Volodsk!  You never heard of it?  No matter.  It was a shtetl like hundreds of others which lay on the borderless steppe lands on this side of southern Russia, not far from a part of the Ukrainian northern border.  Just travel straight south over the hillocks and stop on the north bank of a little river that is the border into Ukraine, you can't miss it.  About 500 souls live in Volodsk.  We were mostly Jews.  Everybody else was a Christian of various persuasions.  For centuries the Jews lived and died amidst border wars fought by Poles, Russians, Turks, and Ukrainian Cossacks for this piece or that piece of territory where Volodsk is situated. 
        We Jews were always peaceful, devout before our G-d, trying to live and let live.  We married, raised children, and plied our trades and professions, studied Torah and Talmud at the yeshiva whose rebbes were famous for miles and miles around for their eruditeness and kindnesses.  The rhythms of life and death ebbed and flowed, flowed and ebbed.  Do not our sages tell us that G-d created this world and us specially to worship Him?  In return, He brings the goodness of life, the sadness of death, in measures according to His Will?  If you look closely at these two questions, their answers do not need question marks.
        Our tale is not about Volodsk and her Jews alone.  It is about a great rabbi and his people facing life and death on the highest holiday in the Jewish religion during 1942 when the rest of the world was at war.  To understand how this 'Rebbe' became a tzaddik, or a 'righteous man,' it is necessary to cast his life and times from the beginning before the ending.  When the miracle happened on that particular Yom Kippur, it came as no surprise to the faithful in the synagogue of Volodsk on the most holy of days.

        Volodsk!  You never heard of it?  No matter.  It was a shtetl like hundreds of others which lay on the borderless steppe lands on this side of southern Russia, not far from a part of the Ukrainian northern border.  Just travel straight south over the hillocks and stop on the north bank of a little river that is the border into Ukraine, you can't miss it.  About 500 souls live in Volodsk.  We were mostly Jews.  Everybody else was a Christian of various persuasions.  For centuries the Jews lived and died amidst border wars fought by Poles, Russians, Turks, and Ukrainian Cossacks for this piece or that piece of territory where Volodsk is situated. 
        We Jews were always peaceful, devout before our G-d, trying to live and let live.  We married, raised children, and plied our trades and professions, studied Torah and Talmud at the yeshiva whose rebbes were famous for miles and miles around for their eruditeness and kindnesses.  The rhythms of life and death ebbed and flowed, flowed and ebbed.  Do not our sages tell us that G-d created this world and us specially to worship Him?  In return, He brings the goodness of life, the sadness of death, in measures according to His Will?  If you look closely at these two questions, their answers do not need question marks.
        Our tale is not about Volodsk and her Jews alone.  It is about a great rabbi and his people facing life and death on the highest holiday in the Jewish religion during 1942 when the rest of the world was at war.  To understand how this 'Rebbe' became a tzaddik, or a 'righteous man,' it is necessary to cast his life and times from the beginning before the ending.  When the miracle happened on that particular Yom Kippur, it came as no surprise to the faithful in the synagogue of Volodsk on the most holy of days.
        Rebbe Shimeon wasn't always a rabbi, if you take into account that he had first to be born.  Our town Volodsk always had a Glazar as chief rabbi of the synagogue.  When Rebbe Israel ben Menachem married Shayna bat Rebbe Avram and Gittel Mendelbaum, every Jew in Volodsk celebrated the marriage deliriously.  Why?  Because this shidduch, or marriage, promised to continue a great line of rabbis on both sides!  But the high expectations all the Jews hoped for were somewhat wilted.  The nuptial night of our newly-weds produced nothing.  Weeks and months after the honeymoon produced nothing.  The passing of years produced nothing.  Decades after the hopeful parents-in-law died without even a grandchild among them produced nothing.
        In other words, Rebbe Israel and Rebbetsin Shayna were childless well into their mid-fifties.
        G-d apparently shut Shayna's womb, and sealed it but good!
