In 1954, after I had finished college and got engaged to my husband, I had an audience with the Rebbe. First, he asked about how my life was going and what had been happening since the last time he had seen me. Then, because I was about to get married, he asked whether I was planning on wearing a sheitel – a wig worn by married women to fulfill the halachic requirement to cover their hair.

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I was raised always to be totally truthful, and I had a very open, honest relationship with the Rebbe, so without thinking about being diplomatic, I just said exactly what I felt: “No, I’m not planning on wearing a sheitel.”

The Rebbe didn’t get annoyed or seem disappointed. He just looked at me with a big smile and asked, “Why not?”

“Well,” I explained, “All of my friends are college graduates from nice religious homes, and none of them are planning to wear a sheitel. Only old people do that, and it’s not something I’ve ever considered.”

I had been living in Boston since I was fourteen years old – when the Previous Rebbe sent my father to assume a rabbinic position there in 1947 – and it was a different world from the Chabad community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. There was a large community of Jews of all types, many of them observant, but they were more secular on the whole, and there certainly wasn’t a Lubavitcher community; there were maybe two or three Chabad girls in the whole city, and none of them were my age.

“Are you going to keep your hair covered?” the Rebbe inquired further.

“Oh yes,” I replied. “I’m going to wear hats. That is what everybody in Boston does.” (more…)

My family left Russia in 1946, eventually arriving in Paris, where we remained for seven years. The Rebbe’s mother, Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, fled Russia shortly after we did, and for three months in 1947, she stayed with us.

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We lived in an apartment on the top floor of a big house in Paris owned by our uncle, Rabbi Zalman Schneerson; he was the brother of my mother, Yehudis Butman, and they were cousins of the Rebbe. We had a dining room and two bedrooms, one of which became Rebbetzin Chana’s. For as long as we lived there, we continued to refer to it as “Rebbetzin Chana’s room.”

The Rebbe, who was still simply known as “Rabbi Schneerson,” had left Europe for the United States years earlier, but that year, he returned to France to reunite with his mother and to bring her back with him to New York. During his stay, the Rebbe would come to our house to visit her twice every single day, in the morning and the afternoon. My mother would serve them tea, and sometimes cake as well.

Aside from our relation on my mother’s side, my family had another connection with the Rebbe’s family. During the war, my family had been living in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan; I was actually born there, in the town of Frunze, which is today Bishkek.

Not far from us was the city of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, where the Rebbe’s parents lived for several months in 1944. The Soviet authorities had arrested the Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, for his rabbinic activities, and exiled him to that region. Partly because of his ailing health – he passed away that year – his sentence had been lifted, allowing him and Rebbetzin Chana to move to Alma-Ata.

During this time, my father, Reb Zalman Butman, assisted the Rebbe’s parents with whatever they needed to cover their expenses each week. When the Rebbe came to Paris in 1947, he told my father: “Reb Zalman, I know you supported my father. I would like to know how much it cost so I can repay you.” (more…)

My mother came from a Munkatcher chasidic family, and a long line of Hungarian rabbis. Both her parents and some of her siblings were killed in the war but she survived Auschwitz and came to the US in 1946. She always was a woman with strong and pure faith. I remember her praying Mincha on Shabbat afternoons for half an hour, all the while wiping her tears with a handkerchief.

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She and my father lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I was born. But after a few years, my father sold our house and moved to an apartment at 848 Park Place, near the corner of Nostrand Avenue, in Crown Heights. At the time, many Jews were living in the neighborhood but they were mostly non-observant. As a result, my mother missed Williamsburg, where the streets felt Jewish and she was surrounded by familiar faces.

One day in the early fifties, she walked up to Eastern Parkway with her baby carriage and was happy to catch sight of a few chasidic looking young men.

“Who are they?” she asked.

“They’re from Lubavitch,” she was told. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe lives nearby.”

“I would like to speak to him,” she said, and she made an appointment to meet the Rebbe.

After explaining to the Rebbe what had been bothering her since the move, she told him that she wanted to convince her husband to go back to Williamsburg.

