I was born in France in 1935, after my family fled there from Germany. Following the Second World War, we made our way to Israel, and soon after, my father, a graduate of the legendary Brisker yeshiva, passed away.

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As a young man, my own yeshivah career began in the town of Be’er Yaakov, in a Lithuanian-style yeshivah. During that time, I became connected to Chabad when I began participating in a secret Tanya class – something that went on for some time. My brother, Rabbi Aharon Mordechai Zilberstrom, had also become close with the movement during the war, and he helped found and run several Chabad schools afterwards. Eventually, because of these connections, I transferred to the Chabad yeshivah in Lod in 1955.

Two years later, the Rebbe asked the yeshivah faculty to send him a list of students who were capable of being teachers and strengthening Chabad’s expanding school network; of serving as “education emissaries,” as they were called. Of that list, the Rebbe chose ten names, including mine. This was how I began working in education while still a yeshivah student.

I taught in several schools – first in Ta’anach, and then in the Malcha neighborhood of Jerusalem, where I later became principal. I also taught and headed up two newly-founded schools that had been set up for new immigrants to Israel from Morocco and Romania.

Those early days were hard. The authorities were often uninterested in cooperating with us and could make things quite challenging. We worked in difficult conditions, in rented classrooms into which we would drag our desks and chairs each morning – then out again in the evening – and in sheds with roofs that leaked in the winter. Along the way, however, we received letters from the Rebbe in which he would encourage us to carry on, while offering instructions and detailed educational guidance. (more…)

My love for the Land of Israel comes from my parents. They moved here when they were young – first to Tel Aviv, back when it was still small, then to a little farm in Kfar Hasidim – and they nurtured our connection to the land.

My family knew very li

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ttle about Chabad. After Baruch and I married, he wanted to go see the Rebbe. Personally, I felt my place was in Israel, but I went along with my husband. In 1964, we traveled to New York by ship, and when they finally met, the Rebbe encouraged my husband to attend art school in New York, which led to us living there for a year.

About a month after arriving, I had an audience with the Rebbe; I was pregnant at the time, and I wanted to receive his blessing ahead of the birth.

He spoke to me like a father to his child. He asked me many questions, such as whether I had friends in New York, and what the doctors had said about my pregnancy. He even gave me the names of some local women with whom I could speak Hebrew – women I have remained friends with until today. I had known nothing about the Rebbe, but after that first meeting, I felt very close to him.

After a year in Crown Heights, the Rebbe told us that our place was in Israel.

“Where?” we asked.

“Wherever you want,” he replied. (more…)

Back in the early ‘80s, I owned a bookbinding business in New York and had a few regular Chabad customers. They would tell me about their Rebbe, and around Passover time, they told me about a special gathering he would have before the holiday which they invited me to join.

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I went, and I was very impressed. There were a lot of people there, and the Rebbe sat at a long dais in the center of a cavernous room. There were some prominent Jewish leaders in attendance as well as some local politicians, some of whom were not Jewish.

The Rebbe spoke in Yiddish, but I was given a transistor radio that could play in my ear a simultaneous English translation of what he was saying. Every once in a while, shot glasses with wine were passed around and when the Rebbe was between talks, everyone would say l’chaim. You would hold up your cup, and the Rebbe would give you a toast. At one point, I made eye contact with him, he smiled, and I made a l’chaim.

It would be a long time before I had a real face-to-face with the Rebbe. In the meantime, in 1983, I married my wife Rebecca. We wanted to have a child, but it wasn’t happening. After a while, we began going to fertility clinics and trying out different medicines. When that didn’t work, we became a little discouraged.

“It’s not so bad,” my sister told me. “You can adopt.”

Well, one day in 1989, I was watching TV in the living room with Becky, when out of nowhere she said, “Jay, I want to go to the Rebbe to get a blessing. Maybe he can help us.”

I hadn’t seen the Rebbe since that gathering, and had never actually met him, but I knew that he received people every Sunday. You could go tell him what your problem was and he would give you a blessing. (more…)

After the Rebbe’s mother passed away, in 1964, the Rebbe introduced something new: Every time he would hold a farbrengen on Shabbat, he would select a gloss from Rashi, the classic eleventh-century Torah commentator, on the Torah reading of the week. He would ask detailed questions on it, and then give his answer, which was always brilliant yet simultaneously simple enough for a child to understand.

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In the ‘80s, however, the Rebbe requested that we present the questions on Rashi instead of him. “I want to address questions that others have brought up,” he told the chasidim.

Several yeshivot used to publish a weekly journal in which people wrote ideas or questions on a variety of Torah subjects – and many continue to do so today. And so, whereas the Rebbe would usually ask his own questions on Rashi, he said that people should now publish their questions in these journals, and he would choose one or more of those questions to address.

We also saw how the Rebbe took pleasure when we would analyze his own teachings carefully, publishing questions or explanations in the journals on things he had said. Sometimes, the Rebbe would even rebuke us when an obvious question on something he had said wasn’t noticed – “why didn’t anyone ask this?” he would demand.

