Parshas Emor 5779
This weekend, in synagogues all around the world, we will be reading Parshas Emor, which contains, among other commandments, the mitzvah of Kiddush Hashem, sanctifying G-d’s name. As it is written, “… I shall be sanctified among the Children of Israel…†(Leviticus 22:32). This commandment specifically requires one to be martyred rather than publicly transgress any religious law where religious persecution is intended.
As you know, throughout the centuries and millennia, our holy ancestors have sanctified G-d’s Name countless times, and through their deaths they made the ultimate statement of faith – that the Torah is G-d’s absolute truth and is even worth dying for. [To learn more about this fascinating mitzvah and all its many details and applications, see Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s excellent work Handbook of Jewish Thought Volume 2 pages 17-27.]
We are also just a few weeks away from the Festival of Shavuos (this year it begins on June 9th) – which also happens to be the yahrtzeit (anniversary of death) of Avraham ben Avraham, the Ger Tzedek (“True Convertâ€) of Vilna, who sanctified G-d’s Name and was burned at the stake on the second day of Shavuos, May 1749.
[A Ger Tzedek is a gentile who became a Jew out of a sincere and deep conviction in the truth of the Jewish religion, without any other motivation whatsoever.]
What better time, then, to tell you the amazing story (in a nutshell) of one of the great converts in Jewish history, Avraham ben Avraham, the Ger Tzedek of Vilna:
One the wealthiest and most influential landowners in eighteenth century Poland was Count Potocki. Many members of the devoutly Catholic Potocki family held high offices in the church hierarchy of Poland, a country with a predominantly Catholic population.
Count Potocki, the owner of the city of Vilna and the surrounding province, had one son named Valentin who was his pride and joy. From early on, the Count and his wife decided that their son Valentin would become a priest. At the age of 16 his parents enrolled him in the Catholic University of Vilna. Young Valentin met a fellow student named Zarodny, or Zaremba, the brilliant son of an impoverished family. With the passage of time, the two young men became close friends.
In Vilna, Valentin came in contact with Jews for the first time, for there was a large and flourishing Jewish community in Vilna at that time. It was related that, as he was walking one day in the street, he saw a group of boys attacking a few younger children. He went to their defense and saved them from further blows. Afterwards he asked them what they had done to provoke the attack. They replied, "Nothing, they wanted to beat us up because we are Jews."
Valentin had heard much about the Jewish people from his teachers, most of it very unkindly things. But he also learned about them from the Bible. Studying for the priesthood meant, of course, studying also the Five Books of Moses, the Books of the Prophets and Holy Writings (the so-called "Old Testament," as the Church refers to it). In it he learned about the origin and history of the Jewish people, from the days of the Patriarchs to the Babylonian Exile and the restoration of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
He was a serious, deep-thinking student, and he spent much time reflecting on all that he was taught. One of the basic things he was taught was that the Jewish people were forsaken by G-d, because they refused to accept the Christian Messiah and Christian faith. This explanation seemed rather strange to him, since the Bible itself declared very clearly what would happen to the Jews if they turned away from the way of the Torah with all its Divine commandments which G-d gave them at Mount Sinai. If they remained loyal to their faith and refused to accept another faith, a faith that did away with all the basic Divine commandments — like Circumcision, the Dietary Laws, and so forth —that was being forced on them, it should make them all the more beloved to G-d, rather than be rejected by G-d, as the church claimed. Besides, he distinctly learned in the Bible that G-d assured the Jewish people that He would never break His Covenant with His people, and G-d is not a man to break His word. If the Bible were true, as he was certain it was, and as claimed also by his teachers, then all they taught him about the Jews could not be true.
