Monthly Archives: August 2015

My husband, Rabbi Samuel (Shmuel) Schrage, was a community activist in Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s.

He became involved because yeshiva boys in Crown Heights were being beaten up by gangs coming in from Bedford Stuyvesant, and a Jewish woman was attacked by a knife-wielding man in her own home. My husband went to ask for police protection from the Mayor, who said there was not enough police to go around. And that is when my husband started the Maccabees, a neighborhood patrol group, which became quite famous and which was written up in The New York Times.

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The Maccabees, most of them chasidic Jews, rode around Crown Heights six to a car, equipped with nothing more than radios and large flashlights. If they saw an incident, they alerted the police and aided the victim until the authorities came.

Still, my husband received a lot of criticism at the time. Mainly this was because the idea of neighborhood watchmen was so original, and some people didn’t understand it – they thought the volunteers were vigilantes who took the law into their own hands. A lot of this criticism came from local Jews.

So my husband went to the Rebbe. He said, “I can take the criticism from the outside but I can’t take the criticism from my own people. That really hurts. I would like to disband the Maccabees.”

The Rebbe said to him, “Don’t disband – make it stronger!”

My husband followed the Rebbe’s advice, and eventually he became the head of New York City’s Neighborhood Action Program. He also got involved in politics. Mayor John Lindsay appointed him to the New York City Youth Board, and Mayor Abraham Beame retained him in that position.

Whether in politics or his personal life, Shmuel did nothing without a blessing from the Rebbe. When I had my first baby – which was a complicated pregnancy and I feared for my life – Shmuel went to the Rebbe and asked for a blessing that everything should go well. Thank G-d, it did. But in the excitement, Shmuel forgot to call the Rebbe to tell him that our son was born and everything was fine. So the Rebbe had his secretary call and ask if I was okay. (more…)

In 1973, when Abraham Beame was elected mayor of New York, he appointed me as City Commissioner of the Addictive Service Agency. I thus became the first Orthodox Jew to head up a major city agency, which was responsible for developing a network of prevention programs to keep young people from getting involved with drugs, as well as for setting up a network of treatment programs for drug and alcohol addiction.

Shortly after my appointment, I had an audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I had met the Rebbe before and attended many of his farbrengens but, on this occasion, I came to talk to him one-on-one about my role as a City Commissioner and as a Jewish public servant – about what people expected of me and what I should do.

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The Rebbe was very forceful about one responsibility that I had – to make sure that I take care of the Jewish people. I said to him, “But my agency is involved with people addicted to drugs – to heroin, cocaine, marijuana, alcohol. That’s not a Jewish problem.”

The Rebbe contradicted me. “Yes, it is. There are many Jewish people who have problems with addiction, and you should make sure you take care of the Jewish people first.”

I repeated, “But really, it’s more of a non-Jewish problem.”

He said, “It’s a Jewish problem also. And you have to make your people your priority. If you express Avahas Yisrael, if you demonstrate your love for the Jewish people, the non-Jews will respect you more. They will see that you are not ashamed of who you are.”

He spoke about this at length. He said that, of course, I had a responsibility of taking care of all people, and I had to make sure that public services were dispensed to Jews and non-Jews alike. But he stressed that, within the framework of taking care of all people, I should not be ashamed of helping the Jewish people. Jews involved in the government often bend over backwards not to do anything for their fellow Jews, erroneously thinking this makes them appear unbiased. There have even been instances throughout history where Jews in positions of power, instead of helping their fellow Jews, actually harmed their fellow Jews. So the Rebbe stressed that I should avoid anything like that. Of course, I should help everybody. But I shouldn’t leave out the Jews, and I shouldn’t do anything that would be harmful to the Jews.

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I grew up in Brooklyn, in a Modern Orthodox family – though the term did not exist in those days. We were Torah observant, and I got a religious education from grade school through high school.

During that time, my parents operated a grocery on Albany Avenue near Lefferts Avenue, and they counted among their customers the Gourary family. When I was a teenager, Rebbetzin Chava Gourary suggested – seeing as I was hanging out in the streets during the summer vacation – that I take a job as a waiter in Camp Gan Israel, which was the Lubavitcher kids’ camp.

This I did. It was in the late 1950s I think, or maybe the early 1960s. My job, as one of twenty or twenty-five waiters, was to set up the tables and serve the food.

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All the waiters lived under the dining room, where there was one huge room set up with bunk-beds for us. Now imagine what that room looked like after a couple of days. To be polite, we weren’t the neatest human beings in the world. Although the camp authorities did come down once in a while and try to make us clean up, the place was a real mess.

Then, all of a sudden – it was in July or August – word came down the grapevine that the Rebbe was coming to visit the camp. Now, with all due respect, at that point I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded to me like someone important was coming to inspect the operation.

All of a sudden, painters showed up, and cleaners showed up, and handymen showed up – everyone was very busy fixing up the camp in advance of the Rebbe’s visit.

I remember someone coming down and banging nails into the wall of the waiters’ room, so that we could hang up our Shabbos suits and our Shabbos shirts because, until then, they were either on the floor or in our suitcases. And I must say, the waiters’ bunk really shaped up rather nicely.

The big day arrived. When the Rebbe came through, we were all standing by our beds, kind of like at attention, while he conducted his inspection. He looked around, and I heard him say, “Why don’t these boys have closets?”

And this part amazes me to this day – that he cared about closets for the waiters! (more…)

I grew up in Montreal, where I attended the Chabad yeshiva, which had been started by nine of the Previous Rebbe’s emissaries who had escaped war-torn Europe to Shanghai. From there, they made their way to Montreal and started a yeshiva with about two dozen boys, of whom I was one.

In 1941, the war was still raging, and my teachers wanted very much to see the Rebbe in New York and get a blessing from him. The first one to get a passport was Rabbi Menachem Zeev Greenglass, and he agreed to take a few others with him on the trip, which took place at the end of Passover week. My two uncles went and I went.

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That is how I met the Previous Rebbe and also his son-in-law, the future Rebbe. I’ll never forget the experience as long as I live, for when the Rebbe spoke I felt that I could see the Shechinah, the Divine Presence, on his face. That is a very special memory from my youth.

After I left yeshiva, I went into business, but I remained close to my yeshiva teachers, especially Rabbi Aryeh Leib Kramer. He was the person I consulted in times of trouble such as when my wife had a hard time conceiving, and we discovered that the problem was with me.

The cause was what happened when I was perhaps nineteen or twenty years old. At that time, I started losing my hair. As male pattern baldness was common in my family, my sisters started to fret, “You’re going lose all your hair … you’re going be bald.”

One of them found a doctor in Montreal who was dispensing drops which worked miracles, and I got a prescription for this medicine. I was living in Val-D’Or at the time, which is around 350 miles from Montreal, so I didn’t go for periodic check-ups like I was supposed to. Instead, I just kept renewing the prescription again and again. It did, in fact, work miracles, because my hair stopped falling out. Unbeknownst to me, there were hormones in that medicine which affected my whole system, and this was the reason my wife could not get pregnant.

When Rabbi Kramer heard my tale of woe, he said to me, “You must go down to New York and get a blessing from the Rebbe.”

So this we did. Rabbi Kramer arranged an audience for us, and we explained the problem to the Rebbe. (more…)