Chof Bais Shvat-Memories-Chaya Mushka-Anne Frank and her Diary...

A day of travel back and forth in memory and back and forth in timeback and forth in history and back and forth in rhyme.

A day I have a daughter on her way to Europe flying fast over the Ocean with her best friend to spend a week in Italy for her birthday. She bought and paid for the trip with her hard earned money... a 25th birthday present to herself. She is my hero and the thought of being able to spend Shabbos in Venice, at Chabad House in Venice of all places is wild.. and am sure the places along the way will be too as she has a wildness and a fire inside of her that always burns to learn more, do more and well..she is my hero.

Mendy, my son is coming back today from a ski trip in NY with his Temple Youth Group (NCSY) and luckily isn't one of the 13 Florida kids who broke something on that trip. Seems he was able to brake going down the mountain but Menechem his friend didn't and well.. they released Menechem from the hospital in time to rush to the airport to be told the flights were all delayed for bad weather in and around Atlanta or somewhere there is a connecting flight. His trip wasn't paid for by me or himself but a present from someone for his work organizing things all year.. So..waiting to see if my Menechem Mendel gets home safe and sound and see how bruised up he is.. cause trust me he sounded pretty bad yesterday and prefaced the talk on the trip by how EVERYONE is really bruised up..

Floridian's going skiing.. what do you expect?

Travel... here and there... my kids always traveling somewhere.

I talked to Sharon today.. on and on and probably used up all her minutes.. one of us is going to have to move. Told her funny, inspirational stories that I heard last night at a Fahrbregen for Chof Bais Shvat which is the anniversary of the Yahrzeit of the Rebbe's wife Chaya Mushka who died back in 1988... a place in time.

And, I wonder... why is it that I remember more about the day she died than Gimmel Tammuz and the Rebbe.

I remember sitting in the lobby of the Yeshiva and watching everyone through a writer's eyes, sort of detached, with wonder on how different people were affected.. how different people cried. Some just seemed numb and sad, others self-concious like they should be sad but so few had anything to do with her that they felt they didn't know her. She was such an enigma in ways ... in some ways a hermit in her later years as she rarely left the house or went to 770 and yet she worked at the Brooklyn Public Library in her younger years as a librarian and co-authored some famous works that few realized she was the main force behind. Odd how every day people saw her everyday at the library and few Lubavitchers in Crown Heights had any day to day dealings with her. And, when she was young she drove a pink cadillac and lived in Berlin and Nice as she and the Rebbe tried to find their way out of war torn Europe before the Nazi's found them.

Oh what a time she lived... what we can't imagine she went through or many of the Jews in hiding in Europe went through.

My father-in-law's cousin was Anne Frank.. my children share her genes and anscestors yet my children are alive and Anne is gone.. only in our memories because of the diary she wrote hidden away in that apartment. She was a war blogger before there were blogs and before there was an internet. Let that be a reminder to all of you to keep a paper copy of what you do... because when the connection goes online ..it goes but when you have it written in a book and get it published.. it is forever.

And, my daughter Rivka looks just like her.. the genes are strong though Rivky is young and as she says "hot hot hot" and special and cute and plays softball and basketball and writes and goes to her NCSY groups on Friday night and hangs out with her friends living the life that Anne never could but wished she could...

Time, weaving its way back and forth upon my mind today..

Rivky's big brown eyes burning bright and deeply passionate (like Dina .. like all my girls) .. big eyes Rivky has like my ex-husband and like the Rebbetzen... deep, big..

Life is so strange... my siser in law just called as I am typing this.. she is in Savannah with my brother and my nephew Chaim and they just took the tour of the Synagogue and she was blown away because Leo Frank had lived and davened/prayed there and ... she knows my kids are descendents of the Frank family but when she called she didn't know I was just writing about her a paragraph before... how odd, I didn't tell her. I just listened...

I watch.. I listen.. with writer's eyes and heart... taking it all in, describing, thinking, processing and rearranging my memories.

A beautiful day in Miami... but summer is coming and I am not ready for the heat and wondering on what the future will bring.. memory wise, weather wise...

Pictures below... from various sources...

Lastly... funny but true in a way as we are all seperated by space here. On the day that the Rebbe married the Rebbetzen his parents could not attend the wedding because they were locked away still in Europe... unable to leave. They made a mock wedding and celebrated anyway with a happy heart and a heavy heart. The Rebbe's mother told over stories of that day her happiest and saddest because she couldn't see her son get marry and yet.. she was happy. Years later safe in America she could tell her friends of the mock wedding. It was a different time in which they lived.. no internet, no throw away cameras or camera phones, no text messages, no blogs.. just memories told over from one person to another so others could remember and Never Forget.

And... a Diary remained even though Anne and her sister Margot did not.

http://www.chabad.org/media/images/34/ObLb341112.jpg
http://www.chabad.org/therebbe/timeline.asp?AID=62152 wedding
http://www.chabad.org/therebbe/timeline.asp?AID=62182 passing