As someone who came to Chabad from the zealous Jerusalemite sector of religious Orthodoxy, and who stayed in close contact with the general haredi community in Israel, I felt there was a lack of literature presenting the school of Chabad philosophy in a manner that those communities could appreciate. For a time, there was Bitaon Chabad, a quarterly journal that the Chabad Youth Organization in Israel began publishing in 1952, but it ceased publication after nineteen issues.

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So, when I traveled to New York in 1962 for my first visit to the Rebbe, I raised the subject during my private audience with him. In providing some background for the journal’s demise, the Rebbe mentioned the Hebrew translated version of his Yiddish talks that were published in Bitaon Chabad. “The drafts of some of the translations that came here had to be completely reworked,” he said, “and there wasn’t any time for that. If you accept responsibility for the translation, you can start editing Bitaon Chabad.” He instructed me to include several others in the work of writing and editing the journal, mentioning Rabbi Chanoch Glitzenstein and Rabbi Adin Even-Yisrael Steinsaltz by name.

And so Bitaon Chabad once again saw the light of day, and for our first issue, I published an overview of my visit to the Rebbe’s court. The entire publication, my travel diary included, was reviewed by the Rebbe, who made a number of corrections and substantive edits.

Actually, I already started my work translating the Rebbe’s teachings while I was still in New York. Twice every year — before the High Holidays and Passover — the Rebbe used to send an open letter addressed to “the sons and daughters of Israel, wherever they may be.” These letters, originally penned in Yiddish, were translated into English and Hebrew, and distributed all over, including in the pages of the Israeli and American newspapers.

Rabbi Uriel Zimmer, who for years had been in charge of the Hebrew translation of these letters, passed away in 1961. So, after my audience with the Rebbe, his secretary Rabbi Leibel Groner approached me with the latest letter. “The Rebbe has asked that you translate this into Hebrew,” he said. I would go on to translate nearly all of those open letters, which were eventually compiled into the two volumes of Igrot Melech. (more…)

In a sense, my first encounter with the Rebbe was in my home: I came to know Lubavitch because my father, Dr. Yosef Slavin, had fallen in love with the Rebbe. He first met the Rebbe in 1940s Paris, and was there when the Rebbe was reunited with his mother after her escape from the Soviet Union. There was something about that scene that was deeply

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emotional for my father; “from that moment,” he would say, “I was the Rebbe’s.” Growing up, I knew that my parents’ every life decision was made after consultation with, and a blessing from, the Rebbe.

When it came time for me to start meeting young men for the purpose of marriage, it was no different. My parents never wanted my choice to be influenced by anything other than my own feelings but, unbeknownst to me, my father would consult the Rebbe before they agreed to a candidate.

One day, my father got a call from a close friend named Heishke Gansbourg. He had spent a Shabbat at Princeton University, and was assigned a certain student’s room to sleep in. The student was away, but after perusing the books in the room –  volumes of (more…)

I’ve written several books over the years, but in 2014, I wrote one about the Rebbe. In my research, I spent almost five years with the Rebbe by immersing myself in his writings, and in the stories that hundreds of people who had interacted and lived with the Rebbe told about him.

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Over that time, the Rebbe started to have a great impact on my own life as well, in that I have become a profoundly different person as a result of studying the Rebbe’s teachings.

But my connection with the Rebbe goes back before then.

I grew up in what’s now known as the Midwood section of Brooklyn, and attended the Yeshivah of Flatbush; my father and grandfather were both ardent Zionists, and they wanted my sister and I to go to a Hebrew-speaking school. They also both had strong ties to the Previous Rebbe, as well as the Rebbe: My grandfather, Rabbi Nissan Telushkin, was already a Chabadnik back in the Soviet Union, before he got out with his family in 1923. Later, my father Shlomo Telushkin had the honor of being the accountant of both the Previous Rebbe and the Rebbe.

My father’s career as Chabad’s accountant started from the very beginning, right after the Previous Rebbe arrived in the United States in 1940. He derived a lot of pleasure from his career as an accountant, not because he made a tremendous amount of money, but because he worked for organizations he felt passionately attached to. As he got older, however, he started to cut back and give up his other accounts. The only accounts he always kept were those of the Rebbe and Chabad organizations. (more…)

I was born in 1937, in the city of Herat, Afghanistan, to the Mullah Ezra family. The Jewish community in Afghanistan is one of the world’s most ancient, and living there gave us a keen sense of our Judaism. The Jews of Herat all resided in the same neighborhood, in enclosed courtyards, each containing several homes. Although there were business ties between the Jews and our Muslim neighbors, especially ahead of the Jewish holidays – vendors would come on their donkeys to our area bearing fruit, vegetables, fish and chickens before every Shabbat and festival – we lived apart from our non-Jewish surroundings.

