Monthly Archives: August 2021

My relationship with Lubavitch started when Rabbi Moshe Feller, Chabad’s longtime representative in Minnesota, came to my store, not long after I opened it, to buy some lumber for his sukkah.

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I had grown up around New York, before coming out to Minnesota to begin a business. Rabbi Feller is himself a Minnesotan, and he had returned there in 1962 as a Chabad emissary just a few years before I got there.

I noticed him as he was leaving the store; beards were not unusual back then, but he wore tzitzit, so I recognized that he was an Orthodox Jew – and likely, a rabbi. I introduced myself, and that became the beginning of a very long and very satisfying relationship – not only for me, but also for my sons and my wife.

At Rabbi Feller’s suggestion, my wife and I went to see the Rebbe and we met with him several times throughout the years. I also had the opportunity to attend a farbrengen in 770 Eastern Parkway, which the Rebbe led with enormous spirit, and I was invited to speak at a convention for Chabad emissaries, where I addressed a crowd of some three thousand men. (more…)

I was twelve years old when I enrolled in the Chabad yeshivah in Crown Heights together with my brother. Our family had escaped from Vienna before the start of World War Two, and although there were plenty of yeshivahs near our home in Williamsburg, we gravitated to Chasidic teachings. In Chabad, we found our spiritual home and our spiritual father, the Rebbe.

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My first major impression of him goes back to Rosh Hashanah of 1951. When the Rebbe’s farbrengen ended at the holiday’s conclusion, he recited the blessing after eating and then started to distribute wine from his cup. Although the Previous Rebbe had also distributed wine from his cup in a ceremony known as kos shel brachah, this was the first time the Rebbe – who had accepted leadership of Chabad earlier that year – personally gave wine to everyone, not just to important people. Each of us went up to get some wine, and the Rebbe said a few words to every person.

I went up also, and even though I was just a teenager, I found this encounter with the Rebbe to be highly meaningful. The words he chose to speak to me were very personal – they were not just standard platitudes but a message pinpointed directly at me. In that moment I knew that I was standing in front of someone most unusual, whom I came to call my “father.” (more…)

I was born and raised in Queens, New York, in a traditional and highly Zionistic Jewish family. Although I attended yeshivah in my youth, my experiences there were not at all positive and they turned me off to Orthodoxy – at least to the kind of Orthodoxy that I had come to know as a youngster, focused solely on rituals and absent of any deeper meaning.

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One small bright light during high school was a farbrengen led by the Rebbe which I attended at Chabad headquarters. Also, I recall hearing some Chabad rabbis speaking about how the Torah elevates the human being in all areas of life. That stuck in the background of my consciousness, and it made a difference later in my life. But, back then, it was not enough to offset the negative impression that my yeshivah experience left upon me.

Subsequently, I attended Queens College, majoring in political science with a minor in Jewish studies, and when I studied Jewish philosophy, Judaism became meaningful to me for the first time. I went on to receive a Master’s Degree from Columbia University and then made aliyah to Israel, where I moved closer to Torah observance, remembering the lesson of the Chabad rabbis that the commandments of the Torah are meant to elevate the human being. (more…)

In the various collections of the Rebbe’s correspondence, quite a few of the Hebrew and Yiddish letters are signed “On behalf of the Rebbe, E. Quint.”

“E. Quint” was my father – Rabbi Eli Quint – who was not a Lubavitcher, and this is the story of how he came to write and sign all those letters.

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My father was born and raised in Bialystok, Poland, which he left to attend the famed Slabodka yeshivah in Lithuania, and when that yeshivah relocated to Hebron, in the Land of Israel, he came along. After he received his rabbinic ordination – from the chief rabbi of the British Mandate for Palestine, Rabbi Avraham Kook – he married my mother, and they moved to New York, where I and my sister were born.

It so happened that, in the 1940s, we lived at 816 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, which was just half a block away from Chabad headquarters at 770. Since the Chabad synagogue was so close by, my father would often pray there, and he befriended Rabbi Mordechai Hodakov, the head of the Rebbe’s secretariat, who offered him a job. My father accepted and he became employed by Merkos L’inyonei Chinuch, where his responsibilities included helping the Rebbe (who was not yet the Rebbe) in a variety of ways – such as editing various Chabad educational publications and handling the Rebbe’s voluminous correspondence.

In the course of this work, he developed a relationship with the Rebbe and they became quite close. In fact, their offices were a few feet away from each other, and whenever the Rebbe walked through 770’s main hallway to go anywhere, he passed by the office which my father shared with Rabbi Hodakov – so they spoke every day.

This arrangement continued after the Previous Rebbe passed away in 1950 and the Rebbe took over the leadership of Chabad-Lubavitch. To an outsider, it may have seemed a bit odd that a person like my father held such a high position even though he was not a Lubavitcher – he used to joke that he was the only non-chasid in the entire building – but because of his vast Talmudic knowledge, he was a very valuable asset. (more…)