Nishmas Day 19 - Rabbi Yechiel Spero | A Shavuos Message
There was a Yid named R’ Ezriel Mandelbaum, the younger brother of the great בעל מנגן of Bobov, R’ Yankel Mandelbaum.
R’ Ezriel was born in Krakow in 1903.
Following the outbreak of WW2, life in the ghetto was unimaginably difficult.
One day, he came home to find his young children crying. The cupboard was empty, with not even a morsel of bread or drop of milk to quiet their hunger.
As he tried to calm them down, the children pointed upward. “Totty, look — the rain is coming in.”
Outside, a torrential downpour was falling. Rain seeped through the roof of their tiny home, and R’ Ezriel began placing buckets around the room to catch the dripping water. The steady pitter-patter of the rain filled the house.
Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop.
In that wet, dreary apartment, surrounded by so much darkness and suffering, he said to his children: “We don’t have bread. We don’t have milk. But we still have a niggun.”
And to the rhythm of the falling rain, he began composing a melody.
That melody became known as the Bobover “Niggun HaTipos” — the Song of the Raindrops. Today, many know it as the tune often sung to “Mi Bon Siach.”
The niggun born from hunger, pain, and tears became the melody to which thousands of chassanim and kallahs walked to the chuppah.
