A Fugitive Tomim’s Daring Flight to Freedom

Introduction

The 5680s and 5690s were dark and difficult years for the Jews in the Soviet Union. The communist regime declared war on Torah and Yiddishkeit, closing shuls, shuttering yeshivos, and locking up mikvaos.

The gates of the Soviet Union were firmly shut. Emigration would undermine the regime’s claim that it was building a perfect society, and those who left could expose the harsh realities of the Soviet paradise to the outside world. Only a precious few were granted permission to leave.

The Frierdiker Rebbe led the heroic struggle to keep Yiddishkeit alive throughout Russia, and his chasidim operated underground institutions with literal mesiras nefesh. Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim, the furnace in which these brave fighters had been forged, was reorganized as a network of small clandestine branches. These compact branches wandered from city to city in Russia to evade arrest, raising the next generation of warriors under the most difficult conditions.

Life in an underground yeshivah was terrifying and exhausting. The bochurim had to escape detection by the police and shield themselves from the prying eyes of regime collaborators. Food was scarce, accommodations were spartan, and they were constantly on the move. Through all of this, they had to somehow find the mental capacity to learn Torah. But there was no way out—or was there?  

By the early 5690s, escaping from the Soviet Union was a perilous undertaking. The country’s borders were patrolled by the Soviet political police, with heavily regulated frontier zones where guards were empowered to stop travelers, search homes, and conduct ambushes. Those who attempted to cross illegally risked arrest, imprisonment, or being shot. Nevertheless, clandestine networks of smugglers and guides continued to operate.

In 5693, a young bochur from Russia named Avraham walked into the editorial office of Dos Yidishe Togblat, a frum newspaper in Warsaw, with an incredible tale to tell. He told of how passionately he and his friends learned in the underground yeshivah, constantly on the run, hungry and afraid. And he told the remarkable story of his daring escape.

The Fugitive

We will reproduce young Avraham’s entire account, in English translation. Then we will identify him and trace his future experiences and ultimate fate. Here is the article, as it appeared in Dos Yidishe Togblat, 14 Cheshvan 5693 (November 13, 1932).

The Fugitive

(The Story of a Contemporary Hero)

Heroism, self-sacrifice. In our prosaic age, even these lofty, idealistic concepts have been cheapened, exchanged for shiny fake coins, and desecrated.

And yet, the spiritual heroes of our generation do exist. They are only hidden, quiet, concealed, unknown. Day after day, they offer up their lives upon the holiest altar. They seek no public honors, no hollow songs of praise. Above their heads glows the purest halo of suffering and thorns, of kidush Hashem.

Quietly, almost on tiptoe, he slipped into the editorial office. He was a short young bochur, dressed in a simple, threadbare coat, with a flat peasant cap on his head.

His eyes, filled with fear, darted searchingly around the room, as though terrified of some dreadful, invisible specter. Then he whispered:

I come from Russia. I’m a yeshivah bochur. I’m a fugitive.

For a moment he broke off. Then he looked me straight in the eyes with an innocent, honest, yet penetrating gaze. Apparently sensing a genuine stir of emotion in me, his pain-stricken heart suddenly opened up completely:

My name is Avraham. More than that, I’m afraid to say. I come from the shtetl of… well, let’s say Dinovitz, a town near ours. I’m a refugee, a fugitive, a survivor of Gehinnom itself. I smuggled across the border.

Who am I? I’ve just turned seventeen. I’m a yeshivah bochur. Until a year ago, we learned in Vitebsk. There were some sixty or seventy of us. There was a Lubavitcher yeshivah there. We learned scattered among the shuls and batei medrash, four or five friends to a shul. Quietly, tucked away in the corners, we learned. Not aloud. We held the familiar Gemara melody inside ourselves, absorbed it inwardly.

The rosh yeshivah wandered from shtetl to shtetl, across the entire country. Whenever he came to us, he would always bring a few rubles to sustain us, together with a few young Yiddishe neshamos, souls he had managed to snatch and rescue.

Then the reshaim, the “Yevseks,” found out about us. The Cheka [secret police] drove us out, and we yeshivah students were forced to scatter to every corner of Russia.

One by one, ten of us bochurim made our way to Kutaisi, in the Caucasus. For long days and nights we dragged ourselves from one train station to another. The train journey took four full days. The Rosh Yeshivah had provided us with money for our expenses.

