Monthly Archives: December 2014

My name is Leah Rivka Arkush. I come from England, where I grew up in Stamford Hill, in a non-religious home just two streets away from Beis Lubavitch – Lubavitch House.

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When we first moved to Stamford Hill, I pointed out the Beis Lubavitch to my mother and I said to her, “Look, this is a place where I could go to school.” My mother agreed to check it out, but she didn’t. I had to nudge her a few times until, finally, she found out – and, yes, it was a place that would be good for me, so I started going to school there.

During those years, my father was badly injured in a car crash. The recuperation took a very long time, and while he was in the hospital, my mother struggled very much because we didn’t have any money.

One day, then the headmaster of the Chabad school, Rabbi A. D. Sufrin, got a phone call from the Rebbe’s office inquiring about us. How did the Rebbe know we were in trouble? I have no idea. But when Rabbi Sufrin related that we were not doing so well, he was told, “You must make sure that they have food and whatever they need.”

Even when my father came home from the hospital, he still wasn’t really well enough to go and work at a full-time job. So Lubavitch employed him at the Montefiore Home in Ramsgate, to get it ready for summer camp. He helped in building the Nissan House, and he stayed there until he was better.

It was right around this time that my parents decided it was best for me to change to a different school. When the Rebbe learned that I was leaving, however, he sent a message to Rabbi Sufrin: “She’s got to stay. You’ve got to sort out what has to be, but I want her in that school. I do not want her to leave.” (more…)

My name is Menachem Alexenberg, but I am also known as Mel Alexenberg. I was born in New York in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, which is now Interfaith Hospital. My bar mitzvah was in Flatbush in my uncle Morris’s synagogue, which is now a mosque, and I married my wife Miriam at the Park Manor Wedding Hall, which is now a Baptist church. So I like to say that I was born in Interfaith Hospital, had my bar mitzvah in a mosque and my wedding in a Baptist church. But however that makes me sound, the truth is that I grew up in an Orthodox Zionist family, went to yeshiva, then to Queens College where I studied biology, then to Yeshiva University where I earned a degree in education, and finally to New York University where I received an interdisciplinary doctorate in art, science and psychology.

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I first met the Rebbe in 1962. Although I had no chasidic background, my sister-in-law – whose husband was studying at that time in the Chabad yeshiva in Brooklyn – convinced me to request an audience with him. I had a fascinating discussion with him on the relationship between art, science, technology and Judaism, which has been my life’s work. He was very interested in these kinds of things, as a scientist and an engineer himself.

That first meeting led to many others, and to a voluminous correspondence between us. I cannot remember exactly at which meeting it came up, but the Rebbe told me one thing that became a central part of my thinking. He pointed out that, in Hebrew, the words for “matter” and “spirit” are interchangeable; that is the letters that spell chomer, meaning “matter,” also spell ruach, meaning “spirit” – all you have to do is drop one letter.

“What is the difference between the spiritual and material world?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s a matter of perspective. If you look at the world one way, you see a material world. But if you make a switch in your head, if you change the quality of your perception, if you look at things in a new, fresh way, then the same world becomes spiritual. The spiritual world and the material world are not two worlds. The quality of your relationship to the material world makes it spiritual.”

Because of this insight, a lot of my artwork – as a matter of fact almost all of my artwork – begins with Hebrew words and Torah concepts. It might become high-tech stuff, but it starts there. (more…)

I first met the Rebbe in 1951 when he had just become the Rebbe. I was attending Yeshiva University high school, the Brooklyn Talmudical Academy, which was on Bedford Avenue and President Street in Brooklyn. My best friend in school was Tzvi Groner whose uncle, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Groner, was the Rebbe’s secretary, and Tzvi and I used to walk over to the Chabad Headquarters sometimes to visit Rabbi Groner. We’d bring our sandwiches and spend our lunch-hour with him.

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During these visits, the Rebbe would speak with us on occasion. This was before he had become world renowned, when he was a relatively young man. He would ask us about our learning – which section in Talmud we were studying – and he would talk a little bit about philosophy. Although these were very brief meetings, I was enormously impressed with the erudition of this man. I mean, he was so much better educated than my high school teachers. I would look forward to these occasional meetings.

