The story of Malka

Many families today have their own “Moses” – an ancestor who left a modern-day “Egypt” and founded the family. My great-grandmother Malka played that role in our family.

By YONATAN SILVER
The Gaba family in Ukraine. Isaac, front right, had emigrated to Wales, so they pasted him into the family portrait (photo credit: COURTESY SARAH PETERS)
The Gaba family in Ukraine. Isaac, front right, had emigrated to Wales, so they pasted him into the family portrait
(photo credit: COURTESY SARAH PETERS)
On Passover, we commemorate Moses leading us out of Egypt and our becoming a people.
Many families today have their own “Moses” – an ancestor who left a modern-day “Egypt” and founded the family.
My great-grandmother Malka played that role in our family.
Malka lived in the Ukrainian shtetl of Kiblich at the turn of the 20th century.
Her parents, Paltiel and Nehama Yossem, were good, kind, respected members of the Kiblich community. They supported the poor of the shtetl, providing them with food and kindling.
One day, Paltiel received a letter from Wales from a young stranger, Isaac Gaba. In the letter, Isaac related how he and his cousin had recently been on a train in Ukraine that was taking army conscripts to the Russian-Japanese war front. Isaac and his cousin strongly believed that since Jews didn’t have full rights in Ukraine, they shouldn’t be bound by obligations either, so they leapt off the train at a station and hopped onto a train going in the opposite direction.
They split up, Isaac wrote. He made his way through Europe, working at such jobs as teaching religious subjects in Poland and eventually reached the Welsh mining town of Tredegar, selling wares. There, a friend of his from the old country acting as his matchmaker mentioned to him that he knew a young woman back in Ukraine, Malka Perl Yossem, that he thought would be a suitable match.
“So, I request your permission to correspond with your daughter,” Isaac concluded in the letter.
Paltiel’s immediate reaction has been lost to history, but our family history does record that his wife, Nehama, enjoyed reading the letters that this young man wrote to their daughter Malka.
“If anyone sent me such lovely letters and poetry, I’d jump at the chance to marry him,” Nehama quipped to her daughter. After a while, Isaac did ask Malka to marry him and join him in Wales.
Paltiel did not agree to the wedding proposal.
“If he wants to marry my daughter,” he declared, “He should move back to Ukraine and live here in Kiblich.”
Malka went on hunger strike.
She didn’t simply skip a few meals – she refused to eat or drink at all! In those days, it was unheard of for women to act that way in the shtetl.
It didn’t take long before Paltiel relented, and he accompanied his daughter to Wales for the marriage.
Before leaving the, Malka visited her soon-to-be in-laws, Ze’ev and Rivkah Gaba. Like her own parents, Ze’ev and Rivkah were kind people dedicated to Jewish values. Isaac’s father was a shohet (kosher slaughterer) who believed that slaughtering was a mitzva (religious good deed) and, therefore, he couldn’t bring himself to charge poor people for his services.
Our family history records Malka and her father’s journey to Wales: “So they set out for Tredegar, with house linen, bed linen packed with the best duck feathers, and, of course, her trousseau, to see if the fiction matched up to the reality, and it was love at first sight!!” Malka and Isaac married and established a family in the Jewish community of Tredegar. After accompanying his daughter to her wedding, Paltiel visited friends in England and even traveled to the United States, where two of his brothers lived.
He was shocked to observe the low level of religious observance among many of the Jews he met during his travels, and was distressed at the conditions he witnessed in the garment- trade sweatshops in which many Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe labored in America.
Returning to Kiblich, he told his family what he’d experienced.
“From now on,” he resolved, “We’re staying here in Ukraine. No one else from our family is leaving!” Paltiel most likely also passed on his impressions and decision to his daughter’s in-laws.
It was a fateful decision: Life in Ukraine in the years that followed was not good for the Jews.
Many years passed. Malka and Isaac’s family grew up and the couple eventually died. In the 1980s, one of Malka and Isaac’s children, Dr. Maurice Gaba, decided to find out what had become of the family who had stayed behind. He and his wife, Pauline, traveled to Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, behind what was known as the Iron Curtain.
Despite difficulties imposed by the Communist regime, he managed to meet with remnants of the family.
He learned of the fate of many relatives who did not survive the turmoil of pogroms and other murderous events in the years following his parents’ marriage in Wales.
He also found out what happened to his grandparents. A cousin of Maurice’s, Lara, told him that when she was a child, she, together with her parents, two sisters, and Paltiel and Nehama, were sent on a forced 70-km. march from Bratslav to the Pechora concentration camp. Nehama died en route to the camp and Paltiel died in the camp from starvation.
In the family history that Maurice and Pauline wrote, Maurice states that he is perplexed that his grandfather, who was known to be a wise and scholarly man, made such a tragic mistake. On the other hand, he notes, it is unfair to judge Paltiel with the benefit of hindsight. He and Nehama were good, kind people. They had no way of knowing what the future would hold.
Maurice and Pauline worked to overcome obstacles and bureaucracy and enable the Gaba and Yossem families to leave the Soviet Union. Thanks to their efforts, many of Paltiel and Nehama’s surviving descendants are now finally at home in Israel.