Valentin and Zaremba went to study at a seminary in Paris. There they found a rabbi who agreed to teach them about Judaism, and it was not long before they decided to become Jews. They resolved to go to Amsterdam, which was one of the few places in Europe at that time where a Christian could openly embrace Judaism. But Valentin first went to Rome, whence, after convincing himself that he could no longer remain a Catholic, he went to Amsterdam and took upon himself the covenant of Abraham, assuming the name of Avraham ben Avraham. ["Avraham the son of Avraham"; "the son of Avraham" is the traditional name given to a convert to Judaism, as Abraham was the first who converted to Judaism from polytheism].
When Valentin’s parents got word of his leave from the seminary in Paris and the rumors that he had converted to Judaism, they began searching for him. He then fled from France and hid in a synagogue in Vilna, wearing a long beard and peyos (sidelocks) like the Perushim (devout Jews who separated themselves from their families to learn and pray). When the Vilna Gaon heard of his whereabouts, he advised him to hide instead in the small town of Ilye (Vilna Governorate). There a Jewish tailor who sewed uniforms for Polish bureaucrats overheard some clients talking about the fugitive divinity student and suspected that the stranger in the synagogue might be him. Later, this tailor's son, who liked to disturb the men studying Torah in the synagogue, was sharply rebuked by Valentin; some say he grabbed the boy by the ear and pulled him out the door. The tailor reported him to the Bishop of Vilna, and Valentin Potocki – now known as ‘Avraham ben Avraham’ - was arrested by the Catholic Church.
Valentin’s parents visited him in prison and begged him to renounce his Judaism publicly, promising to build him a castle where he could practice the religion privately. He refused his mother, saying, "I love you dearly, but I love the truth even more".
After a long imprisonment and a trial for heresy, Valentin was condemned to death by being burned alive at the stake. After the decree was handed down, the Vilna Gaon sent Potocki a message offering to rescue him using Kabbalistic names. Potocki refused, preferring instead to die ‘al kiddush Hashem’ - sanctifying G-d’s Name. His mother used all her influence to procure a pardon for him, but the execution was moved up one day so that she would not be able to deliver it in time.
Avraham ben Avraham Potocki ZTâ€L was executed in Vilna on the second day of the Jewish holiday of Shavuos. Potocki walked proudly to the execution site, and even as he approached fiery flames, he didn’t flinch. He began to sing a moving niggun (song) - one that has been faithfully passed down through the generations - to the words “aval anachnu amcha, bnei brisecha, bnei Avraham Ohavcha shenishbata lo b’Har Hamoriah†— “but we are Your people, members of Your covenant, children of Avraham, Your beloved, to whom You took an oath at Har Hamoriah…†As the fire began to consume his body, he recited the blessing “Baruch Hamekadesh Sh’mo B’rabbim,†and with the words ‘Shema Yisrael’, his holy soul ascended to Heaven.
It was unsafe for any Jew to witness the burning; nevertheless one Jew, Leiser Zhiskes, who had no beard, went among the crowd and succeeded through bribery in securing some of the ashes of the martyr, which were later buried in the Jewish cemetery.
Following Potocki's execution, the town that had furnished the firewood for the execution burned down. There were also an unusual number of fires in Vilna, and a building that stood opposite the execution site bore a black stain from the "smoke and fumes of the burning". No amount of paint or whitewashing would remove the stain, and finally the building was taken down. The authorities would not allow a monument to be erected over Potocki's ashes, but a "strange tree" grew at the site. Those who tried to cut down the tree were mysteriously injured in the process. Around 1919 a tomb was erected over the ashes and Jews came to pray there. Following the destruction of the old cemetery of Vilna by the Nazis during World War II, a new cemetery was built and the Vilna Gaon was interred in a new ohel. Potocki's ashes were reinterred alongside the Vilna Gaon's grave, and an inscribed stone memorial to him was mounted on the wall of the ohel.
[Potocki's comrade Zaremba returned to Poland several years before him, married the daughter of a great nobleman, and had a son. He remained true to the promise to embrace Judaism and took his wife and child to Amsterdam, where, after he and his son had been circumcised, his wife also converted to Judaism; they then went to the Land of Israel.]
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