On 13.3.1922 in Shavel Mum married Moshe Baruch Morgenstern, son of Menachem Mendel and Feige nee Gershonovitch, of Ostrashitzkii Gorodok, a shtetel 20 km. east of Minsk, Belarus.

They were married at the home of Rabbi Meir Atlas, Mum's uncle and the Chief Rabbi of Shavel, who conducted the wedding ceremony. We know nothing about their courtship except for the fact that once, before they were married, they went to the cinema in Shavel unchaperoned, to see the film Quo Vadis. When I asked Mum how it was possible that they were not chaperoned, she replied haughtily "We did not need a chaperone". Mum met Pup at Rabbi Atlas' house which he frequented in order to attend shiurim. Hadassah Golditch, a grand-daughter of Rabbi Meir Atlas, told me that the first time she met Pup was one day as a child when she came back from school her mother told her and her sister Miriam to be quiet as Moshe Baruch was very tired and sleeping on the couch in the living room having just arrived from Vilna. Therefore I think that when Pup came to Lithuania in 1920 he came to Shavel with a letter of introduction to Rabbi Atlas. We have Pup's Smichut certificate written and signed by Rabbi Atlas. I have a wedding invitation in the form of a postcard that Pup wrote to Freda Klavansky (later Bonner), a medical student at the University of Kovno, a few days before the wedding. The invitation was written in Russian, which is surprising. Also, I have a telegram which Freda, twentyfive years later to the date, living in Breyton, Coalfields, Transvaal, sent to Mum and Pup in Cape Town to mark their silver wedding.
Pup worked as a teacher in a school in Shavel and lodged in a room at 7 Stotis (Station) Street care of Kagan. He used to go home to Pakroy for Shabbat and Sunday.                        

As Pup was not a Lithuanian citizen and had over-stayed his residencevisa (we are not sure when, where, how, or even if one was ever issued) he was informed in 1925 that he would be expelled. Pup had to dodge the police and there was a protracted struggle to get permission to remain in Lithuania, a policeman even coming to look for him in Pakroy (luckily he dodged the police by going to the Talpis family in Telsiai). The family was faced with the choice of emigrating to the Soviet Union where Pup's family were living, or emigrating to South Africa where Mum's Uncle Moshe had emigrated in 1893. They chose South Africa and together with their first-born daughter Minde and father Israel Atlas they arrived in Cape Town on 11th January 1926, on the Arundel Castle.

Many years later Mum said that she could not understand how the idea of aliya never even arose, was never mentioned. That same year, in 1925, two of her cousins had left for Israel: Freda Gordon nee Talpis, and Rochel Ben-Ami nee Lifshitz, and this should have been a natural choice. Also, their close friends (our family relationship to them I have not been able to discover, by the way) Klara and Yosef Klavansky of Pakroy also settled in Tel Aviv in 1925; they too had spent the exile in Bachmut and on their return to Lithuania lived in Shavel. Mum was very upset that she and Pup had not even discussed the idea of aliya. Probably the presence of an uncle long established in Cape Town ready to welcome them weighed against aliya. At any rate, their expulsion from Lithuania was a blessing in disguise as hardly one Jew in Pakroy or the surroundings survived the Shoah. Mum recalled an incident that had happened in the distant past, of a poor widow in Pakroy who decided to go on aliya with her young children to Eretz Yisrael and how everyone mocked her, how would she manage there all alone and penniless. Mum said that she had an image of her leaving Pakroy by horse and cart and people standing on the sidewalk and shaking their heads in disapproval. Mum said that she was not certain that she actually saw her, perhaps it might have been an super-imposed memory, but the impression remained and Mum said that this poor woman turned out to be the only sensible person in Pakroy.