By Sara Spielman
Csanad Szegedi was a leader of a right wing pro-Nazi Hungarian political group in Budapest called Jobbik, which formed the Hungarian Guard, a paramilitary organization. Since its establishment in 2003, he was a member of this extreme party and part of the hardcore that started it, devoted to an ideology of anti-Semitism and holocaust denial.
One day, Szegedi discovered from a critic who did extensive research into his background that he is actually a Jew. Even more shocking, he learned that his maternal grandmother is a holocaust survivor, a secret she kept from the family for fear of further persecution. As soon as word got out, Szegedi’s political party rejected him and he was thrown into an existential crisis.
The infamous anti-Semite had nowhere to turn, except to face the very identity he vehemently condemned and was now, ironically, coming to haunt him. Yet, who in the Jewish community would believe in his sincerity? After all the damage he had orchestrated, who would accept him?
Szegedi had one call to make to open the door to his Jewish soul; he called the local Chabad House in Budapest. Against immense criticism, Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, President of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council in Budapest, answered his call and invited him into his synagogue, handed him a kippah, allowed him to pray, don t’fillin and eventually learn Torah. The congregants pretended not to watch Szegedi, but they all knew who he was.
Rabbi Oberlander, who is also a noted historian and prolific academician, explained that he accepted the previously anti-Semitic leader because the man is nonetheless a Jew and we must love every Jew, even those who have done wrong. Furthermore, we must give him a chance to do t’shuva.
There’s a story that took place some two hundred and fifty years ago involving a ten hour journey the Baal Shem Tov took to Leipzig with one of his devoted students, whose parents lived in that town. The Baal Shem Tov was quick to tell his student that he most likely won’t have time to visit his parents. Instead, the student was led by his master down a mysterious path as the sun was close to setting before Shabbos. Their first stop was at an isolated house near a forest, where the holy Baal Shem Tov spoke to an old man with a radiant face that the student had never before seen. They then went to a nearby river where he filled up a cup of water, made the blessing on it and drank from it.
Finally, moments before Shabbos descended, they found themselves on a street lined with taverns near a university known for its anti-Jewish sentiments, where violence and drunkenness reined the streets. No Jew ever dared to venture there, as the chances of survival were slim. Yet, the Baal Shem Tov had a clear destination. He knocked on a tailor’s door, a Jew who was allowed to live there because the local folk needed his services. Much drama ensued when the local mob tried to invade the house that Friday evening when they heard the Baal Shem Tov’s melodic prayers, but he soon paralyzed them with his gaze.
Over the entire Shabbos, however, a lone, shadowy figure stood in the corner of the tailor’s home intently observing the Baal Shem Tov, watching his prayers and listening to his lofty discourses. The tailor later told the Baal Shem Tov’s student, “That man is Professor Shlanger, one of the biggest anti-Semites in the country. I have no idea what brought him here.”
When they later returned home after Shabbos, the Baal Shem Tov offered his student explanations for only two of their previous destinations. The man he spoke with at the onset of the trip is a hidden tzaddik who knows the secret of when Moshiach will arrive and they discussed these secrets. The second detour by the river was because it was soon going to dry up and needed to be elevated by a blessing in order to fulfill its purpose in this world. The strange man who was standing in that room all Shabbos at the tailor’s home? One day, the Baal Shem Tov said, his student will learn the answer.
Twenty years later, the student was traveling to the city of Minsk. It was years after the Baal Shem Tov’s passing and he stayed for Shabbos by a distinguished Jewish man, who gave over deep, esoteric concepts, similar to the ones the student remembered hearing that Shabbos in Leipzig at the tailor’s home. “I was the famous professor who visited the tailor’s home,” the host revealed. “I was at a turning point in my life at the time, full of unanswerable questions as to my purpose in life. When I heard of how the Baal Shem Tov paralyzed those students, I knew I had to see him for myself.
“The sight of his davening and his words of Torah had such a profound effect on me that a few months later I disappeared from the university. I don’t know how your Rebbe could possibly have known that a Jew-hater like me carried a Jewish soul crying out to be redeemed.”
The Rebbe created a modern empire of followers, also leaders, his shluchim, who every day ignite souls and help them on their journeys to teshuva. Many have incredible stories of return, some even as unlikely as Szegedi, who visited Auschwitz only after the passing of his dear grandmother, who he eventually spoke to about her brutal past, one she had kept hidden for so long. While she was alive he could not face the harsh realities or horrors of the camps where she had been suffered.
The pain Szegedi experienced when he stood by the gas chambers and the crematoriums, the gravesite for his unburied great-grandfather, the confusion he felt about an era so inhumane, was perhaps the moment that he became a transformed Jew. A once Jew-hater who denied the holocaust is now a man wrapping t’fillin and davening. Rabbi Oberlander saw his “pintele yid,” his “Jewish soul crying out to be redeemed,” because the Rebbe saw it in every Jew, as did the Baal Shem Tov.
On the streets of Manhattan a few years ago, a university student on his way to class one morning was stopped by a young Lubavitcher Chassid near a mitzvah tank insisting he put on t’fillin. “But I’m not a Jew,” the student insisted. “I was raised going to church every week.”
The Lubavitcher bachur told him with love and confidence typical of a Chassid on mivtzaim, “You have a Jewish face.” Afterward, the student couldn’t shake the feeling, the question, of what if he really is a Jew? He asked his Catholic parents, but they denied such a heritage. The boy got sick over this question. He became obsessed and couldn’t stop thinking about it, especially since he was raised to hate Jews. So tormented he became that he was hospitalized, until his parents finally revealed the truth that he was adopted at six months old, born to Syrian Jewish parents now deceased.
It took a Chabad Chassid to see a pintele yid, to recognize a Jew in a man passing by on the street, who would never have known otherwise. And just one moment to awaken and transform him, ultimately becoming a Lubavitcher Chassid himself.
It is this very type of transformation of souls so lost that return, that embrace t’fillin, that change their ways, like a Nazi political leader in Hungary, the Catholic college student on his way to class and the anti-Semitic professor during an era when violence towards Jews reined the streets—it is these moments that bring such sweetness to G-d and redemption to this world.