---

In honour of Holocaust Memorial Day, I will be sharing this week a few stories of women spiritual leaders who were murdered in the Nazi genocide. Today I am delighted to share my second guest post, in which my friend and teacher Shoshana Jedwab remembers her umgekumene (murdered) grandmother, Roiza Baila Czarnochapka Jedwabnik, may her memory be for a blessing. Roiza Baila also features in this article I recently wrote for the Jewish women’s archive, which provides an introduction to the important work of synagogue prayer leaders like Roiza-Baila and other women religious workers. After asking Shoshana about her grandmother for this piece, I was so struck by her story that I asked her to write it up in full for this website. I particularly adore the story at the end about ‘the keys under the doormat’, which reminds me of a similar story told by Pauline Wengeroff about her zogerke grandmother in her famous memoir.  

Roiza Baila Czarnochapka Jedwabnik, by Shoshana Belle Jedwab

My grandmother and namesake, Roiza Baila Czarnochapka Jedwabnik, was the mother of five children, including my father, Cwi Zev (Hersh Wolf) Jedwab, the sole survivor of their family murdered in Auschwitz. Roiza Baila co-ran the family kosher bakery in the downstairs of their home on Zaleska Street in Shtetl Drobin, Poland, with her husband, my grandfather,  Yisroel Yehoshua Jedwabnik.

Roiza Baila Czarnoczapka Jedwabnik, and her husband, Yisroel Yehoshua Jedwabnik, of Drobin, Poland. Both were murdered in Auschwitz on 14 Kislev 1941.

Jewish women in the 1920’s and 30’s in the shtetl of Drobin, Poland, were rarely taught Hebrew and expressed themselves in the Jewish vernacular through Yiddish tkhines (prayers) songs, poetry and stories and by learning the Tse’enah U’re’enah (Yiddish commentary on the Torah) on Sabbaths. When Jewish women attended Shabbat and holiday prayer services in the grandly painted wooden town synagogue, they relied on a learned female prayer leader, or zogerke, who could follow the Hebrew prayers chanted from the mens’ section. The zogerke or firzogerin would call out the prayers for the women to repeat en masse in the ezres-noshim – the women’s gallery of the town shul.

My grandmother, Roiza Baila Czarnochapka, was not like other women in Drobin. Roiza was a traditionally learned Jew – and a brilliant one at that- a female freak in the traditional shtetl world. Besides Polish, Russian and Yiddish, Roiza was fluent in biblical and rabbinic Hebrew and the Aramaic of the Talmud. Roiza grew up versed in Hebrew liturgy, biblical texts and their commentaries and was even learned in Shas and Poskim – Talmudic law. Roiza’s mother, Leah, and sister, Rivka, died when Roiza was a tender age and Roiza was raised in a house of men by her learned father, *Rabbi Avrum Hirsch Czarnochapka. Roiza’s father hailed from the rabbinic family that produced the Polish town rabbis, Rabbi Dovid Czarnochapka of Yilov (son of Hirsch Wolf and Roiza Baila) and his son, Rabbi Hanoch Heinich Czarnochapka of Golina, who the Nazis murdered in July of 1941.

Former Jedwabnik home in Drobin, Poland, July 2024.  Photo by second generation Drobniner, Barbara Aloni.

Throughout my childhood, my father shared with endless pride how his vibrant, generous, brilliant and tireless modern Orthodox mother, Roiza Baila, shared her abundant gifts with her community members and earned some of their derision for her differences. Roiza Baila voluntarily ran Drobin’s Poor Brides’ Fund and single-handedly organized the Drobniners’ secular lending library. Roiza Baila wrote letters on behalf of illiterate members of her community and helped her husband run the Tomche Shabbos operation out of their bakery that provided all of the many poor Jews in the town with the dignity and nourishment of Shabbat and holiday meals. On the eve of the Holocaust, Roiza was even raising funds to build the first modern **Yavneh school in Drobin, until both her life and this project were terminated by the Nazi genocide.

While Roiza preferred Russian novels to the Talmud, Roiza Baila successfully defended her family’s bakery in rabbinic court, using her knowledge of rabbinic law to challenge the newly installed town rabbi’s increased fees for kashrut (kosher) supervision. Roiza Baila also introduced controversial Jewish women’s Jewish education into Drobin, arranging under cover of night for a rabbi with a mystical bent to teach a Bible class to women.

Among the many gifts my grandmother shared with her community, Roiza served as the zogerke or firzogerin– the female prayer leader.  As Roiza chanted the Hebrew prayers aloud in the ezres-noshim of the painted wooden synagogue, all the women followed her, repeating the Hebrew sounds Roiza chanted.

During one Yom Kippur afternoon in the synagogue, when my father was young, he went up to the ezres-noshim. My father asked his mother, Roiza Baila, who was in the midst of leading the women in the long Musaf prayers, “Mama, I want to take a nap at home. Where are the house keys?” Roiza replied aloud in Yiddish to my young father, “Hershek, the house keys are under the doormat.”

 

די שליסלען זענען אונטערן טעפּעכל

Di shlislen zenen untern tepekhl

Immediately, all the women in the balcony davened loudly in Yiddish as if it was the sacred Shema Yisroel : “Di shlislen zenen unteren tehpekhl” “The keys are under the doormat!”

Years later, my father would marry my mother, Ruth Tappis, a first-generation Brooklyn Jew, in New York City, USA. The word Tappis means tapestry- tepekhl. Indeed the wisdom of Roiza Baila Czarnochapka, came to fruition as my father did seek the keys to his future beneath the Tappis/tepekhl!

*After attending Yeshiva, in Ploinsk where David Ben Gurion was a fellow, if rebellious, Talmud student, Roiza’s father, Rabbi Avrum Hirsch Czarnochapka, eschewed being a town rabbi like his cousins. Rabbi Avrum was content to own a fabric store in Drobin and serve as a rabbis’ rabbi, interviewing and hiring the town rabbis, teaching classes in Talmud and Midrash on Shabbatot, and offering a Wednesday night Zohar class to freethinkers! Rabbi Avrum Hirsch was an active disciple of the rationalist medieval sage, Maimonides, and the modern religious political Zionist, Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever of the Hovevei Zion resettlement movement.

**Yavneh schools were a network of Jewish schools in Poland during the interwar period. The network included schools for all ages, including a rabbinical seminary and a school for the learning disabled.

Cite this: “Roiza Baila Czarnochapka Jedwabnik, the synagogue zogerke of Drobin”, by Shoshana Belle Jedwab