The shocking story told by Rabbi Yitzhak Penger (photo: David Yosef Haniya)
Crowds gathered last night (Monday) on the night of Tisha B’Av to hear the moving and tear-filled annual speech of Rabbi Yitzhak Pangar, delivered at the ‘Nazar Israel’ yeshiva hall in Modi’in Illit.
During the conversation, Rabbi Panger told a chilling story that made him break down in tears for many minutes.
The rabbi told the story of Rabbi Baruch Madan, who visited Tel Hashomer hospital five days before Rosh Hashanah, and there one of the nurses asked him to come visit a patient, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, who was lying alone on his deathbed.
During his visit to the patient, Rabbi Madan was exposed to the shocking story about the mother of the family who died young due to cancer, which completely broke David’s son, who asked her for a promise that she would return – but she did not return, and David became, in the father’s view, “my evil son”.
But then, after a long conversation against the son, the father turns around, blames himself for his son’s deterioration and tries, in his last moments, to catch his son on the phone.
The son, who lives in Manhattan and is married to a gentile, misses the call – and his father, returns his soul to its creator.
When he heard that his father had passed away, he asked that they wait for him with a funeral. He hurried to fly to Israel, and when he arrived at the cemetery and heard what his father was really trying to do in his last moments, he burst into bitter tears: “Father, don’t leave me.”