At last we reached Kutaisi. It is a large city with many Jews, but they are all Gruzinishe Jews. They all speak Gruzinish; only their chacham spoke with us in Lashon Hakodesh.

Kutaisi has nine shuls, large and beautiful ones, and we divided ourselves among them. But what do you do when there are no Gemaras around?

The Gruzinishe Jews are simple people, frum and sincere, but a little coarse. Seforim and Gemaras are scarce among them. It was a struggle, until we somehow managed to hunt down a few Gemaras. And then, we thirstily threw ourselves into learning with a passion. Learning, learning…

For a year we lived this way in Kutaisi. We slept in the homes of the Gruzinishe Jews and lived on meager bread and water. The rosh yeshivah stopped sending support and wrote not a word.  Presumably some misfortune had befallen him, rachmana litzlan. Only from home would one of us occasionally receive a few worn rubles.

But our good fortune did not last long. The Yevseks in Tbilisi learned about us, and the Gruzinishe Jews became terribly frightened.

“Praised be His dear Name,” they pleaded, “until now the reshaim have forgotten about us. In Tbilisi they have already seized several shuls. Here, so far, they have left us alone. Things are still better here than anywhere else in Russia. A father can still take his little boy along to daven, still teach him a parshah of Chumash. But now, because of you yeshivah bochurim, we are all in grave danger!”

What, then, were we to do?

Once again, our quiet, sacred hours bent over the Gemara were torn away from us. Once again, we had to take to the road of exile, wandering in search of some hidden refuge where the bloodthirsty reshaim could not reach us, where we might still be able to quench our thirst for the holy Torah a little.

But where, across the vast expanse of Russia, could we find even a single hidden corner like that?

And suddenly a daring thought flashed through my mind. A brilliant point lit up before me—the border!

I immediately felt myself drawn as if by a magnet back home, back to our little shtetl, the shtetl that lay so close, so very close, barely eighteen versts from the Polish border…

After long weeks of wandering, I knocked at the door of our half-collapsed little house, trembling with joy.

At home I found devastation. A double devastation: broken bodies and broken souls.

My father, utterly crushed and shrunken, was tearing his hair out.

“Oy, they want to tear my young Yisrolik away from me, just when he is about to become bar mitzvah, and put him into their shmad schools!…”

The air in the house was poisoned with festering despair, with dried-up tears, with choked-back curses.

I paced about like a madman. One longing, one desire, consumed all of my senses, all seventeen of my young tormented years:

Escape. Escape!!!

A poor, ragged peasant boy used to come into our house. A peasant boy, with whom my father did “business.” The peasant boy would occasionally bring a bit of dried produce or a couple of eggs, and at night my father would carry them around to the homes of well-known NEPmen [private businessmen taking advantage of the Soviet New Economic Policy in the 5680s and early 5690s].

So the idea struck me: this peasant boy will be my saving angel. He will smuggle me across the border.

Good. The boy agreed. He knew the entire area like the back of his hand. Even on a dark night, with his eyes blindfolded, he could manage to slip past the Red border guards.

But then came the problem of payment. The peasant boy kept crossing himself. The danger is just so great. He’s putting his life on the line. If he’s caught together with me, it’s straight up against the wall and—finished, end of story…

So for the whole undertaking he demands no less than six hundred rubles.

I could find no peace for a single moment. I planned, schemed, searched, and hunted until at last I found a way.

Near us lived two young men, one twenty and the other twenty-two. Their father, who was in Eretz Yisrael, had sent them money, together with visas. But the Cheka absolutely refused to let them leave.

I went to the two brothers. In absolute secrecy, we worked out a plan to escape together. From their sewn-up rags, the brothers took out a few dollars. We reached an agreement with the peasant boy.

We each swore an oath to the others, an oath that if, chalilah, any one of us were caught, he would not utter a word.

And one evening, the three of us set out.

To death or to life. To the “wall,” or to freedom…

The darkness of the night was so thick you could cut it with a knife. A heavy, angry rain poured relentlessly. The three of us set out into the dark, rainy gloom.

The peasant went first. I followed behind him, and behind me, the two chalutzim.

We schlepped ourselves along as if trapped inside a dark sack. Each of us held on to the coat of the man in front. Over hills and valleys, across fields and forests, over ditches and ravines.