“One should never go backward,” the Rebbe told her. (more…)

My parents – Rabbi Gershon Mendel and Rebbetzin Bessie Garelik – married in the summer of 1958. Almost immediately after, they began writing to the Rebbe that they wanted to become his emissaries, serving a Jewish community somewhere in the world. Back in those days, there were very few such shluchim, and it was still a novel concept even within the Chabad community.

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One day my father was walking down the hallway in 770 when he met the Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Mordechai Hodakov.

Now Rabbi Hodakov may have looked somewhat naive, but he was an unbelievably shrewd man who was always on the ball and knew how to handle any situation that came up. But usually, people didn’t just stop Rabbi Hodakov to talk with him; he was very orderly, and you had to make an appointment if you wanted to speak with him.

But on seeing my father he remarked: “You and your wife keep writing that you want to go on shlichus. You have to understand that the Rebbe cannot send people like you.”

“Why not? What did I do wrong?” my father exclaimed.

Rabbi Hodakov explained that he hadn’t done anything wrong. The issue was that, even before getting married, my father had been teaching in the Chabad yeshivah in Newark, which has since relocated to Morristown, New Jersey. “The Rebbe will not take someone from one institution and send him somewhere else. It doesn’t work that way,” the secretary concluded.

“Well, if that’s the problem,” my father thought, “I can take care of it.”

As soon as their conversation ended, my father went up to the third floor of 770, to the office of the Rebbe’s brother-in-law, Rabbi Shmaryahu Gurary. Known as “Rashag,” he was in charge of the Chabad yeshivah network. (more…)

I was twelve years old when my father first took me from London, England, to visit the Rebbe. My Bar Mitzvah was coming up and we came a few months before then for the holiday of Simchat Torah. It was 1973, which meant that the Yom Kippur War had broken out just over a week before and was still going on.

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In his public addresses throughout the preceding summer, the Rebbe had paid an unusual amount of attention to the education of Jewish children, as well as to the spiritual power that children have to nullify any threats to the Jewish people. In this context, he repeatedly invoked the verse from Psalms 8:3, “From the mouths of babies and little children You have established strength… to put an end to the enemy and avenger.”

When children came back home from summer camp, he called for special gatherings to be held for them, where they would hear words of Torah and give charity. Since the month of Elul was coming up, he had also said that children should specifically be told the parable of “the king in the field.”

According to this chasidic allegory, first explained by the Alter Rebbe, the founder of the Chabad movement, G-d is compared to a king who can normally only be approached in his palace, and then only by his ministers and members of his court. But when he is returning from one of his travels, and passes through the fields outside the city, he is accessible to all people. Men, women, and children can come out to greet him, and the king receives them with a smile.

Similarly, during the High Holidays, accessing G-d is like encountering the king in his palace. However, during the preceding month, Elul, anyone can meet Him. As the Rebbe pointed out, this parable is not only something that children could understand, but it has a special relevance to them: One has to be an adult to become a minister in the royal court, and children cannot simply go into the palace to meet the king on their own – but they can when he is in the field. (more…)

We had been married for more than a decade, with five children and one more on the way. After our marriage in 1946, we had been working at the Chabad school in Providence, Rhode Island, and then spent eight years in Buffalo, New York, teaching and working with the local community, until we had to leave when the school there closed down. Throughout this time, my husband, Rabbi Yitzchak Groner, had made a couple of trips to Australia and New Zealand, connecting with local Jews and raising charity for recent immigrants from Russia. On his second trip, the community in Melbourne asked him to stay on as a rabbi, but he had responsibilities and we weren’t yet ready to make such a move.

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I was raised in a Torah-observant family in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, where I attended religious schools through junior high school. But when I expressed the desire to continue my studies in a yeshivah, my parents objected. My father, an immigrant from Russia, wanted me to have a proper college education that would lead to a proper career so, as a compromise, I enrolled in Yeshiva University, which offered both secular and religious studies and which had a campus near our home in Washington Heights.

