The brothers accepted their fate with bitachon and equanimity. The night before their beating, they were visited by two chassidim, Rav David of Vaslikov and Rav Nota of Chaslivitch. After speaking enthusi-astically in Torah, as if nothing unusual was about to happen, Rav Shmuel Abba quietly told them, “Tomorrow, we will be beaten and it should be arranged that there is a minyan, a doctor, ice, and lemon juice [as an antiseptic]. Also, any blood or fragments should be collected.”
The two visitors recorded the impact upon them: “We stood there astounded. Holy fear overwhelmed us and we could not say a word. The impression was so powerful that it will never be erased from our memory all our lives. Before our eyes, we saw, as it were, Avraham Avinu before the Akeidah, totally devoted to do the will of his Creator, and Rabbi Akiva before they combed his flesh, without saying anything and without ruffling their tranquility a hairsbreadth.”
In those days, military beatings were administered by spiessruten (knouts), a punishment introduced to Russia by Prussian army officers. A more sophisticated method of administrating this punishment was “driving one through the stroy (line-up).” This meant running (or rather, being slowly led through) a gauntlet of two rows of 250 soldiers armed with knouts. Resultant death from heart failure or blood poisoning was not uncommon. To receive 1,500 blows, the brothers would pass between the rows three times.
As the two brothers approached the place of their sentence, they sang a special niggun, which is preserved until this day.
During the beating, Rav Pinchas Shapiro immortalized his memory by refusing to move on after his yarmulke fell off. Unable to go back and pick it up because he was being led along by two long ropes tied to his hands, he simply stood stock still as blows rained on his back until someone replaced the yarmulke on his head.
The two brothers regained consciousness on Shabbos and their first words were, “We must recite Kiddush!” After saying Kiddush, Rav Shmuel Abba washed and said Hamotzi, but was too weak to eat a morsel of bread. Whenever he recalled this incident in later years, he said that he was still sorry about this beracha levatalah.
It took them months to recuperate enough to begin walking in chains to Siberia and, by the time they arrived in Moscow, at the end of 5600/1840, they were too ill to proceed. After months of recuperation, officials petitioned that the brothers be permitted to return to Slovita, but Czar Nicholas I insisted that “if they are ill, they should be left in Moscow in a bogadelnia (old age home), but they must not be returned home.”
Even after fifteen years, the brothers were still not allowed to return to a normal Jewish community.
As Bibikov, now Minister of Internal Affairs, explained, “They can exert a harmful influence upon those Jews among whom they will settle and, in addition to this, it can also inspire in other criminals a hope for such types of ameliorations.”
The brothers’ only consolation was that, in 5607/1847, their sons won the tender to open the Russian Empire’s second authorized Jewish printing house, in Zhitomir. The first was the Romm Printing House in Vilna. All other Jewish printing establishments had been closed down.
The brothers were only released in June 5616/1856 by Czar Nicholas I’s more liberal son, Czar Alexander II, who is famous for his emancipation of the Russian serfs.
Surprisingly, Rav Shmuel Abba did not greet the news joyfully.
“I fear that I am now losing my freedom,” he moaned. “There, at home, when they greet us as martyrs, will my strength be sufficient to weather the test? When will they demand of us that we become gutten Yidden (rebbes)? I implore Hashem to protect me from that path ...”
His fears materialized after Rav Aharon the Second of Karlin handed him a kvittel. Admirers insisted that he become a rebbe in Shepetovka and both brothers were revered as rebbes for the rest of their lives.
Nowadays, their memory is immortalized not only by their martyrdom, but also by their holy sefarim. As Rav Aharon Roth, the Shomrei Emunim Rebbe writes in his sefer, Taharas HaKodesh: “Therefore every G-d-fearing person should strive to acquire sefarim of old prints ... especially from the print of Slovita and Zhitomir, [of the Shapiro brothers,] the grandsons of the holy Rav of Koretz, who were exaltedly holy men.”
(Chief source: The Drama of Slovita, by Saul Moiseyevich Ginsburg, University Press of America, Inc. 1991. Translated from the Yiddish by Ephraim H. Prombaum) http://strangeside.com/printing-press-the-slovita-controversy/