We weren’t just schlepping ourselves along; it actually felt like we were flying.

We strained our eyes, and it seemed to us that somewhere far, far away, clear, pure, bright skies were beckoning to us…

The road seemed to stretch on not for a single night, but for an eternity. We all held our breath. I quietly whispered a tefilah to myself, a silent prayer.

We found ourselves in a perilous labyrinth, surrounded by sharpened bayonets and open rifle barrels. But the peasant maneuvered skillfully between the dangers all around us. It was not his senses that guided him, but some instinct born of his native soil.

We reached a little river, and we all stopped, trembling. Yes, this was the border. We knew it. The peasant had told us beforehand.

We were soaked through and through. Rain poured down from above, hot tears streamed from our eyes, and there we were, stepping into the water. We waded in fully dressed, the water rising to our waists.

Now we were on our own. The peasant remained behind on the bank, waiting for a while. For several minutes we trudged through the water, until suddenly the far bank began to brighten. The eastern horizon was turning blue.

Our first step on the “other” side of the border, on Polish soil.

Our souls inside us trembled uncontrollably. We wanted to dance for joy.

And then came a shout:

“Stop!”

A Polish soldier spotted us and took us into custody. We are led to the commanding officer, and once again our fate hangs in the balance. Would they send us back into the fire?…

Trembling from fear, rain, and cold, I stood before the senior officer of the border guard.

“Why did you run away from Russia?” he asked me in Russian.

“Ya khochu uchit’sya v yevreyskoy religioznoy shkole,” I answered. “I want to study in a Jewish religious school.”

Fortune favored us. For the time being, at least, they did not send us back to Russia. We spent several days under arrest in the border village of Kidrynitz. Then they transferred us to the shtetl of Melnytsia, near Borshchiv.

We were thrown into prison. I sat there for eight weeks. They gave us food once a day: a piece of dry bread. In my cell, I had only my tefillin. Nothing else. I nearly lost my mind. I repeated to myself endlessly the few kapitelach of Tehillim that I remembered by heart.

This went on until the Jews of the town learned about me. The rov of Borshchiv intervened on my behalf. It was a difficult matter. The efforts reached all the way to Warsaw, where Deputy Mintzberg succeeded in securing my release from prison and permission for me to travel to Latvia, where Deputy Dubin of Riga was working to have me admitted.

The seventeen-year-old bochur fell silent. He had finished his story of heroic self-sacrifice. The tremor of fear had vanished from his eyes, and in its place a small flame of proud defiance had begun to burn.

A Hero’s Fate

Who was this brave young bochur who escaped from the lion’s den? Afraid to disclose his full name to the newspaper, he identified himself only as Avraham, from a town near Dinovitz. But we can identify him fully, based on accounts written by his friends in the underground yeshivos and additional surviving documents (for the following information, see Toldos Chabad BePolin, Lita, VeLatvia, pp. 296–298; and Toldos Chabad BeRussia HaSovyetis, pp. 386–387).

His name was Avraham Shaul Kvash (Kvasha), and he was born on Rosh Chodesh Kislev 5675 in Kaminetz-Podolsk, near Dinovitz, to R. Aharon and Miriam Sima Kvash. He learned in Kyiv as a child, and as a bar-mitzvah-aged boy, he joined the underground Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim in Vitebsk, then the largest branch of the network.

Avraham learned in Vitebsk for three years, from 5688 to 5691. The rosh yeshivah he describes in his interview is the menahel of the underground Tomchei Temimim network during this period, Harav Avraham Mayor. Based in Vitebsk, Harav Avraham was responsible for all of the branches scattered across Russia, and he traveled from town to town to organize and maintain the yeshivos. The story of Harav Avraham Mayor’s life, including a detailed account of his role as menahel of the yeshivos, is related in the recently published biography Av Hamon Chassidim (full disclosure: this writer was an editor for the book).

Avraham Kvash’s classmates, R. Yisrael Yehuda Levin and R. Yechiel Michel Rappoport, later wrote memoirs describing their experiences (Zichronosai—Levin; and Yahadut Hademamah, vol. 1, pp. 279–310). They relate how in Tammuz of 5691, R. Avraham Mayor instructed them to travel east to the Caucasus, where communist persecution was less severe. 

