(COLLive.com) In what has become an ongoing theme for radio personality Michael Savage, on MotzOei Shabbos he once again extolled My Gulag Life: Stories of a Soviet Prisoner and Reb Mendel Futerfas’s will to survive during his imprisonment.
Savage, as he is known to his millions of followers, read from the book, to what one listener said was the “largest Motzei Shabbos storytelling.”
“In 1919, when Mendel was thirteen, he returned to Kharkov to live with his mother,” he read from Dovid Zaklikowski’s biographical sketches in the book, “But the city was in turmoil—the Bolshevik Revolution was transforming Russian society, making Jewish study and observance increasingly difficult.”
Despite this, Savage said, Reb Mendel continued to study the Torah and about G-d.
In 1930, Savage continued to read, “Reb Mendel became a mentor at the Lubavitch yeshivah in Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine. It was a difficult job: the Soviet government had intensified its effort to stamp out religious life, and those known to be involved in Jewish education were often arrested and executed. Under harrowing circumstances, with little funding or food, the students and teachers tried their best to concentrate on their studies.”
He did not only survive, Savage said, but he had the will to tell over his stories. But how did he have the will to survive, the radio personality asked. “An old man,” he said, “forced to do slave labor in the snow,” yet Reb Mendel, “did not ask for euthanasia, he did not ask to throw himself in front a soviet machine gun.”
His had a will to live, he explained, “because he had G-d. With G-d you can overcome anything. Without G-d you can’t overcome anything.”
Since Savage had begun to push the book, hundreds of unaffiliated Jews and non-Jews have purchased the book, including John Moore, who wrote about the book, “A true story of spiritual strength in the face of adversity.” Others have extoled its format, “And it was sharp and to the point,” while another wrote, “This is a beautiful book about an amazing person. Love all the pictures and the inspirational lessons.”
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