I Never Heard of a Jewish Saint Until I Was Hugged by One

I knew that other religions have saints. After all, I’d heard of St. Patrick’s Day. A high school friend wore a St. Christopher’s medal. And I knew, from required 11^th grade reading of George Bernard Shaw’s play “Saint Joan,” that Joan of Arc was a teenaged girl who led the French army to victory, was burned at the stake, and centuries later was sainted.

As an adult, I learned that for the Catholic Church to declare someone a saint they have to have lived a life of heroic virtue (dying as a martyr helps) and have done two verified miracles after their death for someone who prayed to them.

But did Judaism have any saints?

I knew of plenty of Jews who had been martyred, dying a heroic death since they chose to give up their life rather than renounce their faith. But I didn’t know any Jews who did miracles.

All the Jews I knew growing up in suburban New Jersey and at college were virtuous (more or less), altruistic (more or less), and wanted to improve the world (more or less), but even our most illustrious doctors didn’t claim to work miracles.

I spent my junior year of college in India. There miracle workers abounded. Sathya Sai Baba had millions of followers who claimed that he could materialize objects such as vibhuti [ash] or rings in the palm of his hand. They said he could read minds and predict future events, and that he had healed people of blindness, cancer, and paralysis.

Even less famous local gurus were credited with telepathy. Ram Dass (former Harvard professor Richard Alpert) wrote a bestselling book called Be Here Now, in which he related how a guru, Neem Karoli Baba, read his mind. Dick Alpert’s mother had died of a rare spleen disease several years before. None of his travelling companions knew this. Neem Karoli Baba said to him, “You were out under the stars last night. You were thinking about your mother. She died of spleen.” That moment changed Dick Alpert’s life, turning the skeptical, Jewish Harvard professor into a lifelong devotee of Neem Karoli Baba and Hindu practice.

If miracles were the requirement for sainthood, why were Jews so prosaic? The Jewish People could produce hundreds of Nobel Prize winners, but not one could break through the limitations of the physical world and do a miracle?

A Hidden Holy Woman

After living 15 years in a Vedanta ashram, I came to Jerusalem and was studying Torah. An acquaintance hoped to write a “Spiritual Guide to Israel,” and asked me to write a chapter on women tzaddikim. “Tzaddik means saint,” he explained.

Great! I wanted the assignment. But where would I find female Jewish saints?

I started asking around and was told about a woman named Chaya Sara Kramer who lived in a ramshackle village in northcentral Israel. Certain big rabbis considered her husband, Yaakov Moshe Kramer, to be one of the 36 hidden tzaddikim whose merit sustains the world. “I believe Rebbetzin Chaya Sara is also one of the 36,” my source told me.

I got the number of a woman who lived in the village and who would arrange a meeting with Chaya Sara for a Shabbat afternoon. She filled me in on Chaya Sara’s background. She had been born to a Hasidic family in the Carpathian Mountains and taken to Auschwitz at the age of 20. There her entire family was murdered and she was experimented on by the infamous Dr. Mengele.

After the war, she made her way to Palestine and married Yaakov Moshe Kramer. They never had any children, but for some 20 years (without pay, vacations, or days off) she took care of numerous brain-damaged children who were left on her doorstep. They lived in abject poverty, eking out a meager income by raising poultry and a few dairy cows.

Check for heroic virtue, but could she perform miracles?

During the two-hour bus ride from Jerusalem, I had time to mull over the issues I was grappling with at that period. Barely two months in Israel, I had started to learn the inner depths of Judaism, but as a liberated 37-year-old woman, I was wrestling with two issues in particular where my worldview was sparring with the Jewish ideals I was learning.

On Shabbat morning, I went to the community’s bare-bones synagogue. I was the only one in the women’s gallery. Suddenly the door swung open and a stout woman wearing a quilted kerchief and two housedresses, one over the other, walked toward me, smiling broadly, her arms outstretched. She greeted me with a bear hug, like a long-lost daughter.

Then she took my prayer book from my hand. She leafed through it to find Ethics of the Fathers, aphorisms of the sages of two millennia ago. She pointed to a passage and asked me, “Have you ever seen this one?”

I looked at it and broke into goosebumps. It addressed the first major issue I was grappling with.

Then she took my prayer book again and turned a few pages. She pointed to another passage, and asked, “Have you ever read this one?” It addressed my second most pressing issue.

I stared at her in consternation. She laughed, then turned and left.

Wow! She could read minds. I didn’t realize that she had even bigger surprises in store for me.

Ho Hum Miracles

Over the next 20 years, I became close to Rebbetzin Chaya Sara Kramer, especially after she moved to Jerusalem in 1990. I researched her life and wrote her biography, Holy Woman, which came out in 2006, a year after she died.

