Jerusalem - The sixth of Kislev, December 2, is Chaya Malka Abramson's private Yom Tov. Each year on this day, she, her husband Simcha, and their ten children wake before sunrise, don their holiday finery, and make the short walk to the Western Wall from their home on Mount Zion. After heartfelt prayers and handing out charity and sweets, the family ascends the steps from the Kotel to a house on Ararat Street in the Old City. Here, Chaya Malka and her three oldest children recite the blessing, "Blessed are You, King of the Universe, who made a miracle for me in this place."

Chaya Malka with her husband Simcha Abramson and their two daughters.

Chaya Malka Abramson is a walking miracle, a testament to the strength of the human spirit against the most pessimistic odds. But perhaps more importantly, she symbolizes what a woman can endure‹when permeated with a belief in G-d's grace‹for the sake of her mission as the nurturer of her husband and children.

It was a cold December night in 1981 that changed the Abramsons' lives forever. Simcha Abramson had left for the United States that morning on a tour with the Diaspora Yeshiva Band for whom he played clarinet, while Malka was busy settling her three small children into the new rental apartment on Ararat Street in Jerusalem's Old City. It had been just two weeks before that the Abramson family, along with other young couples, were evicted by the Jerusalem municipality from their quaint but ancient living quarters on Mount Zion near the Diaspora Yeshiva, where Simcha was a student.

While everyone else slept that night, it was Malka's visiting eighty-year-old grandmother who first smelled the gas fumes that engulfed the living room. As Malka ran from her bed to shut off the valve to the gas heater, a spark from somewhere ignited and she found herself in the middle of an inferno which instantly burned up the nightgown she was wearing. Desperately, Malka ran back to her room and rolled on her bed to put out the flames on her already burnt flesh, in the process searing a hole in the mattress. She then grabbed a bathrobe, and darted to the children's room. Thankfully, the fire was still contained in the living room area.

Chaya Malka and Simcha Abramson and their first daughter Devorah 1979.

In the bedroom, her son, two-and-a-half year-old Yehoshua, was closest to the door. Malka scooped him up in her burnt arms, ran through a fireless path out the door, and deposited him with neighbors who had already begun to gather outside. Without a second to lose, Malka ran back into the burning apartment, and clutching Devorah, four, in one hand and baby Esther by her sleeper in the other, raced them to safety. Scanning the faces in the crowd and realizing her grandmother was not among them, she again ran into the apartment, which was by now totally engulfed in smoke and flames.

"I knew exactly where she would be. Somehow Hashem led me right to her," Chaya Malka recalls. Her grandmother was standing by the bedroom window, holes burned through parts of her nightshirt. Malka led her to safety.

Malka had second and third degree burns over eighty-percent of her body when she arrived at the special Burn Unit at Hadassah Hospital. Expert physicians in the field gave her a one-in-ten chance of survival. It was then‹in a mass prayer vigil in King David's Tomb on Mount Zion‹that the name "Chaya" was given to her.

Chaya Malka in front of the house on 3 Ararat Street making the yearly blessing of thanks.

"I can't say I'm haunted by nightmares, but I can still see the image of that night," says Chaya Malka, whose smile radiates warmth and humor and whose eyes twinkle with laughter even as the left side of her face still bears marks of the blaze. "People painted me as this great heroine, running into the fire again and again to save my family, but at the time, I didn't feel I was doing anything unnatural. I didn't feel pain then, because the burns killed all the nerves. It just didn't occur to me that I might not be able to save my family."

The fire took but a minute; her road to recovery the last fourteen years. After years of prodding by friends and publishing professionals, Chaya Malka put her dramatic and inspiring story of survival into a book, Who by Fire (Feldheim Publishers). Co-authored by her long-time friend and next-door neighbor Esther Tscholkowsy, the book details the first year after the fire when yet untested levels of faith and courage, together with a loving and charitable community, contributed to Malka's exceptional recovery. "Miracles are part of our Jewish heritage," Chaya Malka asserts. "Sara Imenu had a child at the age of ninety-nine That was the beginning of our history. We are allowed to believe that miracles can happen to us, too."

Chaya Malka's faith and vision drove her in those painful, draining months of recovery. Sensing her will to survive, her doctors used super aggressive treatment, excising the dead tissue and replacing it with semi-thickness skin grafted from other parts of the body. The process was bloody, painful, and time-consuming. Her most dreaded memory of those months is what she calls the torture chamber. Twice a day, she was hoisted on a stretcher by a crane and into a bath where a team of nurses would unravel her bandages, limb by limb, joint by joint. As each bandage was removed, it felt as if her skin was being torn off. Then, nurses would scrub her raw flesh to get rid of any dead tissue. "During these weeks, my days consisted of either being in the torture chamber or anticipating the dreaded pain."

Chaya Malka with her two daughters.

As her recovery progressed, Chaya Malka was fitted for a Jobst pressure suit‹a head-to-toe elastic body-suit with gloves and a face mask‹which she wore diligently for the next two years. Then, just two years after the fire, came another personal miracle‹Chaya Malka gave birth to a baby girl, Yael.

"During my pregnancy, I was still wearing the mask and the suit, still going to outpatient physical therapy. By now I had learned to cut a tomato and handle other household chores, but I was still quite nervous. Would I be able to care for my new infant? My hands were the most severely burnt part of my body," Chaya Malka says eyeing her hands, which although are now totally functional, are still heavily scarred. "One day toward the end of my pregnancy I asked to hold a friend's baby. It felt okay. I could do it. Baruch Hashem, babies are born small."

