The Ladder Waited 55 Years: A Story of Faith and Fate

The sword of grief struck the five young children of the Shubmian family. The eldest, Chaim, was 18. Yitzhak was 13. Their three younger sisters were just 10, 8, and 5. First, their father passed away. Five months later, their broken-hearted mother followed. It was the year 5711 (1951), in Iran. A land still primitive in some ways, under the shadow of British influence, yet filled with dreams of progress and independence.

Five small orphans, struggling to find comfort.

Yitzhak remembers: “We were broken and lost, no father, no mother. The local Muslim community tried to take us in, and we were in real danger, Heaven forbid, of being absorbed into their world. We had no one. But by Hashem’s mercy, right after our mother passed, her older brother, our Uncle Rachamim, came from his faraway city and took us to live with him and his family. He already had seven children of his own, and now he took on five more.”

Chaim, the eldest, wanted to help. He joined his uncle’s business, a large fabric and thread shop. He worked from early morning, starting with prayer, then breakfast, and then staying at the store all day selling, organizing, cleaning and doing anything to help earn bread for his orphaned siblings with dignity.

After six months of this routine, tragedy struck again.

Chaim climbed a ladder to get an item. The ladder was unstable. He slipped and fell onto a display window, which shattered. A shard of glass the size of a hand pierced the main artery in his groin. Blood poured out uncontrollably. At the hospital, the Persian doctors were helpless. They tried everything. He received blood transfusion after transfusion, but his condition only worsened.

The hospital director, a Jewish man, contacted a top doctor in Britain. That doctor recommended a new approach: tie off the two ends of the artery instead of trying to reconnect them. They followed this advice, and it worked. The bleeding stopped. But two weeks later, Chaim’s leg began to darken. Gangrene was setting in.

“We were in despair,” Yitzhak says. “We feared we would lose Chaim, our brother who was our father and mother in one.”

The doctors said amputation was the only option. Without it, there was no chance of survival. The orphans were crushed.

In desperation, they turned to two elderly Torah scholars who lived in a small house on the edge of the city. Their names were Rabbi Ezra and Rabbi Menashe. Their beards were long and white. They spent their days learning Torah, rarely looking up.

“We cried and cried in front of them,” Yitzhak recalls. “We begged them to pray to our Father in Heaven for Chaim’s healing. They wiped away tears and asked us to bring Chaim to them.”

Uncle Rachamim brought Chaim from the hospital. The rabbis told the family they would pray all night. If their prayers were accepted, they said, a pillar of light would rise from the chimney by morning.

They left, tearful and trembling.

That night, the city’s governor stepped out onto his balcony and saw something strange, a beam of light shining from the chimney of the rabbis’ home. He rushed over, opened the door, and found the two elderly men immersed in prayer, with a pool of tears at their feet.

“What is this light coming from your chimney?” he asked.

The aged tzaddikim (righteous men) were filled with joy. “Our prayers were accepted,” they said.

The next morning, the children were told: “Chaim will live many more years. His leg will not be amputated. But...” the rabbis whispered, “his death, many years from now, will once again involve a fall from a ladder.”

The children barely heard those words. All that mattered was that Chaim would live.

He was rushed to the hospital. That very morning, an Australian specialist had arrived in Persia to operate on a wealthy government minister. The hospital director approached him and asked if he would also consider operating on Chaim. The doctor agreed on the condition of receiving $25,000, no less.

The children wept before him. Moved by their pain, he offered a discount. The Jewish hospital director promised to cover the full cost.

The surgery was a success. Chaim healed. He walked again on two strong legs.

Later, the family immigrated to Israel. Chaim married, raised four children with love and care, and supported his siblings until each of them was married and settled. He became a carpenter, a man of quiet kindness. Everyone loved him. He rose early, worked hard, and lived with purpose.

Then came the final chapter.

On the last Shabbat of his life, one of his grandchildren kicked a ball into the top of a tree. “Grandpa,” the boy said, “can you get it down for me?”

“It’s Shabbat today,” Chaim said. “We can’t do it now, but tomorrow, I’ll use a ladder and get it down.”

The next day, he took a ladder and climbed toward the ball. Suddenly, he lost his balance. The ladder slipped. Chaim fell hard, hitting his head on the wall of the yard. A tear opened in his hip exactly in the spot where the surgery had been done 55 years earlier.

He lay on the ground bleeding for twenty minutes before a neighbor found him and called for help. But it was too late. The doctors tried to revive him, but the attempts failed.

Chaim had passed away.

“When they told me he had fallen from a ladder,” Yitzhak says, “I immediately remembered those words those precious minutes long ago when the rabbis told us his death would be tied to a fall. That ladder waited for him for 55 years.”

We gathered for the shiva that Motzei Shabbat at Yitzhak Shubmian’s home, on the edge of a quiet neighborhood. The heavy summer air hung around us. Yitzhak sat shiva for his older brother, the same brother who had once been his father, mother, and guiding light.

He climbed the ladder and his soul rose higher.