Return to Sender

Mr. Avraham Eliezer Eckstein and his wife were Holocaust survivors. Many years after the war, Mr. Eckstein expressed a deep desire to return to Budapest to visit the kivrei avos of his family, particularly his father's kever. At the time, Hungary was still under Communist rule, and such travel was neither simple nor comfortable. Yet Mr. Eckstein felt a powerful obligation to go.

Mr. Eckstein had survived forced labor, the Russian front, and eventually Siberia. During the war, Russian soldiers once discovered his tefillin and nearly executed him, suspecting him of espionage because of the hidden parshiyos. Only the intervention of a Jewish soldier saved his life.

After the war, he returned to an even more painful discovery: His father, Harav Nosson Binyamin Eckstein, had been murdered on the final day of the war.

As the Germans retreated from Budapest, they entered the hospital where his father was recovering from tuberculosis. The patients were dragged outside and murdered. Later, Mr. Eckstein and his brother Yidel, secretly searched for their father's body during curfew hours so they could bring him to a proper kever Yisrael in the old beis kevaros in Budapest, where generations of the family's rabbanim were buried. That memory never left him.

Knowing all that her husband had endured during the war, and understanding how much the journey meant to him, his wife encouraged him to make the trip.

When Mr. Eckstein eventually returned from Budapest together with his two sons, he remained deeply grateful to his wife for allowing him to reconnect with his family's past and visit his father's kever once again.

But the story did not end there.

One Friday night, something unusual happened. While Mr. Eckstein normally davened at an earlier minyan, but for some reason, that week he attended a later one instead.

There, he met R' Falk, one of Manchester's well-known seforim sellers, the father-in-law of the revered mashgiach, Rav Matisyahu Salomon, who had recently become mechutan with a distinguished family from Malmö, Sweden. Mr. Eckstein wished him mazel tov and casually asked about the new family.

Then, entirely out of character, he began asking more detailed questions — names, background, and where they came from.

Something sounded familiar.

Finally, it was revealed that the family's original surname had been Rothstein.

Suddenly, everything fell into place.

The new mechutan was Mrs. Eckstein's first cousin — the closest surviving relative she had left after the Holocaust.

Mr. Eckstein said nothing to his wife that night. He knew she would be too overwhelmed to sleep. Instead, he invited the family to come after Shacharis the next morning.

So, on Shabbos morning, when Mr. Eckstein returned from shul, he turned to his wife and said, "You know, a few months ago, you allowed me to visit my dead relatives. Now I'm going to bring you a living one."

Decades after the Holocaust had torn their family apart, two cousins embraced once again.

Mr. Eckstein always felt there was a connection between the two events. His wife had selflessly encouraged him to reconnect with his family's past, and shortly afterward, Hashem gave her back a piece of her own family that she thought had been lost forever.

Sometimes, when a person helps someone else recover something precious, Hashem returns something ever so precious to them as well.

The chessed was returned to the sender.