When I first came to the Chabad yeshivah here in Montreal as a teenager, towards the end of 1958, I was pretty raw. It was my first exposure to Chabad, and Tomchei Temimim of Montreal was a top yeshivah – the students there were studying Talmud and chasidic philosophy (Chasidut) on a serious level.

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Later that year, in my first audience with the Rebbe, he made it very clear that he expected me, like all the other yeshivah students, to take my Torah studies very seriously.

In his public addresses, the Rebbe would say that a student should be so devoted to studying Torah that he doesn’t even notice the time passing by. “If they could,” he once quipped, “they should throw away the clock altogether!” Our official daily schedule ended at 9:30 PM, but if you continued learning until 10:30 PM, so what? Of course, we had to be punctual in coming to class, as the Rebbe once emphasized in a letter to me.

Our legendary Chasidut teacher, Rabbi Zev Greenglass kept a record of our attendance, and he gave us up to five minutes of leeway. Our daily schedule began at 7:30 AM, and if we came past 7:35, he would make a note in his little book. That book went to the Rebbe every couple of weeks – along with a report on the students – and the thought of bad marks being sent to the Rebbe motivated us.

In those years, the concept of yeshivah students engaging in Jewish outreach had barely begun. Instead, the thing that gave the Rebbe the greatest pleasure, or nachas, was seeing us totally devoted to Torah study. On one occasion, the Rebbe sent our yeshivah a profound and mystical explanation for why this was so.

It was in 1961, and we traveled to New York to join the Rebbe for the 10th of Shevat – the anniversary of the Previous Rebbe’s passing. A gathering would be held for the occasion, an important event, attended by a large crowd including visitors from other communities. But that year, it became apparent that the evening had not been properly organized, much to the Rebbe’s consternation. (more…)

When World War Two broke out in 1939, my father, Rabbi Yosef Portowicz, was studying at the Lubavitch yeshivah in Otwock, near Warsaw, Poland. Along with his fellow students, he fled east and, by the grace of G-d, found refuge in Shanghai, which was then an international city. There, the Lubavitch yeshivah was reestablished and he studied there until the war ended and he immigrated to the United States.

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By then he was already married – to a Jewish refugee girl in Shanghai – and he settled with my mother in New York, where I was born in 1949. But, although he was a highly-respected Torah scholar, he found it hard to earn a livelihood not knowing English, and he struggled to support his family.

That’s when the Rebbe came to his rescue. At the time the Rebbe was not yet the Rebbe – he was assisting the Previous Rebbe and running (among other things) Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, Chabad’s central educational arm. He suggested that my father become a fundraiser for this organization, and he told him exactly how to raise money. My father was to visit various synagogues in the New York area for Shabbat and speak there. During his speeches, he was to explain the outreach work Chabad was doing; then as people from that community would donate money to Merkos after Shabbat, the organization would pay him a percentage.

So this is what my father did, with varying degrees of success. Every Shabbat, he would leave our family and travel to some other place and try his best.

Along the way, an amazing thing happened. As a child, I never ceased hearing about the Friday afternoon when my maternal grandfather came running to our house to summon my father to his telephone. My grandfather was the only person in our Brownsville neighborhood who had a telephone at that time – this was the late 1940s after all. What was so urgent? The Rebbe had called three times and needed to speak with my father before the onset of Shabbat. (more…)

My father, Rabbi Moshe Yitzchok Hecht, was one of the first emissaries that the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe sent in the United states. In 1942, he was dispatched to open a yeshivah in Worcester, Massachusetts, which he did very successfully.

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Then, in 1946, my father received a telegram from the Previous Rebbe, stating: “Now is the time for you to move to New Haven.” On that very same day, he boarded a train to New Haven, Connecticut, to begin his work anew. I was three at the time, and our family has been there ever since.

In addition to his organizational skills, my father was a brilliant orator, and on occasion, the Rebbe would send him to visit various Jewish communities on his behalf. In 1948, my parents were sent to South America on a six-week mission to visit several communities there, in particular those hosting newly arrived refugees who had survived the Holocaust. They were to meet with the survivors, gather them together, and strengthen them in their Jewish observance. The Rebbe requested a detailed report on how the Jews in these places were faring physically, emotionally and spiritually, as well as how these communities were doing in terms of Jewish education, kosher food, Shabbat observance, and family purity.