The next time I met the Rebbe was in 1970 when I was clerking for Justice Arthur Goldberg, who was running for governor of New York. Justice Goldberg asked me to arrange an audience with the Rebbe, and I did. I expected to deliver Justice Goldberg to the Rebbe and stay outside but they invited me to participate in the meeting, which lasted about an hour.

The Rebbe was very interested in the role that Justice Goldberg had played at the United Nations, particularly during the 1967 War. It was fortuitous that Justice Goldberg, who was a Jew strongly supportive of Israel, would be the person picked to be at the United Nations at that very important time when Security Council Resolution 242 was being drafted, which essentially set the terms for how peace would be achieved.

The Rebbe and Justice Goldberg discussed the events of that time, but their discussion was not political. Also, there was no effort to get an endorsement. Justice Goldberg simply wanted advice from the Rebbe about New York and about the Jewish community, specifically the Chabad community. He was not particularly familiar with Brooklyn in those days. It was a very, very interesting and thoughtful exchange. I was mostly quiet and learned from both of them. (more…)

In the summer of 1974, I was sent as the Rebbe’s emissary to Amherst, Massachusetts. Amherst is a college town – the site of five colleges, the largest of which is the University of Massachusetts. With G-d’s help, with the Rebbe’s blessings, and with the assistance of one of the veteran emissaries, Rabbi Dovid Eidelman, I was able to set up a Chabad House right on the campus of the University of Massachusetts.

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Back then, the term Chabad House was hardly the household word that it is today, and I very much wanted to open the Chabad House with a splash. So I decided to hold a concert in the newly-opened Fine Arts Center on campus, where there was a beautiful concert hall tailor made for this purpose. We hired Theodore Bikel, who was a superstar of Jewish music at that time, and we set about publicizing the event. I spared absolutely no expense. I had full-color flyers printed, I arranged for TV and radio ads, and I did everything possible to make sure everybody knew about this event.

The concert was scheduled for Sunday, and on the Friday afternoon – maybe an hour or two before Shabbos – I called up the ticket office to find out how many hundreds of tickets had been sold. The ticket lady said, “Hold on – I have to check the computer.” A minute later she came back on the line and said, matter-of-factly, “Eighty-seven.”

I said, “No, no, no, no, no. We’re talking about the concert this Sunday.”

“Theodore Bikel?” She asked.

“Yes, that’s the one!” I replied.

“Eighty-seven tickets.”

I was devastated. The Shabbos before the concert was probably the worst Shabbos of my life. I went up to the second floor of the Chabad House from where you could actually see the concert hall, and as I looked at it, I was thinking to myself, “Yisrael, you see that building over there? Tomorrow that’s going to be the scene of your downfall.” I don’t recall if I was literally crying, but inside, I was sobbing. (more…)

I was born in 1934 in the village of Vizhnitz, Ukraine. When I was a small boy, my parents immigrated to Antwerp, Belgium. Belgium had a large Jewish community – some 50,000 Jews lived in Antwerp at that time – and they hoped to have a better life there.

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Unfortunately, our stay did not last long. In 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium and immediately began deporting and killing Jews. So everybody started running. We ran across the border to France.

I was only six years old at the time, but I was old enough to realize that we were fleeing for our lives.

We made our way to Marseilles where my grandmother – that is, my mother’s mother – and also my mother’s sister lived. A group of Lubavitcher chasidim lived there, and we were welcomed warmly. But the problem was there was nothing for us there. By nothing, I mean that with the war going on there was not enough food, and also not enough adequate shelter to handle influx of all the refugees. We moved from house to house, from place to place. A few months later the Nazis invaded Paris, and the situation got even worse.

In the midst of all this chaos and upheaval, my family was forced to split up. Only after the war did I get to see them again. Meanwhile, I was sent to an orphanage in Marseilles.The orphanage housed some forty or maybe fifty children, many of them as young as three and four years old. Some of them knew that their parents had been killed; others didn’t know what became of their mother or father. Often, you would hear children crying, calling out for their parents who were not there to answer.

As the days wore on, the situation grew more and more desperate, and food became more and more scarce. Many a day we went hungry. (more…)