Living on the third floor meant that when my children were babies I usually left the stroller at the bottom of the stairs and preferred to carry them up rather than try to haul the stroller all the way up. And now those children, who are now parents themselves, do the same when they visit. And nothing ever happened to the strollers.
So I was really surprised a few weeks ago when just after we said our goodbyes on Shabbat after lunch, my daughter came running back up the stairs.
“Mum, you’ll never guess what. The stroller’s gone. Someone’s taken it.”
“No, can’t be. Maybe some children took it to play with. Send the children down the road to see where it is.”
But my optimism was unfounded. Eventually they walked home carrying their toddler.
But my daughter was still optimistic and she and the children continued to search the area for a few days until they eventually found it, broken and unusable, thrown aside.
She was very upset. Taking it to use or even play with was one thing – but why destroy it?
Always ready to be ‘dan le’kav zechus’ she pinned a note on the stroller saying “I’m sure you didn’t mean to destroy my stroller – if you’d like to apologize this is my phone number…”
For days she waited for the phone call that never came.
Their budget is very tight and she was in her ninth month with their 11th child, keneine hara, so she knew she would need one very soon but they decided they would wait until after Yom Tov.
But after Simchat Torah, the last thing on her mind was her stroller.
The building she lives in is too old to have a ‘mamad’ (safe reinforced concrete room) and so the sirens in Jerusalem meant that everyone ran down to the ‘miklat’ (bomb shelter) at the bottom of their building. My son-in-law is in charge of the tenants committee and so he reminded everyone who shared the shelter with them that horrific Simchat Torah, that the miklat would have to be cleared out and they would have to remove all their possessions as soon as Yom Tov was over.
As it was still the end of Sukkot, no one had yet returned all the boards and schach to the shelter where they are usually kept and so the shelter was fairly clear and there was room for everyone even though it was certainly not exactly clean. But still, after the chag was over, all the tenants went down to check that they hadn’t left anything in it from a long time previously.
And that was when my daughter’s neighbor, Shifra, found a clean, well-wrapped, almost new, stroller that she had stored there several years ago and completely forgotten about. She had bought it for her granddaughter a few years previously but her daughter had been happy to continue using her older one that was also in good condition. This stroller had been sitting unused and unwanted in the shelter for the last few years. Shifra had heard my daughter’s story so when she found it she happily gifted it to my daughter.
A week later, our new granddaughter was born and came home in her new stroller. She was born at a time of tragedy and uncertainty for Am Yisrael, but happily welcomed by her loving family.
