The Leifer family of Ashdod, Israel was flying to Antwerp, Belgium to attend a wedding.

When the plane was about three hundred miles from Antwerp, the pilot announced that the plane was low on fuel and they would have to make an unscheduled stop. They landed at a nearby small airport.

Everyone deplaned during the refueling, and the Leifers began looking around for a quiet, secluded place where they could pray the evening service. Having only nine men in their group meant that they were one short of a Minyan, but they still wanted to pray individually with dignity.

The men approached an airport attendant standing nearby, and asked him if he could possibly open up a meeting room for them where they could pray in privacy.

On hearing their request, the attendant's face suddenly turned white with fear. He stared at them in shocked disbelief, paused and then said, "I will be happy to grant your request... but you must allow me to recite the Kaddish prayer for my father."

"You mean that you too are Jewish?" they asked in bewilderment. The man nodded, "Yes."

"Really?" asked Rabbi Abraham Leifer. "I would never have expected to meet any Jews in this part of Belgium! What Divine Providence , you are exactly the tenth man for our Minyan! Tell me, what brings you here... just now when we needed you?"

The man rejoined, "Tell me, better yet... what are you doing here...today of all days just when I needed you?"

Still shaking, the man opened the door of the private room, and said: "Let me tell you something incredible. You may find this very difficult to believe, but I promise it's true!"

"I come from a religious Jewish family, but I broke away from my family a while ago and have not been religious for decades. In fact, I haven't even recited the Kaddish for my late father for many, many years.

"Last night I had a very strange dream in which my father came to me and said: 'Yankele, tomorrow is my Yartzeit, and I want you to say the Kaddish for me!'

'But father," I protested in the dream, "I'll need to have a minyan in order to say the Kaddish, and it happens that I'm the only Jew in this village. I could never find a minyan here!'

'Yankele,' my father answered, ' if you promise me you'll say the Kaddish, I promise you that I'll send you a minyan!'

"When I awoke from the dream," the man continued, "I was trembling and in shock. But I soon dismissed it as being only a dream, and reassured myself that it had no significance. It was ridiculous, really! How would a minyan ever find it's way to a such remote Belgian farming village where no other Jews reside?"

Rabbi Leifer draped his arm around the man's shoulders and said gently, "It was all meant to be. Come my friends, let us all pray together now!!"

–From "Small Miracles,"

by Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal