The Tailor Who Rested Beside Him

It is told that the Czarist government of Rav Hillel's day ordered the Jews to cut off their peyos. A Jew informed on him, telling the officials of his district that Rav Hillel had kept his peyos. Officers arrived to cut them off by force. Rav Hillel clamped both hands over his peyos. The soldiers pulled out their swords and beat his hands and head until he screamed.

A neighbor of his, a Jewish tailor who was friendly with the officers in charge, heard him screaming and hurried over. He offered the officers gifts if they would go, and they did. Grateful, Rav Hillel blessed the tailor and gave him a promise: when his time came, "after a hundred and twenty years," the tailor would rest in the grave beside his own.

Many years passed. By then Rav Hillel was Rav of Babruisk, and in the summer of 1864 he was niftar in far-off Kherson. His kever there drew his talmidim and admirers for years to come.

Later, during a harsh winter storm, an old man nobody knew died in the town's inn for travelers. The chevra kaddisha washed him and carried him out, planning to bury him among the unidentified. The snow was so fierce that they ended up, without knowing it, digging his grave beside Rav Hillel. When people noticed this a day or two later, there was an uproar. How could a stranger from the poorhouse, whom no respectable person knew, lie next to the tzaddik?

Moving him was no longer possible, since the Torah forbids it, so the leaders of Kherson tried at least to find out who he was. His documents gave his name, his father's name, and Paritsh as his hometown. They wrote to the leaders of Paritsh to ask for whatever they could tell them. The answer came back: he was a retired tailor, journeying to live with a child. Long ago, they added, Rav Hillel had given this very man his word that he would one day be placed at his side. The decades-old promise had come true.