A story is related about a man with an ailing foot who had visited several doctors in order to ameliorate his pain. Not having success with them, he decided to approach the founder of the Belz dynasty, Rabbi Shalom Rokeach (1781-1855), who, in addition to being a tremendous talmid chacham was renowned as a healer and miracle worker.
The Sar Shalom, as he was also known, was not available at the time of this ailing man’s visit. His Rebbetzin, Malka, inquired about the latter’s problem and then gave the visitor the following advice:
“Bring a candle to the synagogue and light it daily.”
The man heeded her advice and, after a short time, his foot completely healed.
When he heard of this man’s speedy recovery, the Sar Shalom, became quite impressed with his wife’s healing power and asked her from whom she had received such sage advice.
“The composer of the sweet psukim in Tehillim,” the Rebbetzin responded. “It says there, ner leragli… a candle for my foot” (Psalms 119:105).
This story, one of many about the wife of the founder of the Belz dynasty, is indicative of this rebbetzin’s greatness. Her thoughts, totally immersed in our holy scriptures, immediately identified a Torah source referring to the same limb that was in pain. And she just repeated the verse that popped into her head, which was Divinely inspired.
When complimented and told she had performed a miracle, she discounted her healing power with a modest explanation.
“The man gave a donation (candles) to the synagogue and Hashem rewarded him by taking away his pain.”
It wasn’t her advice that healed him, she claimed, but the merit of his tzedakah.
Rebbetzin Malka Rokeach’s entire being was immersed in thoughts of Hashem and His Torah. She spent more than half a century assisting the Sar Shalom with the establishment of the Belz dynasty. He always gave her full credit for the tremendous heights he reached in his love of Hashem and his Torah.
An illustrious yichus
Malka, born in 1780, was the daughter of Rav Yissachar Dov and Chana Rachel (née Tisminitzer) Ramraz. Rabbi Y.D. Ramraz was a distinguished rabbi and an Av Bais Din in the city of Sokal, Galicia; Malka was named after her paternal grandmother, the daughter of Rabbi Yehudah Leib Bick.
Malka’s paternal grandfather was Rabbi Yehudah Zundel Ramraz, a descendant of an outstanding star of the golden age of Spain, Rabbi Chaim Abulafia of Toledo, who could trace his ancestry back to David Hamelech.
Malka’s paternal great-grandfather was Rabbi Moshe ben Rav Todros, who was a dayan in Brody and called Rabbi Moshe Rabbi Zeligs, after his father-in-law Rabbi Aaron Zelig Bar Yehudah Zundel Segal of chachmei Brody. This Rabbi Moshe was known as a holy tzaddik, a ninth-generation descendant of Rabbeinu Todros Halevi, who was a student of the Ramban. It was the initials of his name, Rabbi Moshe Rabbi Zeligs, which made up the name RaMRaZ.
Malka’s mother, Chana Rachel, was the great granddaughter of Rabbi Zechariah Mendel ben Aryeh Leib of Cracow, who wrote a commentary, called Be’er Heitev, on the Choshen Mishpat and Yoreh Deah sections of the Shulchan Aruch.
Malka is known to have had at least one sister, Bracha, whose married name was Babad; one brother, Tzvi Hersh Ramraz; and another brother who had the same name as her father, probably born after her father passed away.
A providential shidduch
Malka met her zivug at a young age. The Sar Shalom was not only her first cousin, but her parents raised him in their home after he lost his own father, Rabbi Elazar Rokeach, who was niftar at the young age of 32. The Sar Shalom’s mother, Rivka Henna (Ramraz) Rokeach, who was left with five orphans and lived in the city of Brody, sent her son , who was about 11 years old at the time, to her brother, Rav Yissachar Dov Ramraz, to raise him and teach him Torah.
At that time, Rabbi Shlomo Lutzker Flam, a prize student and relative of Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch, was teaching the mystical teachings of the Maggid in the same city. Rabbi Shlomo Flam became known as the Lutzker Maggid. He had several years earlier published an anthology of the hanhagos of the Maggid of Mezeritch, titled “Magid Devarav LeYaakov.”
Sar Shalom Rokeach, the young orphan who felt the deep void left by the loss of his natural father, soon became enamored by the warmth of chassidus and fed his heart and soul with wonderful stories and spiritual sustenance. He grew to become a tremendous masmid, and was sought by shadchanim when it came time to marry him off.
