ב"ה
February 13, 2000 "We are so used to the fighting going on across the border, all the artillery flashing in Southern Lebanon, that only our Shabbat guests remind us how really loud and startling all of this is," explains Rebbetzin Bracha Leah Sasonkin of the Chabad Center of Metulla. Together with her husband, Rabbi Moshe Sasonkin, and five children, she established the Metulla Chabad Center back in 1989, to enhance the Jewish atmosphere in the community of more than 450 families. Although no one in this northern-most Israeli town believed that the Chabad emissaries would be able to withstand the stressful war-zone lifestyle, the Sasonkin felt an obligation to persist.Both Bracha Leah and Moshe are the children of Lubavitch emissaries, and so they felt well prepared for the challenges of teaching Torah classes, running a nursery school and raising a family in a hundred year-old Jewish settlement where in-coming Katyushas and evacuations to the air raid shelters constantly intrude upon daily life. But their neighbors were stunned when the family purchased a home in Metulla, showing their lasting commitment to the place. Rabbi Sasonkin has found that he is most effective working with families on an individual basis. As the main address for things Jewish in town, he is called on to serve as teacher and psychologist, besides his numerous rabbinical functions. Thus the Chabad Center has been offering a unique kind of refuge, in a town so used to life inside shelters. |