A whole chapter of the book describes the many miracles she did. Miriam M. had given birth to two daughters. Then, she did not get pregnant again for six years, despite her longings and efforts. One day, Miriam heard a knock on her door. She opened it to find a young woman bearing a note from Rebbetzin Chaya Sara. The note read: “If you help this girl I’m sending you to find a match, I promise you that you will have a child.”

Of course, Miriam exerted herself to find the young woman a husband. She succeeded in arranging a match for her with a suitable young man. Nine months later, Miriam gave birth to a healthy son.

Often Rebbetzin Chaya Sara pinpointed the exact time for her blessing to be fulfilled. One Passover, when her neighbor Ani Kalfa’s daughter Dafne had been married a year without conceiving, she asked Chaya Sara for a blessing. The Rebbetzin blessed her and added that next year at this time Dafne would visit her and tell her that she was pregnant. The following Passover, Dafne came, bearing the happy news.

One man who had lost his job called Rebbetzin Chaya Sara and begged for a blessing for livelihood. She told him, “Don’t worry. You’ll get something much better, with double pay.” Two days later, the man called her with the good news that he had found a new job. Moreover, the salary was exactly double what he had been earning before.

She also had a preternatural ability to see inside the body as well as the mind. Once a relative’s married daughter went to visit Rebbetzin Chaya Sara. The Rebbetzin asked her if she were pregnant, and she replied that she wasn’t. Nearly two weeks later, a pregnancy test revealed that she was.

I had a personal experience of Rebbetzin Chaya Sara’s ability to “see” the soul inside the womb. After five years of striving for a second child, I became pregnant. In my second month, I went to tell the Rebbetzin the good news. At the end of our visit, as she walked me to the door, she glanced toward my womb and remarked, “It looks like a boy.” Looks like a boy? Even an ultrasound that early on could not distinguish the gender of the fetus. Clearly, she was seeing the soul of my baby … which turned out, of course, to be a boy.

A guest at our Shabbos table, a newly-married American architect in his late twenties, heard me tell about Rebbetzin Chaya Sara’s miraculous abilities. A few weeks later, he phoned me. He had received “a terrible diagnosis” and he needed to see the Rebbetzin right away. I gave him her phone number. When he called, the Rebbetzin told him that he didn’t need to come to see her. He was perfectly healthy, she assured him, and had nothing to worry about.

The next day the architect dropped by my house on his way from the Kotel [Western Wall]. “I went to the Kotel to thank God for my miraculous cure,” he exulted.

“You’re not going to follow up with any treatment?” I asked, more skeptical than he.

“No! The Rebbetzin healed me over the phone. I’m fine.”

A year later, wondering if the architect was still fine, I located his phone number and called him. His wife answered the phone. In trepidation, I asked how her husband was. “He’s fine, perfectly healthy,” she replied.

“And he did no treatment?”

“That’s right.” Her voice was breezy. “No treatment. Your Rebbetzin healed him.”

The Surprise Was On Me

Rebbetzin Chaya Sara Kramer completely transformed my life. Always with a smile, despite her nightmarish experiences in the Holocaust, she showed me that happiness is a choice I could make by focusing on God’s kindness in my life. She showed me that although I have no power to determine what happens to me, I have total power to determine my reactions.

She showed me that giving is the secret to spiritual growth. By her own example she showed me that it’s possible to love and respect everyone by seeing the Divine image within them.

Years after Holy Woman became a bestseller, I reflected back on my initial meeting with Rebbetzin Chaya Sara. She came into the synagogue and gave me a bear hug, like a long-lost daughter. Then she proceeded to show me that she could read my mind by her trick with my prayerbook. At the time, I was impressed by her telepathy but looking back I realize that the decisive element of that meeting was her bear hug.

She loved me. She loved me although she didn’t know me. She loved me although I was barely “religious” in the sense that she was. She loved me although I had just emerged from 15 years in an ashram doing things that were an anathema to her value system. She loved me although I was religiously, culturally, and politically so different than she was. And throughout the next 20 years, she continued to love me, regardless of what I did, the long periods in which I neglected her, and whatever choices I made.

Now I’m convinced that the qualification for saintliness has nothing to do with how many miracles a person can perform. Saintliness is a function of how much a person loves.

The 20^th yahrzeit of Rebbetzin Chaya Sara Kramer falls on the night of May 29 and the day of May 30. Because she had no children, she worried, “Who will light a candle for me?” Please light a memorial candle on Thursday night, May 29, for Rebbetzin Chaya Sara bas Mendel Yosef, a Jewish saint.