Why shouldn’t he, Rav Yissachar Dov Ramraz, take this outstanding masmid, the Sar Shalom, as a son-in law? Rav Yissachar Dov thought to himself.
Rabbi Yisrael Eichler, Knesset member and author of a biography of the Sar Shalom titled “Kemalach Hanitzav al Rosh Derech” (Like an Angel Standing at the Head of the Trail), describes how the Sar Shalom’s uncle requested the agreement of the Seer of Lublin to the shidduch. The Chozeh, as he was called, gave his blessing; he knew the Sar Shalom well since he also served as the Sar Shalom’s mentor.
Rabbi Eichler also discusses Malka’s response when her father asked her whether she was interested in the Sar Shalom as a potential shidduch. “I will never find anyone as modest, honest, and as great a tzaddik as he is,” she claimed.
During their entire engagement he continued to learn as much as he did before, and even after, his head was totally immersed in ethereal matters. His new wife was certainly on his level.
The couple was supported by Malka’s father, and they lived together with her family.
Conspirators and collaborators
During the daytime, the Sar Shalom would spend his time learning with his father-in-law, sometimes until as late as midnight. His father-in law made it clear to him that he wasn’t entirely against chassidus, He just believed it was more appropriate for poskim and older men who had completed all Shas to study it. He said he did not agree with the belief that new husbands should leave their young wives with small children and infants at home to cling to their Rebbes.
Little did Rabbi Ramraz know that in order not to upset him, his daughter would help her husband sneak out of the house through a window every night so that he could learn together with Rabbi Shlomo Lutzker Flam. The Sar Shalom, after learning almost all night would sneak back shortly before daybreak to make sure his in-laws did not realize he disappeared.
Malka would try to wake her husband up each morning so that her father would not realize he had been gone almost the entire night. Rabbi Ramraz would become annoyed sometimes, wondering why his son-in-law seemed too tired to rise, totally unaware that he barely slept.
The ladder that Malka would let down the window to enable her husband to escape and return back into their room is described by Czech Jew, Jiri Langer, who claims it was “on exhibit in the Belz House of Prayer in Belz, an eternal memorial to this day.”
Unlike other rebbetzins
Jiri Langer was an assimilated Jewish writer who was born in Prague. In 1913, as a 19-year-old, he astounded those close to him by announcing that he decided to become frum and join the chassidus of Belz under the leadership of the Rebbe, Rabbi Yissachar Dov Rokeach. In his “Nine Gates to the Chassidic Mysteries,” which he wrote in Czech [the book has been translated into several languages, including Italian and German] in 1937, he devotes chapters to each of nine rebbes. The first gate, or chapter, is about the Sar Shalom. He describes the Rebbetzin Malka’s piety like this:
…. In those times, almost all devout men did nothing else but meditate on the Talmud the whole day long and leave the care of the family to their patient wives. The latter were well aware that they would be richly rewarded for this in the next world, that for their self-sacrifice, they would be allowed to sit at golden tables in paradise with their husbands, in the company of the most famous scholars of Israel, and that they too would rejoice in the glorious light of the majesty of G-d.
Malkele, however, was not satisfied with this. She wanted her Sholem to sit on a throne of rubies and pearls among the most holy of the saints and the angels of the L-rd, wearing the diamond crown of the purest merits, high, exceedingly high above the husbands of all her neighbors—and she at his side.
Many readers are aware of the famous story of how the founder of the Belz dynasty stayed up for 1,000 nights; what is not well known is that according to tradition, Malka was the one who held the candle for him during those long nights. On the thousandth night, the Sar Shalom was so exhausted, he was almost ready to succumb, but Malka would not let him sleep. And it was on that night he reached a very high level of spirituality and merited to meet Eliyahu Hanavi.
Jiri Langer writes:
… The holy Reb Sholem never forgot what his Malkele had done for him.
When he was famous throughout the world for his holiness and for the miracles he performed, and when hundreds and thousands of devout persons journeyed from far and wide to his table at Belz to fulfill obediently his every word, the slightest nod of his head, he would declare “If it were not for Malkele, (which means little queen) Shalom would not be king!”
