My second son had been in shidduchim for two years. Every day, he got at least five suggestions and every day, I spent thirty hours on the phone. In our circles, the children don’t meet until the parents have checked out the suggestion, and the families have met so while my son was serenely learning in yeshiva, I was running myself exhausted.
On the Sunday after a motzei Shabbos that another shidduch had fallen through, I felt I needed a break. I sent my children out of the house, told my husband I’m retiring for the morning, and went back to bed.
The phone rang, I answered. It was my cousin David who had a shidduch suggestion. It was a girl who lived three minutes away whose family I had never met and although this was unusual, they had already agreed. I may have retired for the day but Hashem obviously hadn’t. My husband came home to find me in a whirlwind of inquiries. To make a long story short, the shidduch was finalized within a week and we drank a l’chayim.
Nice story. But how the shidduch came about… that’s something incredible.
You see my cousin David needed a loan for something or other and he went to a gemach he heard about to ask about getting one. The gemach was run by the grandfather of this girl. Since you don’t give a loan without checking the person out, the grandfather asked my cousin for his family name.
“Dzialoszynski,” he said.
The grandfather gasped.
“Are you related to the Dzialoszynskis who ran the Kinderheim* (children’s house) in the Swiss Alps during the war?” he asked. (*A home for children who needed the mountain air to recover from illnesses, or for a family with a sick mother who couldn’t take care of them during vacation, so the children were sent up there and of course during the war many children were taken in illegally.)
“Yes,” replied my cousin.” He was my father’s cousin.”
“I was in that Kinderheim,” the grandfather said. “During the war, I was evacuated to Switzerland and spent a few years there until I was reunited with my family.” He paused, obviously moved. “And what is it you do?” he asked.
“I’m an avreich,” he replied. “And I dabble in shidduchim in the evenings.”
The grandfather was thrilled. “I have a granddaughter in shidduchim. Perhaps you can find her someone.”
So my cousin came home (after getting the loan, of course) and called me up. He had a strong feeling, because of the unusual connection, that this was the girl for my son.
And she was.
Our two families happily reunited under much happier circumstances than under which they were originally introduced, but by the same Divine Providence.
The icing on the cake is that the first son that was born to this couple was named after my grandfather, who founded the Kinderheim, and by virtue of whom my daughter-in-law’s grandfather was able to survive the war.