Monthly Archives: February 2020

Early on in my career as a political reporter – first for Herut, the daily newspaper of the Israeli Herut party, and then for Yediot Achronot – I heard the Rebbe’s name many times. This was because the Chabad Movement was unique in its involvement in the lives of Israelis, in keeping with its slogan of Ufaratzta, which can loosely be translated as “spreading the faith.” It was Chabad’s mission to influence matters of Jewish life wherever Jews dwelled.

Click here for full-color print version

I would spend a lot of time in the hallways of the Knesset as a political reporter, and I met a number of Chabad chasidim who were promoting Jewish education and the Jewish identity of the state. Today there is almost no concern, social or business, that doesn’t have a lobby which works to promote it, but back then, these chasidim were pioneers. Because of their pleasant approach and personal warmth, everyone in the Knesset – even those who were cynical towards matters of religion – treated them with affection and their cause with sympathy.

In 1962, as part of my journalistic work I was sent to the United States and decided that I wanted to meet the Rebbe. An audience was arranged, and we had an extremely fascinating conversation. At the outset, I told the Rebbe that I wished to interview him on the record, but he responded that he doesn’t give interviews to reporters. But after I explained that I would like to discuss matters of personal interest to me and, with his permission, would publicize his answers, the Rebbe agreed to continue the conversation.

I then brought up various questions that I prepared ahead of time. One of the things I asked was why the Rebbe wasn’t making aliyah to Israel, or at least coming to visit.

In response, the Rebbe did not rule out the matter in principle, but he explained that there are a few important matters which are preventing him from leaving his present location. Traveling to Israel shouldn’t be just for pleasure, he said, but to achieve something. “When the reasons that are obligating me to stay in the United States no longer apply, what I can accomplish there can be considered.”

I asked the Rebbe when he thinks this will happen, but his answer was only a smile. (more…)

Click here for full-color print version

From the age of ten until I was fifteen, I attended the Chabad yeshivah in Newark, New Jersey. This was a very small, unaccredited school – housed in a one-family, colonial-style home on Grumman Avenue – run by Rabbi Sholom Ber Gordon. Although small, the school offered a warm educational environment and I learned a great deal there.

While at the school, I became the editor of the student newspaper, though to call it a “newspaper” is being very generous. This was basically a one-page sheet that reported on school happenings like, “Mr. Posner, the Latin teacher, was out for three days because of a cold,” and other events and activities of equal importance. I would write it up with the help of Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum, who edited my writing which was not great since I got only a minimal English education. I would then run off copies on a mimeograph machine, an early version of the modern photocopier. I would turn a handle and churn one page at a time through a large inked roll that would produce copies of the original. I do not recall how many copies I made, but it was never more than twenty. I guess the students and teachers read it, and perhaps the school also sent copies home to the parents.

Now the reason I am describing this extracurricular activity that kept me busy as a kid is because of what happened subsequently with the Rebbe.

Rabbi Gordon would frequently take a small group of us into New York to participate in the Rebbe’s farbrengens and hear him deliver his Torah talks. I recall these as very impressive events. There would be a couple thousand people crammed into a large room, which looked to me like Yankee Stadium with bleachers reaching up to the ceiling. I vividly remember the Rebbe distributing schnapps and everyone saying l’chaim, but us kids got grape juice, of course. We always looked forward to these occasions. (more…)

My story begins with the story of my father – Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Holtzman – and his relationship with the Rebbe and his wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka.

Click here for full-color print version

My father was a child survivor of the Holocaust who ended up in a Chabad orphanage in Paris, and this is where he met Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the future Rebbe. Rabbi Schneerson had come to Paris in 1947 to meet his mother, who had escaped from the Soviet Union, and escort her to New York. During his stay, he visited the orphanage and tested the kids on their Torah knowledge, awarding prizes. My father, who was thirteen at the time, used this opportunity to ask the Rebbe if he could come to America. A year later this was arranged and he came to Crown Heights and enrolled in the central Chabad yeshivah there.

In 1954, his relationship with the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin began. That year, the Rebbetzin had gone to Europe for a few weeks and, during her absence, the Rebbe’s meals were prepared by a local cook. My father was selected to pick up the food and serve it to the Rebbe. And then, after the Rebbetzin returned, he continued to help out. For about four years, he filled the role of their handyman – helping them prepare for Passover and Sukkot – and this is how their house became his home away from home, so to speak.