Chaya Malka was fortunate. During the fire, every layer of clothing she was wearing had protected the skin underneath. Carrying a pregnancy was possible because she had wore a turtleneck shirt under her nightgown, which protected the skin from her neck to her abdomen. Ankle-high slippers had protected her feet, and to this day, the imprint from her wristwatch is visible as the skin under it was kept intact. Yael's birth hurdled Chaya Malka back into "normalcy," back into functioning womanhood. "I never thought too much about having children before," Chaya Malka says. "I had my first three children close together. I had never been in a position of feeling like I had to daven for children. It was only when I thought I might never have more children that I realized so acutely what a privilege each additional child is. Yael's birth was a message to me from Hashem that He was there with me, giving me the signal that I'd be able to continue to care for my family."

Today, Chaya Malka leads what she gratefully calls a "normal" life, caring for her husband and large family (seven children were born after the fire). From her home on Mount Zion‹where the family relocated after the fire‹she is an active, helping member of the vibrant, cohesive Diaspora Yeshiva community who sustained her family during the ordeal and to whom she feels she owes much of her recovery. "It's ironic, I never wanted to be just Œnormal.' That idea was just too boring," Chaya Malka says, echoing the dreams of fame and fortune she grew up with in Waterbury, Connecticut.

"But after the fire, lying on the sterile sheets in the hospital with most of my flesh burnt off, things became crystal clear. My one priority was to complete my function as a wife to my husband and a mother to my children. But to do that, I had to relearn so much of the basics. I had several skin graft operations on my legs and had to relearn to walk each time. I had to relearn to use my hands in a limited way. When a woman is on such a basic, primal level, she learns to value and appreciate all the things we consider the drudgery of life‹dishes, cooking, homework, dentist appointments, stretching the paycheck. I saw with total clarity that there was no priority higher than the opportunity Hashem gave us to care for our families."

Before she moved to Israel and became religious, Chaya Malka studied fashion design for several years in New York, dreaming of one day making her mark through clothing expression. Today, through sweat and diligence, her hands‹which could have remained mangled and out of commission‹have become dexterous enough for her to again sew professionally.

Mending a dress for the first time.

"I learned fast that I couldn't become a slave to my scars, nor live in fear of how I looked," she says as she fingers the bulging bones of one hand where the joints fused together. "At first I was afraid of how my children would accept me. Would I look scary to them? The first time I looked in the mirror after the fire, I thought my face looked mean. The left side was very scarred and red, my lips were swollen and uneven. Would my children think I became mean? But children, thank G-d, are loving and accepting."

Then there is the more primal, female aspect of those fears. What happens to a woman's femininity when her physical beauty is impaired? "That was probably my most conflicted internal issue. How would my husband accept me? How could I ever be beautiful for him again? I kept asking him, ŒHow can you look at me! Aren't I ugly? How could you ever want to touch my hand?' But my husband never gave into the yetzer hara (evil inclination). Even today he tells me I'm beautiful without makeup."

Getting over the embarrassment of wearing the elastic face mask in public was a pivotal point in her recuperation process. People would stare; children would make rude comments. But Chaya Malka knew it was the only way that her face would heal. She was determined not to let herself become a hermit.

First visit home for Purim, in "costume" the Jobst pressure suit.

"Now I don't really care if people stare at my scars or sneak a look at my hands. I've been through so much more than that. I've become emotionally resilient," she says, noting that since the book came out she has become somewhat of a celebrity. "The only time I feel self-conscious is at a wedding or other simcha where everyone is dancing in a circle holding hands. I, too, want to dance, but I know that no one wants to touch my hands."

Since the book's release, Chaya Malka has found that her story, once one family's personal challenge, has become the inspiration for Jews in difficult situations around the world. She was recently flown to the United States on a speaking tour for cancer patients.

There, she visited "Nana," her grandmother, now eighty-four and in an old age home. During the visit, she gave "Nana" a copy of the book. Chaya Malka says it was Nana who taught her the quality of selflessness throughout her growing-up years. "Everyone who reads the book wants to know what happened to my grandmother. The truth is, the ordeal was extremely traumatic for her. She suffered from burns on thirty-five percent of her body, and although she recuperated, she never wanted to talk about it. She still came to visit us in Israel every year and we had lots of time to talk, but she never did. When I gave her the book, she said she could no longer read."

Her story has piqued the interest of others as well. One day, a professional makeup artist visiting Israel knocked on her door and volunteered her services. The Abramson children sat transfixed on the couch as the woman transformed their mother into a veritable cover girl. But, says Chaya Malka, "it just wasn't me. My husband told me to wash it off. It's always reassuring to know that I'm loved and accepted without the paint."

Does Chaya Malka ever feel sorry for herself or think, "Why me?" "I really don't. I used to think life was simple, but now that I'm older and wiser, I realize life is more complicated than we ever thought; so we have to simplify it by focusing on the really important things. And pain is part of life. We learn that it expiates our sins."

In fact, Chaya Malka says she feels privileged that her ordeal might possibly give hope and encouragement to others, which is why she had the book published despite its personal, even intimate content as well as the reason why she agreed to have her picture on the cover, despite her innate shyness and modesty. "My story isn't just about me, it's about Hashem's hand in our daily lives. If the book succeeds, it's because of its message, not because of me."

Rachel Ginsberg, a frequent contributor, lives in Israel.