On occasion, I would write questions on the weekly Torah reading directly to the Rebbe. In one letter to the Rebbe from the spring of 1983, I asked a question on something he had recently taught.

Commenting on the verse in the first parshah, Bereishit, “And the snake was more cunning than all the beasts of the field,” the Rebbe had wondered why it only says that the snake was smarter than the “beasts” – what about the fish or the birds? The answer, said the Rebbe, was that it was self-understood: If the snake is smarter than any other land animal, this would imply it is also smarter than other, lesser creatures. (more…)

Back in the ‘70s, my husband and I wanted to live in a larger home, so we moved to Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. Mountain Lakes was a beautiful town, but the Jewish community there was highly assimilated.

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I myself had a very Jewish upbringing, having grown up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in a community that was quite traditional, even if not all of its members were observant. Despite that, I became less involved with my Judaism as I grew older and more worldly.

My husband Chaim, of blessed memory, was a mechanical engineer working near the Battery Tunnel in Manhattan. One day he went to work and saw a Mitzvah Tank parked outside, with a few yeshivah students standing nearby.

“Are you Jewish?” they asked, and he replied that he was.

“Then come in with us,” they said.

He didn’t know what to expect, but he followed them inside the Mitzvah Tank. They put on tefillin, recited the Shema, and when they were done, he asked them: “How much do I owe you?”

“Owe us?” they asked. “It’s our mitzvah to do this!” They explained that they were there at the behest of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and that was probably the first time that either my husband or I had ever heard of the Rebbe. (more…)

In light of the shocking events that have taken place in the Holy Land, we are reprinting an account from a previous issue of Here’s My Story about a soldier in the Yom Kippur War. It is our prayer that G-d’s blessing in the Torah, “I will grant peace in the Land, and you will lie down with no one to frighten you” – which the Rebbe quoted in his letter in the following account – will be realized openly and quickly.

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Having come from a family with chasidic roots, I gravitated to Lubavitch at a young age and studied in a Chabad yeshivah. But it was not until I was an adult and already married that I met the Rebbe. This was in 1965 when I traveled to New York to spend the Hebrew month of Tishrei – the month of the High Holidays and Sukkot – in his presence. At the end of my visit, I had a private audience and I confided in the Rebbe that, although I’ve been near him for several weeks already, I still didn’t feel that a change has occurred in me, as I expected would happen.

In response, the Rebbe quoted a saying of his father-in-law, the Previous Rebbe, that “when you travel to the fair, you buy a lot of merchandise, pack it up and take it home, and you unpack the parcels all year.” I understood what he meant – the one who travels to a fair is like the chasid who travels to his Rebbe for the month of Tishrei, “buying a lot of merchandise” – that is, acquiring spiritual inspiration. But he doesn’t see what he has truly received until he gets home, processes it, and puts it into practice. And then he begins to feel that the Rebbe is with him all year long.

This proved very true for me, especially in later years, when the Yom Kippur War broke out.

The Yom Kippur War caught me, like all Israelis, in the midst of prayers on the holiest day of the year. I was praying at the yeshivah in Kfar Chabad, when I suddenly heard planes and saw cars out on the main street. I understood something terrible was happening, although I did not know exactly what until I returned home when Yom Kippur was over, and my wife told me that I had been ordered to report for duty. I immediately put on my uniform and wrote to the Rebbe that I was going off to war, asking for his blessing to return safely. (more…)

It is a long-standing custom in Chabad for a young couple to seek the Rebbe’s approval and blessing before getting engaged. Even once they have decided on marrying, and their families are happy with the match, that blessing from the Rebbe is what couples wait for before making their engagement official.

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My father, Rabbi Leibel Posner, often describes how when he and my mother decided to get married in 1950, they first called the Rebbe from a pay phone to ask for his blessing. Of course, when my wife, Zeesy and I got married in 1978, it was important to us to do the same.

Actually, the Rebbe’s involvement in my match started even before then – though I didn’t know it at the time. I was a yeshivah student learning in Crown Heights, and one day my father told me about a potential match for me, and then gave me the name of a young lady, suggesting that I meet her. Of course, I did as I was told, confident that my parents had done their homework.

Only later on, did I find out how the match had come about. My future father-in-law, Rabbi Yisroel Gordon, had written to the Rebbe to ask him about a suitable match for his daughter. In his letter, he included the names of several young men and, although I never learned who my competition was, the Rebbe chose my name.

My wife and I ended up meeting shortly thereafter, and soon we decided that we were ready: We wanted to ask the Rebbe for his blessing for our engagement.

Now, all of this was happening a few weeks after Shmini Atzeret. On that day in 1977, the Rebbe had suffered a serious heart attack, and had been in recovery since. He wa (more…)

I had grown up in a quiet neighborhood of Tel Aviv, but in 1976 my family moved to New York. Back in Tel Aviv, I had attended Moriah, a religious, non-chasidic school with a strong emphasis on learning. As a fifteen-year-old, I loved it there and it was hard to find another school like it in New York.

