deed. “I would do it again, gladly,” he said.
“Although we understand well what drove you to this deed,” said the rabbi, “it cannot be forgiven. You may well have started another pogrom. On the other hand … we are Jews and there is no justice for us in a Russian court. We have reached a decision you are to abide by.”
“Yes, Rabbi,” Jossi said.
“You are to cut off your curls and dress like goyim. We will give you food and money enough to travel for a week. You must leave Zhitomir at once and never return.”
In 1884, Yakov and Jossi Rabinsky, aged fourteen and sixteen, became fugitives. They used the roads only by night and hid during the day, moving east to Lubny, a distance of a hundred-odd miles from Zhitomir. At Lubny they found the ghetto immediately and sought out the rabbi, only to learn that their notoriety had preceded them. The rabbi and the elders of Lubny met and agreed to give the boys enough food and money for another week’s travel. This time their destination was Kharkov, some two hundred miles away, where the search for them might not be so intense. Advance word was sent to the Kharkov rabbi that the Rabinsky boys were on the way.
The entire countryside was on the alert for the Rabinsky brothers. It took twenty days of cautious moving for them to get to Kharkov.
Their fame had spread throughout the Pale, and their capture was being turned into a holy mission. For two weeks they hid in the clammy basement beneath the synagogue in Kharkov, their presence known only to the rabbi and a few elders.
At last the Rabbi Solomon came to them. “It is not safe, even here,” he said. “It is only a matter of time until you boys are discovered. Already the police have been prowling around asking questions. But with winter coming on it will be near impossible to move.”