Monthly Archives: July 2021

The story I am about to tell begins in Johannesburg, where I lived with my late husband, David Neppe – who served for a time as the mayor of the city – and our two children Cliff and Cindy.

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It happened a week before Cindy’s thirteenth birthday in April of 1983. We had just returned from a mother-daughter shopping trip, and Cindy plopped down in a chair to watch TV, when I heard her call out, “Mommy!” (She later said that she suddenly felt strange.) I walked into the room and I got the fright of my life – she was sitting there totally rigid and seemingly unconscious. My husband wasn’t home so I summoned Cliff, who picked her up and carried her to the car, and we drove as fast as possible to the hospital which was just up the road.

When we arrived there, she came to and asked, “Why did you bring me here?”

She was examined in the emergency room, and after some tests, a neurosurgeon was called in to consult. The neurosurgeon ordered a biopsy of her brain in order to determine what was going on. That was easier said than done – the fact that they didn’t want to sedate her fully, made things quite complicated. Her movements caused problems with the equipment they were using, and the procedure, which had been expected to take forty minutes, dragged on for a full six hours.

After all that, they informed us of their terrible diagnosis: Cindy had an inoperable brain tumor, and radiation coupled with chemotherapy was the only available treatment. Even that offered very little hope; she was probably going to die. (more…)

My parents – Rabbi Gershon Mendel and Rebbetzin Bessie Garelik – were sent to Milan, Italy, by the Rebbe over sixty years ago, before I was even born. So, I am privileged to be one of the first children born to his emissaries. And I am also one of the first people to be named Levi Yitzchok after the Rebbe’s father.

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When my mother brought up the idea of giving me this name, my father agreed because, as a child, he had spent time in Almaty, Kazakhstan. That was where Rabbi Levi Yitzchok was exiled by the Soviets for the crime of teaching Torah and supporting Jewish religious practice. Although my father never met Rabbi Levi Yitzchok – since even being in the vicinity of a Schneerson back then was considered a crime – he felt a connection to him. Eventually, my father and his sisters grew very close to the Rebbe’s mother, Rebbetzin Chana, and they all escaped Russia together. But that is another story.

Later, when I was a toddler, my parents sent Rebbetzin Chana a framed picture of myself, and she wrote back expressing her gratitude. It apparently meant a lot to her that I was named after her husband because she put my picture on the breakfront of her dining room. And she even mentioned to others, “I have my Levi Yitzchok.”

But I never got to meet Rebbetzin Chana because the first time I visited New York she had already passed away. That visit took place in the winter of 1967 when I was seven, and my mother brought me along with my five siblings to meet the Rebbe. We timed our trip to coincide with Yud-Tet Kislev, the 19^th of Kislev, when Chabad celebrates the “Rosh Hashanah of Chasidism” because on this date in 1798, the Alter Rebbe, the founder of the Chabad Movement, was freed from Czarist prison.

The day before we left Italy for America, the Italian translation of the Alter Rebbe’s seminal work, the Tanya, came off the press. This project was very important to the Rebbe, and he had appointed my father to make it happen. We would be bringing him the first copy, and it was decided that I should be the one to make the presentation. We would all wait outside 770 as the Rebbe left to go home in the evening, and that is when I would hand him the new Italian Tanya.

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Back in the early 1950s when I was a yeshivah student, there were very few religious summer camps. For several summers, I worked as a counselor at one of them – Camp Agudah – and from this experience, I got the idea of starting a more-inclusive Chabad summer camp which would leave the campers with a lasting connection to Yiddishkeit.

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However, when I wrote to the Rebbe about it, I didn’t get an immediate go-ahead. Starting a camp would require a lot of time and energy, the Rebbe said, and it would be a distraction from my Torah studies. He advised that I shelve the idea for six months, until after Passover, and write to him again at that time.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking and planning, and of course right after Passover I wrote to the Rebbe again. This time, I received a response from the head of the Rebbe’s secretariat, Rabbi Mordechai Hodakov, with advice pertaining to the camp’s organizational structure. He informed me that we would have to form a legal corporation – not just start up a private venture – so that there wouldn’t be personal liability. Also, since I and Yossi Weinbaum, my partner in this undertaking, were still young yeshivah students, we needed a third partner who was older and married. We chose Kehos Weiss for that role, and we reported this to Rabbi Hodakov, who told us that the Rebbe wanted to see us.

When we went into the Rebbe’s office, he asked us very seriously, “Why do we need a camp?”

This question sent my head reeling. Because I had invested so much thought and hope in this idea and the Rebbe’s initial response was positive, I had expected that now he would advise us what to do, but here he was asking us why we should even do it. I felt my whole world shatter, and I actually blacked out. Kehos saw me wobbling on my feet and grabbed me before I hit the floor. Needless to say, the audience was disrupted. The Rebbe said we should go outside for a few minutes, and when I felt better, we could come back in. (more…)

Although I come from a family of Radomsker chasidim, I was educated in non-Chasidic schools – I attended Torah Vodaas in New York through high school and then the Telz yeshivah in Cleveland, and I received my rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the legendary adjudicator of Jewish law in America.

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Still, I gravitated to Chasidic courts, and when trouble hit, this is where I went for help.

On Shabbat, in the winter of 1968, while we were living in Montreal, my wife, Frieda, gave birth to our second child, Yossi. She had gone into labor on Friday morning and we arrived at the hospital early to avoid any unnecessary violations of the holy day. The baby was delivered that night without complications and we were very happy.

I went home to sleep and returned after morning prayers, as the hospital – Jewish General – was within walking distance. But when I arrived, I immediately saw that there were problems. The baby had been placed in an incubator and he was wired up to all kinds of instruments. He seemed to be having trouble breathing, and the doctors and nurses were running back and forth, looking very concerned.

The baby’s condition did not improve during the day, and so our pediatrician informed me that Yossi would have to be transferred to Children’s Hospital that evening, because here they couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

While my wife stayed behind at Jewish General, I followed the ambulance that transferred the baby to the other hospital where he was taken into the emergency room. After a long time passed, when I assume they were checking him over, a doctor came out to speak to me. “Mr. Abramczyk, we have to be realistic,” he said. “This child might not survive the night.” Those were his exact words, and they sent me into shock.

“What should I do?” I asked, trembling. (more…)