        Or so everyone in Volodsk thought and rumors began circulating that a young (and fertile) rebbe from outside Volodsk must be found--and soon--eventually to take over the aging chief rabbi's work load. 
        Rebbe Israel suffered in silence over Rebbetsin Shayna's barrenness; she was tormented by guilt and anguish for failing her husband and somehow G-d.  Both prayed until prayers seemed useless.  While no son or daughter at the time existed to assuage desperate parents that G-d did not forget, Israel and Shayna did everything they could for the children of other parents as if they were their own.
        G-d did not forget.
        One day Rebbe Israel was in his back room study preparing the parsha, or text, for services relating to the childless Abraham and Sarah before they had Isaac.  There was a breeze riffing his beard and side locks which seemingly could not come from an open door or window.  Neither was found to be guilty.  He looked about to see where this breeze came from, and he never could find its source.  The breeze circled his desk, but nothing else in the crowded room moved--not even the heavy dust on his tomes or scrolls tumbled to the floor for who knew how long.  After a few minutes, the breeze slowly ceased.  Its whisper vanished into nothingness.
        When he came to supper that evening, he told Shayna about the surprise whispering breeze coming and going all about his desk.  She held her tongue at how impossible that might be, that somehow a draft could appear and surround only her husband and disturb nothing else in a closed room for a few moments.  It meant that he was just overworked and worried from preparing the next parsha.  After their meal, she thought nothing about the breeze tale afterwards.  That night, she woke up to find spotting on her bed sheet side.  "I am too old for a period," she thought.  "My last one ended some twenty years ago!"  She took a towel to cover the spots, and went back to sleep without disturbing her husband.  After Rebbe Israel arose and did his morning prayer to start the day, Shayna changed the sheets without his knowing about her belated spotting.
        As soon as she could, Shayna went to the mikvah to cleanse herself.  Emerging from Shayna's ritual cleansing, Ruth the Midwife quietly approached her from behind to be out of earshot from the other women and girls in the mikvah or busily drying themselves.  Ruth asked Shayna how long she was pregnant.  Shayna scoffed at this ridiculous question.  When the others saw the Midwife and Rebbetsin whispering and glancing about conspiratorially, they gathered around the two women intent on hearing gossip.  Shayna and Ruth left together, and on their way back Shayna asked Ruth why she thought the rebbetsin were pregnant.  "Because you are showing all the signs of being with child, that's why."
        In early June of 1909 Shimeon--the new 'Isaac'--came into the world of Volodsk.  After the hubbub about a 'miracle child' being a blessing from G-d to their rebbe and rebbetsin, the Jews of Volodsk all prayed Shimeon would be a future and brilliant rebbe.  After all, this miracle seemed to come about right after Rebbe Israel gave his parsha regarding Abraham and Sarah lamenting their sad state of being childless, yes?  And just like Isaac in the Torah, a son was born to his parents both 55 years old and childless before, yes?
        Imagine the joy--the nachis--everyone felt for the beaming parents during the bris eight days later when their infant Shimeon entered the Covenant of Abraham.  As he grew up, Shimeon was a healthy, exuberant boy; he was rather tall for his age, and with bright blue eyes and reddish hair like his father's.  When he was just ten, this child could speak Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and German with equal fluency.  By the age of twelve he mastered the entire Torah, and most of the Talmud.  Confident of his knowledge and growing saichel, or wisdom, the religious prodigy Shimeon even wrote missives on various halalich questions to other rebbes who his father personally knew well, and heartily approved of this correspondence.
        Shimeon had one other love in his young life besides Judaism.
        One day when he was six, Shimeon was sitting by his father studying when he looked up and saw an unusual thing tucked in a corner near the doorway entrance.  Its rich vermillion gold coloring only became apparent when brought into the light at the center of the room.  When he asked his father what it was, Rebbe Israel explained that it was a viola that made music, and it had been in the family for two hundred years.  When his father offered to let his son touch it, Shimeon fell in love with this old wooden box and its creamy white horsehair bow.  Soon he was teaching himself how to play.