The Little Room

An entry from one of Esty's recently found journals. (Written between ages 12-15)

Chap 32 (80-84) “The Most Interesting Place I Went To – The Little Room”

You asked us to write about the most interesting place we’ve ever been to. Some girls will write about exotic places and faraway lands. I don’t have to go very far. Just down to my basement, right past the hallway and across the Pesach Kitchen, is what we call “The Little Room.”

My father’s little room is lit by a small light-bulb hanging from a string from the ceiling in the basement. My father is a Rabbi, but not just the shul kind, he’s a Chabad Shliach that has almost every job in the world, as long as it will help bring another Jew closer to Yiddishkeit.

This little room is full of my father’s gimmicks. There are big Shabbos candles made of wood, and dreidels that light-up and spin around on record-players. There are big round smiling Matzos for Pesach, and beautiful Menorahs for Chanukah. Oh, and there are stickers! Rolls and rolls of them… Some say to Eat Kosher and have a delicious hot pizza on them, others say Learn Torah – it’s the real thing! Some stickers say to buy a letter in the Torah.

It’s a small room and it always seems that there’s never any more room. But when it gets too cluttered in Tatty’s office upstairs, and Mommy says it’s time to throw things out, my father gives us things to take down to the little room.

A magazine, a calendar, or a bookmark... He’s always spreading these stuff out on tables and sorting them.

Oh! The little room! You can spend hours in the little room. You can sit on boxes and open file cabinets and read things. You can browse through albums with pictures from years back when Chabad still had a Kosher hotdog cart! I peel off the stickers, read a cute article and pull out buried stuff…

There are miniature Sukkahs and exhibits from Jewish fairs. Over on the right are big walls made of wood. One is a painting of the Kremlin, the other of the Western Wall. I just sit there at night, I look through the papers and articles. I read on and on… it’s so interesting.

You can dream away, and imagine all kinds of things. It’s like a world for itself. Our little room. A miniature world about Jewish things. It’s not a book or a sefer, but it is full of ideas how to teach what it says in the Torah to other people who can’t read black and white. They like to see things colorful, full of life and fun. Like the things in the little room. Just to make Jews love their Yiddishkeit…