The Rebbetzin's Merit

The Gemara asks (Berachos 17) how women earn a portion in Olom Haboh, and answers that they wait for their husbands to come home from the beis hamedrash. It was said that nobody in our generation fulfilled this more fully than Rebbetzin Pincus a"h.

Her husband's beis hamedrash was as vast as the world and was bound by neither time nor space, and she valiantly carried the full burden of running their home. "We do not share much time together in this world," Rav Shimshon would say to her, "but in the next, we will be together a lot."

She also fulfilled the second thing the Gemara mentions, that they take their sons to the beis haknesses to learn. Rav Shimshon never complained about anything except one thing: "I ache from longing for my children." His comfort was that the children were in his Rebbetzin's pure and faithful hands. He would often mention his good fortune in being able to rely on her completely for the children's upbringing and education. "She knows about each child, where they are every minute," he would say. He said it was her pure-hearted prayers that sustained every child. "Everything that we have is due to Imma's tefillos." There was not one Shemoneh Esrei at which she did not weep copiously, and she trained the children to say Tehillim in their spare time, in a special chant.

Her self-effacement before her husband was well known. Her daughters related that they knew her only as a strict headmistress in school. At home she always deferred to her husband. Once she called someone and asked him to undertake a particular errand, and she had to use considerable powers of persuasion to win his agreement. When Rav Shimshon came home, he took a different view. She ran straight to the phone and called the man back, using all her powers of persuasion to convince him that she had been mistaken earlier.