Some time after their return, our family merited to have a private audience with the Previous Rebbe. Despite not understanding the conversation, I was mesmerized by the shining countenance of the Rebbe’s holy face, and his loving smile.

I also noticed that there was a wheelchair in the room and after the audience, I asked my father about it. He told me of the Rebbe’s great self-sacrifice under the Soviet regime, and how the suffering he had endured in prison had taken a physical toll on him.

The evening after one Shabbat in the winter of 1950, we received a phone call telling us the devastating news of the Rebbe’s passing. The date was the tenth of Shevat. My father was extremely distraught. After a flurry of activity, we rushed to the car and set out for Crown Heights. (more…)

On an absolute lark, in the summer of 1972, I decided to go to Israel. I was a twenty-two-year-old public school music teacher from Niagara Falls, so this was a pretty way-out thing to do. My family, who was completely secular, didn’t even believe that I would go through with it.

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But I was dead set on going, and I ended up enjoying it very much, even staying on past the summer. One day, I was walking through the Tel Aviv central bus station when some yeshivah student came up and asked me if I wanted to do something.

“Alright,” I agreed, “how much will it cost?”

“Nothing,” he said, and the next thing I knew, he placed a kind of lemon in my one hand and some branches in the other. He instructed me to say some words and put the lemon and the branches together and then he began shaking them back and forth with me.

“What is going on here?” I thought to myself in embarrassment. And yet, somehow, that was the start of my Jewish observance. That student in the bus station might have gone home wondering what he had accomplished, but by helping me perform the mitzvah of lulav and etrog, he got the ball rolling.

When I got back to Niagara Falls, I began reading everything I could about Judaism, Israel, Jewish history – anything. I began taking Hebrew lessons from an Israeli, who told me about the Chabad House in nearby Buffalo. There I joined a Torah class led by a rabbi with a thick, straggly beard named Heschel Greenberg. We were just learning the plain text, without any deep explanations, but I was completely inspired. It felt real. (more…)

An enormous percentage of the photos and videos of the Rebbe that we have today were taken by my cousin, Levi Yitzchak Freidin – also known as “Levi Itche.” As Levi Itche passed away in 1992, I would like to relate here – from what I personally witnessed – how this came about and how a relationship between him and the Rebbe developed.

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Levi Itche lived in Holon, a largely secular city in Israel; he was not a Chabad chasid, per se, although he came from an illustrious line of Chabad chasidim in Russia. Because of this, the Rebbe asked Rabbi Efroyim Wolf, who ran the Chabad-Lubavitch network in the Holy Land to hire him as a photographer, which was his profession. In 1975, after working for Lubavitch for a couple of decades, Levi Itche decided to visit the Rebbe in New York. I got a call asking if he could stay with me; I agreed, and he arrived just before the High Holidays.

When he came, he had no idea what the place was all about and no idea what would be happening here during Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah. But he was a professional photographer and when he began to see the dramatic scenes taking place all around him, he was moved to record them. He was very enthusiastic, with a very lively personality, and he really responded to the Rebbe.

He began taking pictures as the Rebbe came and went, which got a rise out of the yeshivah students who would accompany the Rebbe, and who felt that photographing the Rebbe up close was not respectful. Indeed, in the early years of his leadership, the Rebbe largely avoided being photographed. Even later, when he became somewhat more amenable to it, it was not a common thing to do. However, Levi Itche wanted to take good pictures, not just snapshots, and to do this he would need to stand close to the Rebbe. This is why the students would give him a hard time and, at first, I had to accompany him to fend them off, and to advise him on when he could to take pictures without offending people.

To record the farbrengens, he used three-minute reels which were quite expensive and which then had to be spliced together. When he went home, he had a whole film put together of activities and celebrations from the month of Tishrei which he planned to show in numerous places in Israel. (more…)

After my wife and I got engaged in 1966, the Rebbe wished my father “Mazel Tov,” and then added: “They will be in Australia.”