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In the larger courtyards, people raised livestock, providing milk and kosher meat. There were several kosher slaughterers, shochtim, in the community, and once the meat was brought home, the women – who were all experts when it came to removing any forbidden fats or nerves – would complete the koshering process.

The synagogues, four in all, were also in enclosed courtyards. Two such courtyards contained two adjoining synagogues, one of which would serve the younger people, along with a few in-ground mikvaot.

Behind each synagogue there was a study hall, which also served as a school of sorts. As a child, I studied Torah in the study hall of Rabbi Asher Garji. We would end up spending the entire day there: In the morning, we came to pray in the synagogue, we’d have breakfast at home, and then return to the study hall. At lunchtime, we returned to our homes, which were nearby, and then went back again to learn until the evening.

For the most part, the Jews made their living as merchants and shopkeepers. Our family also owned a store in Obe, but this town had been almost completely emptied of its Jewish inhabitants. A not insignificant portion of Afghan Jewry emigrated to the Land of Israel at the turn of the century, and then, after the founding of the State, the majority of those who still remained left as well. Although relations with our Muslim neighbors were mostly calm, I do remember how, after Israel’s Sinai Campaign in 1956, things became more tense. (more…)

The first time I traveled to the Rebbe was at the end of 1963, as part of a group of yeshivah students from Israel. The journey was more than a week long; part by ship; then by train from Italy to England, by way of France; and from there by plane to the United States. After arriving, I had my turn to go to the Rebbe for a private audience. That audience was thirteen minutes long, which was considered extraordinary.

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Among other things, the Rebbe took an interest in my family relation to Rabbi Aryeh Levine, the famous “Tzaddik of Jerusalem.” He was also known as the “Rabbi of the Prisoners,” a moniker that stuck ever since he took to visiting the incarcerated members of the Jewish underground in the days of British Mandatory Palestine.

“How are you related to Reb Aryeh Levine?” the Rebbe had inquired at the beginning of our meeting. “Is he your mother’s father?”

When I confirmed that that was the case, the Rebbe had a request for me: “I have already written to your grandfather, but if you would, please go to his home as well, and send him my regards.”

My grandfather was educated in the Lithuanian yeshivah world and was not a member of the chasidic community, but he and the Rebbe shared a bond of friendship and of deep mutual respect. In one of his letters to Reb Aryeh, the Rebbe wrote of his fine reputation — “his name goes before him,” was how he put it. My grandfather would also send all kinds of manuscripts to the Rebbe, and on his part the Rebbe would send him various publications released by Kehot, the Chabad publishing house. Indeed, after returning to Israel, I fulfilled my mission and passed the Rebbe’s regards on to my grandfather, who was most happy to receive them. (more…)

When I was growing up in Newark, New Jersey, there were no yeshivot there, just a local Talmud Torah where most of the religious boys went, four days a week. We learned how to read and write Hebrew, we learned Jewish history, but no more than that. My parents were not satisfied with this and also arranged for me to study Torah with a tutor on Friday and Shabbat afternoons.

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“When you become Bar Mitzvah,” they said, “we’ll send you to a yeshivah in New York.”

Back then, you would have to take a bus from Newark to the Hudson Tubes, and then take the subway from there, which was really a bother for a small boy to do, especially when traveling alone. When the time came, however, I was going to go to Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn.

One day in 1942, Rabbi Moshe Pinchas Katz, a Lubavitcher who was living in Newark at the time, came over to my father. “Mr. Slansky,” he said in Yiddish, “We want your son.”

My father was a kibbitzer, he had a sense of humor, and so without hesitation, he replied, “Take him!”

Rabbi Katz then explained what he wanted me for: “We want to open a yeshivah in Newark.” My parents were thrilled by the idea, because their one and only little boy wouldn’t have to travel far from home.

When I got older, I joined a new high school that Lubavitch opened up in New York, and thank G-d, it was a good school. Rabbi Lasker, who taught English, was a top educator and every morning, we would go to 770 where Rabbi Shmuel Levitin would teach us Chasidic philosophy. Sometimes, if we got up very early, one boy who had a car would take us out to Brighton Beach to dip into the ocean, for mikveh. (more…)

I was born in the city of Sanandaj, Iran, to a line of rabbis that originally come from Safed, Israel, nine generations ago.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution broke out, I was appointed as the head of the local rabbinic court, as well as the head of the community council, making me the point man between Iranian Jewry and the new regime. Not long after that, a group of students seized the American embassy in Tehran, along with fifty-two hostages. At one point during this crisis, the UN negotiated a clerical visit and, after some pressure

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from Jewish organizations, agreed to also send a rabbi for the three Jewish hostages. The Iranians didn’t want any Americans or Israelis, and so the rabbi of Mexico was chosen for the task – Rabbi Avraham Mordechai Hershberg.

