In the period after the Six Day War, along with the tremendous spiritual awakening that swept the Jews of the Soviet Union, and the rest of the Diaspora, the political climate changed as well. Many Russian Jews began to receive permission to emigrate and they went to Eretz Yisroel.
This change affected our own attitude in arranging classes for the boys of our yeshiva. At the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, we would carefully choose secret locations for the boys to learn, after assessing the trustworthiness of the people who lived there. These locations were top secret; even the parents did not know where their sons learned. By the end of the 1960s it was altogether different. We accepted more students and opened new places to learn. We began to choose as teachers people of whom we would have previously been very wary, or who would have previously been afraid to have anything to do with us.
In 1968, R. Moshiach Chudaitov approached his brother-in-law Gavriel with a daring proposition. “You have a big, enclosed yard with a large house, and another small house in the yard," he said. "We’ll pay you rent and the children will learn Torah by you. You are a teacher, and your wife, my sister, is a dentist, so no one will suspect that there are secret Torah classes on your property.”
The truth was that Gavriel had all the reasons in the world to refuse. As a teacher in a government school, if anyone would discover that secret Torah study was taking place in his house, he would immediately lose his job, never to get it back. However, since Gavriel greatly respected his brother-in-law, he agreed, and asked only that the children refrain from walking around in the street and that they stay in the house during the day.
Slowly, the number of students learning in Gavriel's yard grew to ten, and beyond. In order that the neighbors would not notice the suspicious traffic around the house, we decided that it was better if some of the students would sleep there, and therefore would not go in and out every day. Thus, R. Gavriel’s house turned into a yeshiva with dormitory facilities. Among the students who learned there at that time were: Shlomo Chai Niasoff, today the spiritual leader of the Bucharian community in Boro Park; the Ledaiov brothers; the Melayev brothers; the sons of Bechor Mulokandov; Bechor Pinchasov; Bechor Zevulonov; and others.
Despite the precautionary measures taken, after some time the neighbors noticed too many boys going in and out of the house. They asked Mrs. Saidov why so many children were visiting them and she cleverly responded that since she did not allow her children to go to other people’s homes, their friends came to visit them.
Their teacher was R. Dovber (Berel) Rubinson. R. Moshe Nissilevitch had told R. Moshiach that it occurred to him that R. Berel Rubinson would make a very good teacher. However, when R. Moshiach first suggested it to R. Berel, he was afraid to even discuss it and refused to listen further.
Half a year later, R. Moshe asked R. Moshiach to speak with him. R. Moshiach discussed becoming a teacher at the yeshiva with R. Berel and convinced him that nobody would find out. R. Berel said he had to think it over, and a few days later he accepted the job, serving as the teacher in R. Gavriel’s courtyard. Even after we left Samarkand, the learning continued in R. Gavriel’s courtyard, with the older students teaching the younger ones.
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