By: Faygie Holt – Jewish News Syndicate; jns.org
“We would bring stuff to one person and they would say, ‘I’m sure there’s someone who needs it more than me,’ ” relates Rabbi Shlomo Litvin. “Even as they were taking stock of their homes and everything they lost, they were saying their neighbor two doors down needs the water.”
The last time Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, co-director of Chabad of the Bluegrass, had been in Hopkinsville, Ky., he was joined by thousands of other people to see a total eclipse.
He returned to the area on Monday to find a much-changed landscape after a massive tornado ripped through the western part of the state on Dec. 10, rendering much of it temporarily uninhabitable. The tornado was one of a series of others that struck six Midwestern states on Dec. 10.
“The kindness they had shown to tourists during the eclipse was overwhelming, and to come back now and see the devastation was heartbreaking,” said Litvin, who went to the region with his brother, Rabbi Chaim Litvin of Project Friendship, a social-service arm of Chabad of Kentucky, to deliver 10 pallets of bottled water along with boxes of winter clothing and shoes to the survivors of the tornado.
cont’d…