Grandma, 106, Had Hundreds Of Descendants
Maryasha Garelik, a Lubavitcher Hasid who survived pogroms, Soviet persecution and the Nazi killing machine, died in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights last Wednesday. The progenitor of more than 560 direct descendants, she was 106.
Garelik, who was known in her community as Bubbe Maryasha, was born in tsarist Russia. Her father and her maternal grandparents were murdered in pogroms. Matters did not improve under the Soviet regime; her husband was arrested and murdered for promoting Judaism in 1938. Garelik survived World War II in Tashkent. After the war, she moved to Paris, where she founded a Lubavitch girls’ school. In 1953 she moved to New York, where she remained an active fundraiser. Many of her descendants serve today as Lubavitch emissaries in such locales as China, Australia, South Africa, and, ironically, Russia and Ukraine.
She was laid to rest in Queens, near the grave of late Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Schneerson.
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