Their original destination was Baku, Azerbaijan, but when that location didn’t work out, they settled in Kutaisi, Gruzia (Georgia). Along the way, the Russian police stopped Avraham Kvash and his friend Moshe Robinson. They were schlepping a large suitcase and wearing winter clothes in the warm Caucasus weather, raising suspicion that they were smugglers. After a three-day detention, the police were satisfied that the bochurim weren’t transporting any contraband, and they were released.

Avraham Kvash and his friends learned in Kutaisi for a year, but in the summer of 5692 they were forced to wander again. It was at this point that Avraham made his daring escape, as related in the article above.

As Avraham described in his interview, he was initially expelled from Poland to Latvia. But by early 5693, he was back in Warsaw, where he learned in the local Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim.

Avraham’s daring escape had devastating repercussions for his family. Toldos Chabad BeRussia HaSovyetis (p. 387) reproduces a photocopy of a heartrending letter he wrote in 5697 to the directors of the Ezras Torah organization in America, begging their help for his father:

Five years ago, I, Avraham Kvasha, fled Russia, that land of blood, because I could find no place there where I could study Torah. I escaped to Warsaw, Poland.

Afterward, my father, R. Aharon Kvasha, was arrested by the GPU, yimach shemam, and thrown into prison. They accused him specifically of having consented to my escape, as well as of his involvement in Jewish activities.

After enduring terrible torture and suffering, more than the hardships inflicted on anyone arrested for Jewish activities, he was sentenced to five years of exile in a forced labor camp in Siberia. He has now been imprisoned for more than four years. May Hashem have mercy on him and redeem him soon.

As a result of the torture he endured at the hands of the GPU, and the suffering he continues to experience in Siberia, where he is surrounded by wicked men, murderers, and people who are literally savage and deranged, he has fallen ill, lo aleinu. He does not even have the means to maintain his failing health, let alone purchase the medicines and treatments he so desperately needs.

We also urgently need funds to pursue efforts to secure his release, or at least to free him from exile. Meanwhile, my mother has no means of supporting herself and the rest of the family, much less covering the additional expenses we now face.

Having briefly explained the situation, I turn to you with a heartfelt request: Please take an interest in this urgent and worthy cause. Here is a man who has risked his life for Hashem and His Torah, and who is now suffering such terrible hardships, lo aleinu. He is pleading for help simply to stay alive, crying out, “Please, Hashem, save us! How much longer will You hide Yourself from the suffering of Your people?”

I therefore beg you to send him a package containing food and medical supplies, to help sustain him and restore his health.

May the merit of this mitzvah protect you, and may you be blessed with the fulfillment of all your heart’s desires, as Chazal teach, “Whoever sustains a single life…”

We don’t know the fate of Avraham’s family back in Russia, but we do know more about his own. From 5693 until 5699, he learned in Tomchei Temimim in Warsaw and Otvotzk. During this period, he served as an intermediary through whom chasidim in Russia communicated with the Frierdiker Rebbe. Evidence of this role is found in the interrogation records of chasidim arrested in Russia.

When World War II broke out, Avraham ended up back in Riga, Latvia. The Frierdiker Rebbe obtained American visa approvals for dozens of talmidim of Tomchei Temimim who had fled Poland to Lithuania and Latvia.

But in a tragic twist of fate, the very escape that saved Avraham Kvash from spiritual persecution in Russia contributed to sealing his fate at the hands of the Nazis. Collecting the visa and leaving Europe required transiting through Soviet Russia, and Avraham knew that if his identity were discovered, he would be in mortal danger. He wrote to the Frierdiker Rebbe asking for guidance, and was advised to wait until an opportunity would open up.

In Riga, Avraham was appointed to serve as a “rabbinic apprentice,” and he was trapped in the city when the Germans conquered it in Tammuz 5701. On 10 Kislev 5702, 13,000 Riga Jews were massacred in the Rumbula forest. Eight days later, on 18 Kislev, another 12,000 Jews were massacred in the same place.

Many great chasidim were among the victims of these massacres, including Harav Itche Masmid, whom we wrote about last year. We don’t have a specific record of Avraham Kvash’s death, but in all likelihood, he was killed in one of these massacres, shortly after his 27th birthday. This year will mark 85 years since the tragic death of this brave hero.

יִוָּדַע בַּגּוֹיִם לְעֵינֵינוּ נִקְמַת דַּם עֲבָדֶיךָ הַשָּׁפוּךְ.

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