Rabbi Hillel Eisenberg is one of the most gifted Torah story-tellers around today and can often be heard on Torah Anytime, Daily Dose.
After listening to a story titled, “The Scent of Gan Eden” while walking home from shul recently, I wanted to find out more about the man in the story and reached out to Reb Hillel. He filled me in and I got in touch with a daughter of the subject who filled me in some more. She asked that I respect the family’s wish for privacy, as they were convinced that her father, who was very humble and modest, wouldn’t want any publicity.
So under the conditions that I agreed to, I’ll try to tell the story about Mr. Ploni.
Mr. Ploni, of course, was not his real name, but that will be the name we’ll use. Mr. Ploni was born in Bilgoraj, pronounced “Bilgoray” in Yiddish, which was a town in southeast Poland. It was estimated that over 5,000 Jews lived there prior to World War II, which was over half of the town’s population. The town had a Hebrew printing press in 1909 and continued to print Hebrew and Yiddish books until the Holocaust.
Those who didn’t leave when they could were deported to Belzec Death Camp. Mr. Ploni, a youngster in 1939, went with his father and probably some others to Siberia, where conditions were better for Jews. The Plonis were able to go to France and back to Poland before they arranged to move to America.
Around 26 years ago, Mr. Ploni was on a trip to Europe with his son-in-law, and they opted to also go to Israel. While in Israel, Mr. Ploni’s son-in-law (we’ll call him Ari), took his father-in-law to meet his brother-in-law, a Syrian Jew, who was close to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Talmudic scholar, posek, and Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1973-1983.
The brother-in-law wanted Mr. Ploni to get a bracha from Rabbi Yosef and made the arrangements. The three men entered the room. Rabbi Yosef got up and said to Mr. Ploni, something like this, “I smell the scent of Gan Eden coming off you and I’d like to know why. What is your zechus?”
Reb Ovadia asked everyone in the room, including Ari, to leave. He asked Ari’s brother-in-law to stay so nothing would get lost in translation. Rabbi Yosef asked again, “Why do you have the scent of Gan Eden?”
Mr. Ploni told of how his father was so bothered that bars of soap were made from the dead Jews and were used by their tormentors and others to help clean themselves. After the war, Mr. Ploni, then 10 years old, accompanied his father and stopped at houses, farms, stores searching for these bars of soap to buy and bury. They used drivers, automobile and horse-drawn, and walked over stones and under rain and in the mud.
They spent all of their money and finally came to some kind of store at their last stop. When questioned, the storekeeper admitted he had some of the soap bars, but wouldn’t give them without payment. Finally, they agreed to trade Mr. Ploni’s pants for one of lesser quality. Again, they buried the bars of soap and said the appropriate accompanying prayers as the tears fell from their faces, probably wondering if they were perhaps burying the remains of some they knew from their town of Bilgoraj.
After Mr. Ploni finished telling his story, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said, “Now I know why I smell Gan Eden on you. The neshamos you buried are clinging to you.”
Mr. Ploni’s daughter said the family never heard anything about searching for the soap bars and using all of their available money to do so before the family moved to America. Her father never mentioned anything about the heroic episode. There are so many questions that I had, such as how long did Mr. Ploni, who was ten years old in 1945, and his father search, and what areas did they cover? Nobody knows. The only thing the family knows is that Mr. Ploni was a special man and, of course, so was his father.
