The blizzard of January 2015 may have flaked out in much of Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, but it’s still raging in other parts of the northeastern United States and in Canada.
From the far eastern tip of Long Island, N.Y., to the shores of the Canadian maritime—and cities in between—people are still bracing for the worst as some travel bans remain in effect for parts of Massachusetts and Maine. (Travel bans in New York and New Jersey were lifted early Tuesday morning.)
One Massachusetts town was flooded when water from the Atlantic Ocean breached a sea wall, while the island of Nantucket, Mass., was said to be completely without power as winds reached in excess of 40 miles an hour with heavy snow.
“We can’t get out,” says Chana Wilansky, co-director of Chabad of Maine in Portland with her husband, Rabbi Moshe Wilansky. “It’s real blizzard; we really got hit. We have over a foot of snow already, and it’s supposed to snow until tomorrow morning. Everything is canceled.”
Everything that is, except school for her younger children. “The kids go to an online school,” she explains. “It’s amazing ... despite the fact that there’s blizzard outside, the kids are still learning.”
Their older daughter, Toby, however, is enjoying a few extra days of midwinter vacation. The teenager, who attends high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., had come home with a friend for break and got stuck at home when bus service was suspended on Monday.
The Wilansky are also helping out a Jewish traveler from New York, who is in Maine on business, and who had left his tallis and tefillin at home.
“He called a Chabad in Manhattan and got our number,” recounts Rabbi Wilansky. “He asked if he could come and daven with us this morning, and so he came. He’s staying at a hotel next door, and hopefully, he’ll come for supper tonight.”
Exchanging Mitzvahs
Further down the coast, in New Hyde Park on Long Island, N.Y., Rabbi Boruch Sholom Wolf—co-director of Chabad at the Medical Centers with his wife, Mushkie—spent his morning digging himself out of more than 15 inches of snow.
“I shoveled, but someone graciously picked me up for Shacharit [morning prayers] because I couldn’t get my car out in time,” he says. “Now we are OK; it took a lot of time to clear off the property.”
While the beneficiary of a good deed today, Wolf spent yesterday doing one of his own. After hearing news reports that a Red Cross shelter had been established at a local high school for people who didn’t have any heat during the storm just two miles from his home, Wolf knew he had to act.
As his wife prepared two kinds of fresh sandwiches—tuna fish and jelly—Wolf got busy making chicken soup, which he makes every Shabbat.
“We serve the medical community, so we are used to bringing the food on the fly,” the rabbi explains, noting that his Chabad House serves three area hospitals.
He recruited fellow local Rabbi Lawrence Teitelman of Young Israel of New Hyde Park to go with him, and they headed off armed with the soup and sandwiches made by the Wolfs, as well as other goodies supplied by Teitelman.
“When we came, there were less than a dozen people there, but the main thing was to see the impact we made on the volunteers,” Wolf relates. “The Red Cross workers were so excited; one woman said no one had ever brought her hot soup before.”
Meanwhile, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, despite the fact that more than a half-foot of snow, topped with a coating of ice pellets, was on the ground, the city was up and running, according to Rabbi Mendel Feldman, director of Chabad-Lubavitch, Rohr Family Institute of the Maritimes with his wife, Basya Chanah.
“It’s not that bad here,” he says. “It’s pretty much a day off from school, but the buses are still going at the corner.”
In general, he says, “we don’t get terrible snowstorms here because we are on the coast, but New Brunswick and Quebec do. But here in Canada, we are much, much more prepared to deal with the snow than New York.”