Since he had lost his father during the war and his mother lived far away in Europe, the Rebbetzin looked after him. When he started dating, she told him, “It’s not appropriate that you should go on every date in the same suit,” and she gave him one of the Rebbe’s old suits to wear, so that he would have another. (The Rebbe then was no longer wearing a suit but a kapote – the black rabbinical coat – so this must have been one that he no longer needed.)

After he got married, the Rebbetzin gave my father a set of silver cutlery as a present. Even when he moved with my mother to Belgium, she stayed in touch with him and once, upon hearing that he was sick, she asked someone in London to send special medicine to him. That’s how she took care of him. (more…)

When I was fourteen years old, I got carried away with the celebration of Purim and, in that state, I decided to write to the Rebbe. I opened up about everything that was going on with me – all the things that I did which were not so good, all the temptations I faced, and all the egotistical concerns that disturbed me. Among the latter, I mentioned my worry that I was too far behind in my studies to ever amount to anything.

Click here for full-color print version

To underscore my failings, I noted that the Alter Rebbe had written his own version of the Shulchan Aruch, the Code of Jewish Law, before he was twenty; Rabbi Aryeh Leib HaCohen Heller, had written his classic, Shav Shmaytsa, at eighteen; and Rabbi Meshulam Igra – at age nine! – gave a speech which amazed the Torah scholars of Brody. Compared to them, I was getting nowhere, so why should I even continue to learn?

In his response, dated the 17^th of Adar, 1958, the Rebbe wrote that the solutions to my problems could be found in the Tanya, the main work of Chabad philosophy which is a handbook for living a spiritual life.  “Certainly, you have a Tanya…” he wrote, “and presumably, you have a Tanya with an index, which will make the search easier.”

“As for your question regarding what is recounted in writing and orally about those who were geniuses in their younger years…” the Rebbe wrote, “what is the use of asking why all minds are not the same?”

“It is explained in the Tanya,” he continued, “that a person’s grasp of Torah is dependent on the ‘his ability to understand and the source of his soul on high.’” He went on citing the Tanya, adding, “The Mishnah states that ‘you should feel humble before all people,’ because each has an advantage over another [in some respect].”

He made the observation that he found my attitude strange, since it is the purpose of every person not to try to be greater than someone else but to serve G-d. “If G-d wants one person to be great in the mitzvah of charity and another to be great in Torah study,” then that’s what must be. We all need to fulfill G-d’s intention for which we were created, he stressed. But regardless of our abilities, we are obligated in all the mitzvot, and in particular, we are obligated to study Torah. (more…)

My story begins with my grandfather – Rabbi Avraham Sender Nemtzov – in Russia.

In 1897, after spending six years as a conscript in the Czar’s army – during which he managed to keep Torah and eat only kosher – he arrived in the town of Lubavitch, where the Rebbe Rashab, the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, was in the process of opening his new yeshivah, Tomchei Temimim.

Click here for full-color print version

At first, my grandfather was rejected by the yeshivah’s administrator, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, the seventeen-year-old son of the Rebbe Rashab. The reason was that my grandfather was by then a married man of twenty-seven, whereas most of the other students were teenagers.

But my grandfather insisted on making his case to the Rebbe Rashab himself. He argued that he could have gone to another, more-established and better-known yeshivah where he would have received a stipend. Instead, he was coming to a brand new yeshivah, with no reputation, and he was doing so because he had come from chasidic roots and wanted his descendants to be chasidim. He told the Rebbe Rashab: “Don’t let me in just for myself, but for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and all the generations to come.” And because of that, he was allowed in.

The Rebbe Rashab’s decision had a direct effect on all our lives – on my father, on myself, and on my children. We are all Lubavitchers and committed to spreading chasidic teachings wherever we find ourselves.

My grandfather spent several years studying at Tomchei Temimim, where he became friendly with the administrator who had initially rejected him, the Rebbe Rashab’s son, who would later succeed his father as the sixth Rebbe and become known as the Rebbe Rayatz.

Even after my grandfather left the yeshivah to become a kosher butcher (shochet) and immigrated to Manchester, England, he maintained regular contact with the Rebbe Rayatz via correspondence. They saw each other only once – in 1937, when the Rebbe Rayatz visited Paris and my grandfather went there to meet him. At that meeting, the Rebbe Rayatz famously told him, “Du hust gezucht der emes, du hust gefunen der emes un du lebst mit der emes – You searched for truth, you found truth and you live with truth.” (more…)