The Painters Helping Hand
by Dovid Zaklikowski for Hasidic Archives
In the mid-1920s, Rabbi Yosef Katzanelson arrived in the United States. It was shortly before the United States largely shuttered its borders to immigrants from Eastern Europe. In the preceding decades, hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing pogroms and antisemitism, or simply looking for a better life, had moved to the United States.
Many Americans resented the Jewish immigrants, accusing them of taking away their jobs and making the streets filthy and bring sicknesses to its borders.
Rabbi Katzanelson, an alumnus of Tomchei Tmimim in the town of Lubavitch, was hired as a rabbi in his hometown of Babruysk, Russia, in 1921. He was not only beloved at the Lubavitch-Minsker Study Hall, where he served as rabbi, but his Torah knowledge and humility earned him the respect of the local rabbis.
His return to the city was fraught with the aftermath of World War I, during which the city had been captured by Poland. With an uncertain future, like many Jews at the time, he wanted to head to the United States. Hearing that it was easier to obtain papers for the United States with a visa for a religious position, he learned how to be a shochet.
In New York, where he changed his family name to Nelson, he became the beadle of the Tiferes Israel Congregation and a shochet on Slaughterhouse Row, along the East River in Manhattan. In the mid-1940s, the area was cleared to become the home of the United Nations, and the slaughterhouse shuttered.
At the time, it was difficult for a kosher poultry shochet to find a new job, and he looked for a position outside New York. He received offers from Maryland and Illinois; however, his wife did not want to move away from where their son was studying at the United Lubavitcher Yeshivoth.
To support his family, he painted homes and became lovingly known as Mr. Nelson. He was good at his job, and his services were in great demand.
He was once hired to paint the hallways of 346 Brooklyn Avenue, where Rabbi Mendel and Rebbetzin Moussia Schneerson resided. At the end of the day, balancing two buckets of paint on a stick as he walked out of the building, he felt someone holding the second bucket steady.
Seeing Rabbi Mendel, then known as the Ramash, assisting him, he was taken aback. Out of respect for the son-in-law of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he would not continue walking.
However, the future Rebbe would not let go. After what seemed to Mr. Nelson like a long time, the Ramash asked him, “Why do you care if I fulfill the mitzvah of ‘And you shall surely help him’ (Shemos 23:5)?”
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