Monthly Archives: February 2021

Some time before my Bar Mitzvah in the winter of 1966, my father – Reb Hersh Mailach Spalter – wrote to the Rebbe. As a Holocaust survivor whose brothers had perished, he was understandably very emotional as the Bar Mitzvah of his eldest son approached. And, of course, he wanted to mark the occasion in a grand manner as he was a man of means back then.

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But when he informed the Rebbe that he was planning an extravagant party, the Rebbe responded, “The Torah is careful when it comes to [spending] the money of Jewish people. So instead, make it spiritually extravagant.”

The Rebbe’s secretary relayed this message to my father over the phone, but my father wanted to see the Rebbe’s handwritten response for himself.

I vividly remember going along with him to Chabad headquarters and reading the Rebbe’s note. When we did, my father turned to me and asked, “What do you think the Rebbe means?”

I was a young boy, so what did I know? “I have no idea,” I said.

My father supplied the answer: “I think the Rebbe means that instead of reciting one chasidic discourse, you should recite two.” (more…)

Although I grew up in a religious family in Jerusalem, I did not have any real connection to Chabad until my sister married a Lubavitcher. This led me, in 1974, to the Chabad yeshivah in Kfar Chabad and eighteen months later to meeting the Rebbe in Brooklyn, New York.

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When that happened, I felt I had discovered a treasure, and I decided to stay in New York for the rest of my life. I took a job as a teacher with the elementary school, Oholei Torah, and I felt I had the best of all worlds – I was close to the Rebbe, and since I was teaching in a Chabad school, I felt that I was working as his emissary.

When it came time to get married, my future wife, Toby, told me on our first date that she intended to go out into the world with her husband, who would serve as a Chabad emissary. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I am an emissary already – right here in Brooklyn.” But that’s not how she saw it.

This created a dilemma. In fact, her father asked the Rebbe if we should continue seeing each other, but the Rebbe just responded, “It’s up to the two of them.”

That is when I hit on an idea to win her over, because I already knew that I wanted to marry Toby. I told her, “You know what – when the time comes, let’s ask the Rebbe and whatever he tells us to do, we will do.” She agreed. “That’s good enough for me,” she said and, after meeting a few more times, we were engaged. (more…)

I come from a long line of Chabad emissaries. My mother’s parents, Rabbi Sholom and Rebbetzin Chaya Posner, served in Pittsburgh and my father’s parents, Rabbi Chaim Meir and Rebbetzin Rivkah Leah Garelik, in Crimea. In turn, my parents – Rabbi Gershon Mendel and Rebbetzin Bassie Garelik – have been serving in Milan since before I was born so, in our home, service was a natural state of being. Although physically we were far from the Rebbe and rarely saw him, we lived with the awareness of the Rebbe’s care and guidance day and night.

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I was fortunate that, as a teenager, I was sent to New York to attend Bais Rivkah, the Chabad seminary for girls. During those years, I saw the Rebbe constantly as he was coming and going from prayers or to his office, and I had a number of private audiences with him.

When I graduated in 1976, I was invited to stay on – to work at the Chabad seminaries, Bais Rivkah and Machon Chana. But when I asked the Rebbe, he said that I should go back to Milan to teach at the school there. This was not what I had expected because I had been very happy in New York, but, of course, I went.

Shortly after I returned, my parents began receiving marriage proposals for me. I was very young then and I didn’t feel ready to date. But I told my parents that they should send the names to the Rebbe. “If the Rebbe tells me to go out, I’ll go out,” I said. “But, until the Rebbe tells me to do it, I don’t want to hear about it.”

During Passover week, a wonderful young man who was raised in Italy, Avrohom Hazan, came back to Milan after spending many years studying in Chabad yeshivot abroad. The year before he had organized an amazing summer for boys who had never had the opportunity to study Torah and it had been highly successful; now he was back to do it again. (more…)

During my enlistment in the Israeli Air Force, I served as a forward air controller, a highly-specialized job which involves guiding aircraft and providing aerial defense in the event of attack by enemy planes. During my six years of service, I participated in a number of important missions, including the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.

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Four years prior to that event, the Israeli Air Force decided to improve Israel’s aerial defense abilities by acquiring four E-2 Hawkeyes – the all-weather, early-warning planes equipped with sophisticated radars – manufactured by Northrop Grumman. And in order to prepare for the new squadron, eleven airmen were sent for a year of training in the US. I was selected to be part of this group.

While training, we lived on Long Island, where the Northrop Grumman factory is located. Long Island borders the Brooklyn borough of New York City, and for Chanukah of 1977, we were invited to visit the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Crown Heights, to participate in a farbrengen in honor of the holiday.

None of us was religious, but I come from a traditional home so I was definitely happy about this opportunity. The names Lubavitcher Rebbe and Chabad weren’t foreign to the rest of my colleagues either. Chabad’s Mitzvah Tanks would come onto our base from time to time, and everyone was familiar with the outreach work of Chabad, which constantly strives to bring Israelis closer to Torah.

When we arrived at Chabad Headquarters, before we even entered the big hall where the farbrengen was to take place, we were led to the Rebbe’s office. He greeted us from behind his desk and, from the first moment, we felt that we were in the presence of a great and special man, an important leader of the Jewish nation. There was a kind of electricity in the air, although I can’t define exactly what caused the experience to feel so utterly unique. (more…)