My wife, Pnina, is from Australia – her father, Rabbi Chaim Gutnick, was a popular rabbi in Melbourne – but it was only after hearing those words that we knew our mission in life would be there.

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Before the wedding, the Rebbe told me to take the requisite tests on Jewish Law in order to receive rabbinic ordination. I had actually already been ordained the previous year when I was a yeshivah student in Israel. Still, now the Rebbe wanted me to seek as many additional certificates of ordination as I could, which I did: From the yeshivah in 770, where I was studying at the time, from Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung of Montreal, Rabbi Berel Rivkin of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the foremost Halachic authority at the time.

The Rebbe also specified that our wedding should be in Melbourne, as a large, community-wide event tied to the opening of the local Yeshivah Gedolah.

In addition, at the wedding and each of the Sheva Brachot celebrations over the following week, I was to deliver a chasidic discourse, along with at least three in-depth Talmudic lectures overall. The Rebbe also wanted there to be one Sheva Brachot in Sydney. Ostensibly, this was because my wife’s grandfather, Rabbi Asher Abramson, was the head of the Sydney rabbinic court, but the Rebbe specifically requested that the event be held in a different synagogue – that of the “Yeshiva” community.

Now, at around that time, a few members of this community had written to the Rebbe with a request. Mostly Hungarian and Polish survivors, they had founded a small yeshivah – giving the community its name – and now they wanted a day school. Although they weren’t Lubavitchers themselves, they had seen the school founded by Melbourne’s Lubavitch community flourish under the direction of a young, charismatic American named Rabbi Yitzchok Groner. So, they asked the Rebbe to send someone who would likewise be able to connect with the younger generation in Sydney.

At first, the Rebbe didn’t respond to this letter, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t take notice of it. In fact, the Rebbe had a vision for Sydney that would start to unfold with this community. (more…)

It was the summer of 1968, and my father had helped me get a part-time job at a charity called Ezras Torah. Founded in 1902 to help rabbis experiencing economic hardship, Ezras Torah had since expanded to become a general relief society, handing out stipends and assistance to anyone in need. My job was writing out checks, getting them signed, recording who received assistance, and other administrative tasks.

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Ezras Torah was close to the heart of the old Lithuanian Jewish community, which had historically been at odds with the chasidic community, and so I was very much in unfamiliar territory. When people came in and recognized me as a Lubavitcher, they would sometimes make a snide remark that could border on verbal abuse. “Oy vey,” one person said upon seeing me. “Those people have even reached here!” It bothered me very much, and eventually, I wrote to the Rebbe.

“I’ve been at this job for two months,” I wrote, “and I keep getting these jabs about being a Lubavitcher. Debating and fighting aren’t in my personality, so I keep quiet. But I feel that my silence implies that their criticisms are correct. I want to leave the job.”

The Rebbe’s answer was quick in coming. He wanted me to keep the job, and he advised me on how to handle the comments: “We are commanded by our sages to distance ourselves from even the trace of conflict. Therefore, you should remain silent.”

After that, my work experience changed. I continued to get those jabs, but with my instructions to stay silent, they went in one ear and out the other. The atmosphere at Ezras Torah suddenly became much more comfortable, even congenial, so I ended up staying there for the next few years. (more…)

As a young man, I came to the United States from Israel to study at the Chabad yeshivah in New York and to be near the Rebbe. However, after several years, my visa was about to expire and I was told that, once it did, I would have to return home. I did not want to leave, so I wrote to the Rebbe explaining my problem, but I did not receive a reply.

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Meanwhile, Rabbi Yisroel Jacobson, the spiritual mentor of the yeshivah, got me a job as a Hebrew teacher at a school in New Jersey, which qualified me for a green card, and eventually for U.S. citizenship. Only a year later did I learn that the Rebbe was behind this solution to my problem. Even if he didn’t reply to my letter, he thought about me and asked Rabbi Jacobson to find a way to help me. So I knew then that my place was here, and that the Rebbe wanted me to stay.

In 1976, three years after my wedding, the Rebbe offered me a job looking after the central Chabad library, creating a catalog and organizing what was already an enormous collection, comprising some fifty thousand volumes. (Today it numbers more than a quarter million volumes.)