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While at Yeshiva University, I first encountered Chabad. This was in 1954, when a bearded young man approached me and explained that he was from Lubavitch. Berel Shemtov was his name, and he had a few books with him – they were copies of the Tanya, the seminal work of Chabad philosophy authored by the Alter Rebbe in the 18th century – and he invited me and several of my colleagues to join a weekly group to study it. He only spoke Yiddish, so we had a hard time communicating with him, but we joined the class, and for a few weeks we studied in the evenings in one of the empty classrooms.

But when the university administration found out, they objected and the class was stopped. Berel reported this to the Rebbe who advised him to speak directly to the YU dean, Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. Berel did just that; Rabbi Soloveitchik gave us his total approval and the class resumed.

After two years of Tanya studies, I was on fire spiritually – I felt as if I had acquired a new soul – and I wanted to quit YU in order to enroll in a Chabad yeshivah. Of course, my parents were not happy about this, and my father wrote to the Rebbe complaining: “My son wants to stop his secular learning. What is going to become of him?”

The Rebbe responded, “B’shum panim v’ofen nit – Under no circumstances” should I quit college. His opinion was that I should complete my studies, earn my diploma and use that diploma to spread Torah. (more…)

My father, Rabbi Nachum Goldshmid, was born in Yekaterinoslav (today Dnipro), Ukraine, where the chief rabbi was the Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, also known as “Reb Levik.” My grandfather Reb Yitzchak Goldshmid, the local kosher slaughterer, had a close relationship with Reb Levik.

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Aside from their eldest, the Rebbe, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak and Rebbetzin Chana had two younger sons: Berel and Leibel. The latter was the same age as my father, and the two forged a strong friendship that would last for many years.

Around 1909, as the boys were nearing school age, Reb Levik asked the chasid Reb Zalman Vilenkin to open a cheder, a small school, for his children and some other boys, in Reb Zalman’s home.

Many years later, when my aunt met with the Rebbe for the first time, her husband made mention of her maiden name.

“Goldshmid?” asked the Rebbe, looking at my aunt. “You are Reb Nachum’s sister?”

She confirmed this to be the case, and the Rebbe continued, “I learned with him in cheder. I also knew your father well.”

When she recounted her meeting to my father, he remarked, “I never learned together with the Rebbe in cheder. We learned in the same home, but I didn’t learn with him – he always studied on his own.”

The Rebbe was some four years older than my father, so when he joined the cheder, the Rebbe was already eight. The students were split into three classes, with the top “class” comprising one student, the Rebbe. In addition to being the oldest of the group, he was also, in terms of his abilities, without a peer. (more…)

When I was seven, my family moved to Parsippany, New Jersey — a place that, at the time, lacked an organized observant community. Despite this, my parents took it upon themselves to establish an Orthodox synagogue in our home, the first in the area, while my siblings and I attended a nearby Jewish day school. With no religious neighbors and a limited support network, we were incredibly fortunate to be just ten minutes away from Morristown, New Jersey.

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In Morristown, we found a lifeline in its vibrant Chabad community. Spending time with the students of the yeshivah and other members of this close-knit community, we deepened our understanding of what we were learning in school and integrated it into our daily lives. In the summer of 1977, just before my Bar Mitzvah, I attended Camp Gan Israel in Morristown, run by Chabad, and it was an experience that left a lasting imprint on my soul.

By then, our entire family had grown close to the Chabad community in Morristown. One evening, towards the end of that summer, we received an unexpected call at home.

“We’re heading to a private audience with the Rebbe tonight,” a family friend told my father. “If you join us, you too can meet him. Are you available?”

“Absolutely,” my father replied without hesitation.

They picked us up that evening and drove us to 770. I can still recall the thrill of sitting in the car with my father and brothers, each of us buzzing with anticipation. What blessing should we ask for? What would the Rebbe say to us? That alone left a profound impression on me, along with every other detail of the journey — driving into Brooklyn, parking the car, entering 770, and waiting outside the Rebbe’s door. We even practiced the blessing one recites before seeing a great Jewish sage. I had seen the Rebbe once before, as a young child, but this time, I was old enough to grasp the significance of the moment. (more…)