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My older sister Michla Breindel, of blessed memory, who had just married a Lubavitcher named Yehuda Blesofsky, was living in Crown Heights. Although it was not long after their wedding, they generously invited me to come and board with them so I could attend the local Chabad girls’ high school, Bais Rivka.

I went to try it out just before Rosh Hashanah, and it was quite an adjustment. The religious environment I had come from was intellectual but reserved, while the education that the girls in Bais Rivka were receiving was so warm and exciting. I loved it and decided to stay.

I also had to adjust to the neighborhood. The streets of Crown Heights, with their festive hustle and bustle and the guests who had come from abroad for the holidays, were so different from where I had come from. The real shock, however, came from what was going on inside my sister’s home.

In those days, Crown Heights had no prominent hospitality organizations for hosting or providing meals for visitors. Families simply opened their homes and had guests over for every holiday meal – and my sister did the same. I was a little spoiled growing up as the youngest of four children, but I wasn’t going to let my sister deal with this alone. Oblivious to the activity surrounding the Rebbe in 770, I focused on helping my sister make sure that everyone was fed, and keeping her from collapsing.

That Rosh Hashanah, I threw myself into the tasks at hand – cooking, serving, cleaning. On the day before Yom Kippur, there were more guests, and before Sukkot, yet more. In Israel, most of the holidays are only observed for one day, and so the two days in the beginning of Sukkot felt endless, especially since we had to make constant trips up and down the steps of her home to the Sukkah outside. (more…)

Being privileged to grow up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as a child, I would see the Rebbe all the time. Typically, we saw him on Shabbat, as there was school during the week, but I remember how exciting it was when we would be able to go to 770 for the Minchah service on days there was no school. At 3:15 in the afternoon, the Rebbe would come into the synagogue, and he would hand us each a coin to place in a charity box.

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One memory that stands out was in 1973, the Shabbat before the fast of the 9th of Av. I had just turned six and my father took me to the farbrengen, the public gathering that the Rebbe often led on Shabbat afternoons. We walked into 770 and went to our spot; my father normally stood towards the end of the long table the Rebbe sat at, on the Rebbe’s left, while sitting me down on another table adjacent to it. The synagogue was a lot smaller than it is today, but being summertime, with children away in camp and families off in Upstate New York, there was more room than usual.

That summer, the Rebbe had spoken several times about the power of children, referring repeatedly to the verse from Psalms, “Out of the mouths of babies and infants You have established strength … to silence the enemy and avenger.” As the summer went on, he brought up the subject with increasing regularity, in public addresses, and in letters to educators and summer camp administrators, focusing on how important it was that Jewish children receive a Torah education and their power as role models. Now, as he walked into the room for the farbrengen, he looked directly at me, and then around the room. My father had a sense, as he later told me, that the Rebbe was looking to see whether there were any other children present: Something was going to happen with the children at the farbrengen that day.

Sure enough, after addressing the assembled, the Rebbe said that he wanted all of the children to say a special l’chaim. The way he put it was interesting: “If it isn’t too much of an inconvenience,” he said, as if he was asking something of an elderly person, “the children who are under Bar or Bat Mitzvah can come up.” On occasion, the Rebbe would pour wine for people to say l’chaim on, but never before did he distribute to children only, and as far as I know, it never happened again either. (more…)

Back in the Soviet Union, in the city of Samarkand, my parents had run an underground yeshivah. My father taught a group of young men, while my mother cooked for them and hosted them in our home. Those boys were like her own children. There was an underground cellar where they would hide if the secret police showed up, we had a minyan for Shabbat, a mikveh, and my father also secretly served as a kosher slaughterer. It was like an underground Chabad House.

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Before we finally left in 1971, my parents had never seen the Previous Rebbe or the Rebbe – and of course neither had I. In communist Russia, even a picture of the Rebbe was something that had to be kept hidden – I had only ever seen one – but we were raised in the underground with the knowledge that the Rebbe was with us. In that country, we felt anti-Semitism all the time – I was constantly having to escape, fight, or be assaulted by non-Jewish kids – and often, I would feel a sense of despair about our predicament. But in those moments, the thought that the Rebbe was with me made me feel strong and determined to continue the struggle and continue being the Lubavitcher boy I was raised to be.

After spending seven years as refuseniks, waiting for permission to leave Russia, we emigrated to Israel, and soon began making plans to visit the Rebbe. Just a few months later, in the summer of 1971, Israeli chasidim chartered a plane in order to spend the festive month of Tishrei with the Rebbe. People borrowed and collected money to buy a ticket, although afterwards the Rebbe actually reimbursed us Russian emigres for all our travel expenses.

We were due to arrive on the Thursday before Rosh Hashanah when I was fifteen years old. Our flight landed in New York at around 4:30 AM, and we were able to drive into Crown Heights, run to immerse in the mikveh, and get ready for the Rebbe to walk into the synagogue for selichot, pre-Rosh Hashanah supplications, at seven o’clock. (more…)