Klal Yisroel knows. We always know. There is a kind of ruach hakodesh that lives in the body of the nation, an instinct that awakens at certain moments in history and says: “Go there. Stand here. Hold on to this.” And right now, at what feels like the bottom of the ninth inning, Klal Yisroel is huddling around Reb Shayele.
Why? What is it about him? He didn’t leave behind volumes of sefarim. And yet, the world is flocking. His Torah was not written, but it was given. In challah rolls. In sugar cubes. In the way he looked at a Yid.
Rav Itcha Meir Morgenstern shlita once shared, after davening by the Reb Shayele’s kever: “We think we’re the ones who suddenly become drawn to a Tzadik. But really, it’s the other way around. In Shomayim, the Tzadik turns his attention toward us. And when that happens, we start to look back.”
If Reb Shayele is looking our way, we look back. But how do we do that? How do we have a hiskashrus to a tzadik who isn’t with us, who passed away long ago? What is the entry point of contact to the tzadik for a woman from New York in 2026?
This is what was on our mind when 45 women took a trip to Kerestir this past February. “Kerestir with Faigy” was a mission to find our hiskashrus to a tzadik who has captured our generation’s attention by paying attention to our generation.
For us, it became clear. We would enter through the Rebbetzin. Just as access to a living Tzadik often comes through the quiet strength of the Rebbetzin, we connected to Reb Shayele’s Rebbetzin, Sarah. To her nurturing, her presence, her partnership in a home that fed the world.
And suddenly it clicked. We are nurturers. We are the ones who feed, who hold, who sustain. And that was Reb Shayele’s entire avodah. He became, in a certain sense, a mother to Klal Yisroel. His greatness was the most tangible, human act: hachnosas orchim. Feeding another Yid without calculation. Without cheshbonos. Without asking, “What will be with me?” Just pure giving.
And maybe that’s why this place feels so untouched. So unruined. Like something from a more innocent world that somehow survived and is now resurfacing — because we need it.
Going to a kever is not one thing. It’s layers. On the most basic level, it’s a mikdash meyat, a place where tefillah is more readily received. But that alone doesn’t get forty-five women on a plane to Hungary in the dead of winter.
The next level is speaking to the neshama of the Tzadik, asking them to be a maleitz yosher, to advocate for us. But even that wasn’t the deepest place we were trying to reach.
There is a higher level. To become bigger. Neshamos are like those Russian dolls, one housed within another. Each one individual, but also part of something bigger. The Tzadik’s neshama is represented by the biggest doll that houses us all. We are nested inside and forever expanding. When you attach yourself to a Tzadik, you’re no longer just you. Your name, your identity, becomes part of something much larger.
You daven as yourself, but who is that self? A self that is now connected. Integrated. Expanded. And in that space, something shifts. The tefillos sound different. They come from a wider place. We tried to hold that; to imagine our names woven into the Tzadik’s name, to feel ourselves not just asking, but belonging.
And then we got there. Kerestir. A town that doesn’t make sense. A town that once didn’t even have a train stop. People wanted to come, but there was no way to get off there. Until the trains themselves started “deciding” to stop. Breaking down specifically in Kerestir, long enough for Yidden to get off… and then continuing on.
Eventually, the authorities gave in. Even they understood; something is happening here. The non-Jews closed their shops on the day of his levayah. They knew he was the source of blessing.
Yes, there were open miracles in Kerestir. But that’s not the ikkar. The real wonder was quieter. A Yid would arrive, broken, layered in struggle, carrying years of heaviness. And Reb Shayele would first strip away the klippos, not by force, but by sight. He would look at the Yid and see… only the neshama.
And in that gaze, something would already be fixed. The sugar cube, the challah roll, the piece of fish…those were just vessels. They were ways to hold and pass the yeshua that had already begun the moment he recognized who the person really was. He gave them something to carry.’ But what he really gave them was themselves. “You are not the enemy; you were just hijacked by him.” That was his Torah.
And on this trip, somehow, we tasted a drop of that.
Between the davening; deep, shaking tefillos that seemed to rise from somewhere ancient…Between the Torah, the laughter, the bus rides filled with stories and songs…Between the spontaneous singing and dancing, the food that somehow tasted more like connection than nourishment.
Something softened. Layers fell away. You could see it in the women. In the way they looked at each other. In the way they spoke.
In the way a group of forty-five very different lives became, for a moment, one neshama. And maybe that’s the takeaway. Not just that there was a Reb Shayele. But that there is a Reb Shayele. That his avodah is not locked in Hungary in the early 1900s, but that from Shomayaim, the Tzadik is inviting us to join his avodah wherever we find ourselves in 2026.
To look at another Yid and refuse to confuse them with their struggles. To separate the person from their pain. To defend, to nurture, to give without calculation. To hand someone a “bilkelah” whatever that looks like in your life, and remind them who they are.
If we can take even a fraction of that back with us… Then Kerestir didn’t stay in Hungary. It came home.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 77.
