This week I received an email recounting an amazing story that has a direct connection to the Jewish community of La Plata.
Many surely knew Rabbi Leizer Szuszan, the shochet—ritual slaughterer—of La Plata. This story is about him and who this figure in the La Plata community, who passed away in 1984, really was.
Below I transcribe a few paragraphs from this wonderful story.
Rabbi Eideles met with Moti Szuszan in his office. Moti took a large notebook with an old binding from the safe: a manuscript that had belonged to his grandfather, the Gaon Rabbi Leizer Szuszan, of blessed memory.
""I open the notebook and before my astonished eyes I discover in the dense writing hundreds and hundreds of lessons on many chapters of the Mishnah.".
The old notebook was written by Moti's grandfather, the Gaon Rabbi Leizer Szuszan, of blessed memory, who penned down in his neat and tidy handwriting the lessons he had heard in his youth. Rabbi Eideles asks Moti to tell him a little about his grandfather to try to understand who the author of these manuscripts was. Rabbi Leizer, originally from Lithuania, lived most of his life in the city of La Plata in Argentina, where he arrived from Eastern Europe after studying at a yeshiva in Grodno. He listens to the stories, looks a little more at the writings, and the thread begins to thread in his mind toward the identity of the lessons and their true significance.
[...] Moti comments: "I thought about Dad and Grandpa too. What was a Jew, for whom the Torah represented his entire world, doing there in Argentina? I remembered that every year, on Simchat Torah, a rabbi from Buenos Aires, Rabbi Frishman z"l, would come to his house, and for the two days of the holiday they would sit and study Torah. They didn't sleep or rest, they just studied and studied. All year round, Grandpa had no one to study with, and when this rabbi came for Simchat Torah, he used the entire time for Torah study.""