In Memory of Our Dear Community Member – Masha Rutitsky
Usually, in this section we publish interviews with members of our JRCC Ontario community.
But this time, we are sharing a special story – the words of Masha Rutitsky’s daughter. Masha made an immeasurable contribution to the growth and development of our community, filling it with warmth and energy. Today, Masha’s daughter, Gila Lowel, lives in Israel.
I sat shiva (the traditional Jewish mourning period) for my mother, Masha Rutitsky, in Jerusalem, at my son’s home. I kept thinking how hard it was to go through mourning far from the places where my mother and I had lived...
From my mother I inherited her gift for languages, her deep love for Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), for the Jewish people, and for the study of Torah...
My mother and her twin sister Rachel (of blessed memory) were born in Vilnius in 1946. That fact alone speaks volumes: the Shoah (Holocaust) was still a raw presence...
...She always said that everything there felt like a dream come true, and she remembered those years with a special light in her eyes. In the kibbutz she first discovered what Shabbat was and felt, for the first time, truly at home...
There is so much I could say about my mother. I could tell about her poetic talent – how nearly thirty thousand subscribers wept as they read her moving poems about Torah and her longing for Israel...
And even though Alzheimer’s slowly took her from us over eight long years, I feel that her legacy is alive. It continues to blossom in Eretz Yisrael – every time I sit in a Jerusalem park with my grandchildren and we discuss the weekly Torah portion.
