A Jew Who Loves Me

By YEHOSHUA BEN-ELIYAHU
How do you know if someone loves you?
Well, I will tell you how.
I was ill could not come to my morning minyan for several days.
On the fourth day of my absence, I get a call.
"I know you are not feeling well so please do not go outside today.  It's very cold."
Somewhere up in his 80's, my friend from the morning minyan has a mother's love for me.
He is Hungarian.  At the age of 11, he was taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.  Most of the kids sent there were later transported to Auschwitz.  But he remained there, working in the kitchen and, through luck and miracles, somehow survived. 
On Friday afternoon, he collects one of each of the many Shabbat weeklies that are dropped off in a bundle outside the shul, and puts them in a pile for me.  He knows I like to read them and just does this because, I think, he loves me.  
I love him to, of course, and have listened to him tell me about his childhood for hours.  He always has a complaint about something but always has a smile, too.  When his wife died, he looked at me with a half smile of resignation.
He often visits his daughters and grandchildren in different parts of the country.  He has one daughter who lives with him.  The love of her life was killed in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  Since then, she has never entertained the thought of love or marriage with anyone else.   But she takes care of her father with deep devotion and motherly love.  
I think I know where she learned to love like that.