Some tried to dissuade him from traveling to Iran at such a sensitive moment, so he decided to consult with the Rebbe. About a week before leaving, he apprised the Rebbe of his travel plans and his concerns. The Rebbe urged him to make the trip and reminded him to also bring some candles so as to light the menorah with the Jewish hostages for the upcoming holiday of Chanukah. Rabbi Hershberg did just that.

The day after their visit, the clergymen were invited to the mass Friday prayers in the main mosque of Tehran with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in attendance. At one point, the congregation all knelt and then bowed down in prayer – except for Rabbi Hershberg and myself. Afterwards, an overbearing cleric came over to us. “Why didn’t you show us respect?” he demanded angrily. “Why didn’t you bow down like the priests did?”

“Those priests come from Syria and Lebanon and know Arabic,” Rabbi Hershberg explained. “But I don’t understand what is being said. Our Torah commands us, ‘do not prostrate yourselves,’ so how can I bow if I don’t know what I’m bowing for?” (more…)

The first time I came to the Rebbe’s court was before Rosh Hashanah of 1965. I had come together with several of my peers from the yeshivah in Kfar Chabad, Israel, to spend the year studying Torah near the Rebbe. The journey was long and expensive, and people rarely traveled from Israel to America back then. So although we had read about what went on there and heard recordings of the Rebbe speaking, we had never seen him in person.

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In those days, guests who came to spend the holidays in the Rebbe’s court were able to have two private audiences – yechidut – with him; one upon arrival, and a second time before their return. We, however – the yeshivah students who had come for the year – were told that we wouldn’t be able to go into the Rebbe’s room just yet. The thinking was that we ought to first spend a little time around the Rebbe. After participating in his farbrengens and listening to his chasidic discourses, we would be prepared for a private audience, and more equipped to properly absorb the experience. So our first audience was set for four months after our arrival.

On the day of my audience, I was terribly excited. I finally went into the Rebbe’s room at midnight, and although I hadn’t eaten the whole day – the custom is not to eat, only to drink before meeting the Rebbe – I didn’t feel the least bit hungry. (more…)

This story concerns Shmitah, the agricultural sabbatical mandated by the Torah once every seven years in the Land of Israel. It is now the middle of a Shmitah year, when thousands of farmers are refraining from working or profiting off the land.

I began working for the “Keren Hashvi’is,” (the Sabbatical Fund) in 1970. The fund was established by a couple of Jewish communal groups, the Agudas Yisrael and Jerusalem’s Edah Hachareidis, in order to

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support farmers in the Holy Land who were observing Shmitah. Rather than relying on any Halachic loopholes that allowed them to continue working, these farmers were letting their land lie completely fallow.

In 1972, before the Shmitah year was due to commence, Rabbi Binyomin Mendelsohn of Komemiyut, a religious village, asked that we promote the vision of the fund and expand its activities.

The subject of religious agricultural law in general, and Shmitah in particular, was very close to Rabbi Mendelsohn’s heart. In fact, it was the reason that he turned down a prestigious job offer from the community of Kiryat Ata, preferring the rabbinate of a small agricultural settlement. When we first met, he inquired about my great-grandfather Rabbi Moshe Kliers, who had served as the Ashkenazi rabbi of Tiberias while working extensively with the Jewish farmers in the surrounding Galilee, encouraging them to observe Shmitah and other agricultural laws. (more…)

I was born in 1956 in a city called Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, 1,500 miles from the Lubavitcher communities in Tashkent and Samarkand, in Uzbekistan. In order to immerse in a mikveh, my mother had to take a thirty-six-hour train ride, each way, to Samarkand.

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My parents had only come to Dushanbe for a business opportunity, so we didn’t stay for long, and I grew up between Samarkand and Moscow, where my grandparents lived. My parents had six children in Russia, which was such an achievement that the government gave my mother a medal. She was called a “Heroic Mother,” and received eleven rubles every month to buy additional milk.

Every child in the Soviet Union had to go to a government school. It was mandatory. If parents were caught not giving their child a communist education, it was three years of jail, and up to twenty-five years if they decided to take it to court. During that time, their child belonged to the government, and would be sent to grow up in government institutions.

So, when I came of age, my parents told me, “We want you to continue in yeshivah and we don’t want you to go to the Russian school.”

“Sure,” I said. “that’s fine.”

“Well,” they continued, “for that, you will have to disappear.”

What does it mean to disappear? It meant that, starting from September until mid-June, when children are in school, you cannot go outside or near the window. Nobody can know that you exist. (more…)