Rabbi Meir of Premishlan (the second, who was a contemporary and friend of the Sar Shalom) would make a pun out of the king’s title in Bereishis 14:18: “Malki Tzedek, Melech Shalem, because Malki was a tzadekes, Shalom is a melech.”
Spiritual nutrition
Yitzchok Buxbaum, a student of the late prominent chassidic singer and rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach, devotes a chapter in his book “Jewish Tales of Holy Women” to Rebbetzin Malka of Belz. In the introduction to this book, Buxbaum writes that when he received semicha from Rabbi Carlebach, the latter blessed him that he be a maggid, a teller of sacred Jewish tales, and draw Jews closer to him this way. Buxbaum translated many of the tales about Malka that originally appeared in the first Hebrew volume of “Admorei Belz” by Yisroel Klapholz.
After each story that he relates, Buxbaum gives the reader his interpretation and comments on the tale. One story that has appeared in a number of books about the Rebbetzin was how she softly reprimanded a chassid to whom she had served some Kasha (buckwheat).
The chassid (who seemingly must have been quite starved) ate the food hurriedly, in a gluttonous manner.
Buxbaum then comments that the Rebbetzin’s words to the chassid demonstrate how she herself must have surely eaten, slowly and with dignity, so as to elevate her food spiritually. He also adds that he believes when Rebbetzin Malka cooked the food, and then distributed it, she undoubtedly davened at the same time and had in mind the elevation of the kasha.
Just like Gan Eden
Usually, when one visits a rebbe, one would not find him in the company of his wife. But a well-known story that has circulated for generations about this famous holy couple tells that when the Divrei Chaim of Sanz and his young son, Reb Baruch Halberstam, visited the Sar Shalom and his Rebbetzin, Malka, they found the couple seated at a table together eating in a very simple, unadorned room.
They were shocked. They expected to be told to wait in a hallway till they would be admitted to see the Rebbe alone. Seeing their astonished looks, Rebbetzin Malka calmly invited them to join her and her husband at the table where she continued to speak to them.
After they left the Sar Shalom’s house, the Divrei Chaim asked his son what his impression was of the Rebbe and Rebbetzin. Reb Baruch responded that he felt he had just come out of Gan Eden. The simple room smelled so ethereal that it was as if he had been sitting with Adam and Chava when they had been very pure, before they had eaten of the forbidden fruit.
“That is exactly how I felt,” answered the Divrei Chaim.
The Rebbetzin’s Realm
Tirzah Firestone, author of “Receiving: Reclaiming Jewish Women’s Wisdom,” writes:
The kitchen was the setting of Malka’s personal spiritual ecstasy and holy service, and she spent most of her day there, up to her wrists in fleshy white dough in the kneading trough, vigorously chopping fish and onions at her cutting board, or standing over the woodstove tasting a broth for an unwell child or chassid.
Out of Malka’s kitchen came food each day for her seven children, scores of students, visitors and shnorrers, indigent beggars, and holy men who came to Belz to learn from her husband, the great Rebbe. The kitchen and adjacent hall were her personal domain, the worldly hub of the Belzer court. The great hall’s benches filled to capacity every evening with male students of all ages, and it was Malka’s job to fill their bodies with warmth and nourishment that would produce nothing short of joy.
Malka knew well that the highest and holiest human task was not to leave the earthly world behind but rather to connect earth and heaven by making of one’s life a conduit through which the river of spirit can flow, downward as well as upward. From a non-hierarchical perspective such as Malka’s, no creature, no circumstance, and no aspect of life is irrelevant or merely discardable. All phenomena in time and space are aspects of G-d’s creations and portals that lead to potential holiness.
Let us all attempt to emulate the Rebbetzin’s love of Torah and Hashem and try to perceive the world through Malka’s eyes. Let our actions serve as an aliyah for her neshama.
She passed away on the eighth of Elul, 5612 (August 23, 1852).
Pearl (Preschel) Herzog, is the daughter of Chana Rachel (Flam) Preschel, who is named after her great-grandmother, Chana Rachel (Rokeach) Flam. Chana Rachel Rokeach was a granddaughter of the Sar Shalom and Malka Rokeach, and married to the grandson of Rabbi Shlomo Lutzker Flam, the Sar Shalom’s rebbe.