By Rabbi Mikhail Salita, a Brooklyn rabbi with roots in Odesa, Ukraine

Sometimes destinies intertwine in ways that even angels marvel at. My great-grandfather, a Podolian Hasid, was a friend and business partner of the grandson of the great Russian poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. The more I learned about this connection, the more I felt that it was written not in ink, but in breath.

There are stories that belong neither to time nor place — they live between heaven and earth, between dust and light. The story of my great-grandfather, Srul Aronovich Lekhtman, is one of them. In him faith, intellect, and inner nobility merged, reflecting the ideal of the Hasidic court of Ruzhin — to be a “king without a crown,” serving the King of Kings.

He lived in Kamianets-Podilskyi, a town in western Ukraine where nearly all Jewish life followed the Ruzhin–Husiatyn Hasidic tradition. The Rebbe of Ruzhin, often called “the holy Rebbe” or “the king without a crown,” taught that true greatness lies not in gold, but in how one carries divine light through ordinary life. Wealth, he said, should serve the soul, not the body. His Hasidim built factories, educated children, and helped the poor — all as a form of prayer through action. From that spirit of sanctified labor came people like my great-grandfather.

He was an educated man who served on the City Council of Kamianets-Podilskyi under the Russian Empire, owned a brick factory, and was closely associated with Pan (Mr.) Teofil Dembicki — a Polish nobleman and intellectual whose ancestry, as it turns out, carried traces of Jewish roots. Archival records show that my great-grandfather managed Dembicki’s estate and later became his business partner. Together they owned a brick factory where the clay of Podolia turned into both building stones and human stories. Their........

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