Rabbi Sholom Deitsch was sitting at the Sabbath table Friday night when the lights started to flicker.
One of his guests, he later found out, had a tree fall on his house, right where he would have been eating dinner if he wasn’t at the rabbi’s house for the meal.
“I went to look at it; it was like a matchbox house, after what that tree did,” said Deitsch, co-director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Northern Virginia.
The young man told him: “Eating by your house literally saved my life.”
It’s been that kind of week in the Mid-Atlantic region, with Deitsch’s community just one of the many pummeled by a line of fast-moving severe thunderstorms that caught residents and businesses by surprise, left millions in the dark in 90-plus degree temperatures, and claimed more than 22 lives.
Deitsch experienced the temperatures Saturday morning, as the synagogue he runs lost power. But people came to services anyway.
“It was a beautiful turnout,” he said. “And we had a Kiddush with hot soda. We got in touch with our real essential needs.”
As a handful of people still had power, synagogue announcements for his crowd of about 150 included invitations to those without to come cool off.
“Houses were doubled and tripled up,” detailed Deitsch. “People were happy to remember the meaning of being part of a community, both being able to give and able to accept.”
Rabbi Moishe and Esther Kavka, who run Chabad of Rockville in neighboring Maryland, watched their table go dark Friday night, with the only remaining light coming from their Sabbath candles. It led to some good discussions.
“It really puts the focus on” the spiritual light of the Sabbath, said Esther Kavka.
She recounted how after the holy day, her husband sprinted to the store for a generator to try and save their freezer full of chicken and meat, meals for them and their community members for weeks to come.
More broadly, the storm knocked out the power at the kosher pizza restaurant and the bagel store, she reported, with both still shuttered mid-week, interrupting the rhythm of daily life. Kavka, for example, was supposed to meet somebody at the bagel store; they moved their meeting to the pizza store, and “in the end, we went for coffee,” she said.
Every day, she’s been checking in with families with children to see how they were keeping cool, and how a man whose wife is in a rehab center is faring.
“He was glad to get a phone call from us,” said Kavka.
All of the things so easy to take for granted on a daily basis – the lights and air conditioning, for example – became much more appreciated instantaneously, she added.
Rabbi Sender Geisinsky of Chabad of Chevy Chase had his work cut out for him this week. The wind rattled the screen doors and lightning flashed for nearly an hour and a half Friday, and he had a summer camp to run.
“The news said there might be a thunderstorm, and it turned out to be a maelstrom,” he said. “It was intense.”
By Sunday, reports were coming in that people had lost power, and downed trees and power lines made travel difficult.
While most of the local camps were closed, Geisinsky’s Camp Gan Israel stayed open, running the usual morning bus route and giving the kids several full days of camp, despite the odds.
They plugged in an iPod, some lights and fans, and got the word out that it was business as usual for their three- to 10-year old charges.
“We tried to create as much of a camp atmosphere at the Chabad House,” he said. “The Gan Izzy camp chugs on.”
The camp returned to its usual building Thursday, and Geisinsky said he’s proud of what they accomplished.
“The Chabad mentality is that you do what you need to do and you keep camp going,” he stated. “That’s part of our upbringing. Camp is a part of what we do, and that doesn’t stop because of the blackout.”
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