Toward that end, I oversaw a staff that was needed to inventory this huge collection, which included not only books but also handwritten letters and manuscripts. The first effort resulted in an old-fashioned card catalog, which even back then – in 1978! – the Rebbe wanted to put on a computer, but the technology was not yet sufficiently developed. Eventually, we got an expert to write a special program for us so the card catalog could be digitized, and we spent four years inputting all the entries. Today, of course, everything is on the web, where it can be accessed by anyone.

The other part of my job was editing new publications.

Among the first works that I edited was a book of the Halachic responsa (teshuvos) of the third Chabad Rebbe, the Tzemach Tzedek. Many of his rulings had already been published, but the library had acquired even more of his handwritten letters and notes, so the Rebbe asked me to gather them all together, edit them, and prepare a manuscript for print. (more…)

As a young, newly-married man, I was offered a position as one of the Rebbe’s emissaries. This was in 1977, a time when there were only a small number of us in existence – now there are thousands – and I was posted in Bergen County, answering to Rabbi Moshe Herson, who headed Chabad activities in all of New Jersey. The Rebbe gave his blessing, and I went off with great enthusiasm, setting up Jewish outreach programs and events.

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One of our first programs was aimed at encouraging girls to light Shabbat candles, which was a huge success with thousands of participants. Then, at Chanukah time in 1980, we decided to light a Chanukah menorah in Hackensack, the county seat. The town council gave us immediate approval, the fire department provided a “cherry picker” so we could reach the top of the menorah for the lighting, and we got a nice turnout. Each night, some important personage in the community was chosen for the lighting, plus we had joyous singing and dancing. It was a beautiful event, well covered by the local press.

As far as I was concerned, everybody was happy, but it turned out not to be so. A few months after, I got a call from a woman representing the Teaneck Jewish Community Council, an umbrella organization made up of the leaders of the various Jewish groups in Teaneck. I thought she was calling to invite me to stage a public Chanukah lighting ceremony in her town as well, but it turned out she was calling to protest such ceremonies. She said that the Teaneck Jewish Community Council had fought to prohibit any religious displays on public property, and they thought that Jewish symbols, in particular, should stay under the radar.

Now, I was young, energetic and stupid. Her argument only caused me to resolve to put up a Chanukah menorah in Teaneck. As a result, a big war ensued, which was not very pleasant, to say the least. But, in my defense, I must say that because I forced an examination of this issue, many positive things happened in the end.

As things got heated, the Rebbe was brought into the picture, and he responded in writing, explaining that this issue was not new. He noted that the constitutionality of public menorahs had been fully examined many years ago, that there was overwhelming support for the idea, and that, as a result, “gigantic Chanukah menorahs” stood on public property in Manhattan, in Washington, the nation’s capital, as well as Philadelphia, the birthplace of America’s independence, and many cities throughout the United States. (more…)

My mother was a member of the Schneersohn family, a descendent of the Alter Rebbe, the founder of the Chabad movement. On the other side, my father was from the famous Porush family that moved from Lithuania to Jerusalem many generations ago. Their wedding was an interesting one, with guests from both of these very different groups in attendance.

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I myself was born in Jerusalem, in 1936, but was raised in Seattle, Washington. At the age of fifteen, I went to yeshivah in Chicago, at the Hebrew Theological College – which later became known as Skokie Yeshiva – where my maternal grandparents lived.

In yeshivah, I took my studies very seriously. At the same time, I also became active with Bnei Akiva, the Religious-Zionist youth organization.

Now, Chicago had Jews of all persuasions. Most were not Torah observant, but they were all Zionistic, and so their children would join Bnei Akiva and learn about Judaism there. As a youth group counselor, I would help bring these children together every Shabbat, to sing songs, play games, and tell stories. We made Judaism a joyful experience for them and our three-week summer camp, Camp Moshava, had a tremendous effect on the children.

However, as I grew older and advanced at the yeshivah, it occurred to me that I might be spending too much time with Bnei Akiva. Rather than being a youth counselor, maybe I should be learning Torah the whole time! (more…)