Monthly Archives: June 2022

As a yeshivah student, I used to go on walks together with a friend every Shabbat afternoon, while discussing our studies. One week, we heard some people singing. We didn’t recognize the song, but I felt drawn in by its soulful melody.

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“Let’s go see where it’s coming from,” I told my friend.

That’s how we ended up at the “Baal HaTanya Synagogue,” a small Chabad shtiebel in Meah Shearim, Jerusalem. There we met ten or so men, singing chasidic melodies, as is the Chabad custom towards the end of Shabbat. The song, I learned, was an old Chabad tune, with lyrics from Psalms (62:6-7): Only to G-d should you hope, my soul, for my hope is from Him.

They sang this song a few times more, before moving on to others, and I felt something tugging at my heart. We started going to that shtiebel at the same time each week, and whenever I walked in, the locals would start singing that song for me. This was my first exposure to Chabad. After a few weeks, the rabbi, Rabbi Shimon Yakobovitch, offered to study Tanya with me, and before long I began to feel like a Chabadnik.

At a certain stage, Rabbi Shimon suggested I write to the Rebbe. (more…)

I was born in Fez, Morocco, to the Turgeman clan, a deeply religious family. After the founding of the State of Israel, our family immigrated there and settled in Tiberias.

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The ‘50s were years of severe austerity in Israel, a time of poverty and famine. This allowed the kibbutz movement to recruit new immigrant children with promises of food, education and economic stability ,which is what happened with my family. Times were tough, my parents were naive about kibbutz life, and had several children to care for. So when a couple of young men came from a nearby kibbutz and spoke with them, they were persuaded, and reluctantly gave their permission for me to go to a kibbutz. When we separated, my father gave me a prayer book, a Chumash, and his blessings.

In the kibbutz, I was the only one leading a religious lifestyle. Gradually, I gave up wearing tzitzit, and then my weekday prayers, but I still tried to keep kosher and Shabbat to the best of my ability. When I reached my Bar Mitzvah, and my parents came to the kibbutz for the celebration, my father was shocked to find nary a trace of Jewish practice – there was no synagogue and I had no tefillin. He took me straight back to Tiberias with him and for the next two months, from morning till night, he had me shadow our community rabbi, who gave me all the Bar Mitzvah classes I had missed.

Still, after I’d spent two years becoming socially integrated into kibbutz life, my older brother told my parents that it would be unhealthy to tear me away from it now, so they let me return. Back at the kibbutz, my name changed from Machluf to Micha. Then, instead of Turgeman, I adopted the last name “Peled,” which was the name of the pre-military civil service youth group I was very involved in. (more…)

Back in the sixties, by Divine Providence, my family happened to move right next door to the dormitory of the Lubavitcher yeshivah in Montreal. One day my five-year-old younger brother Reuven, or “Ruby,” happened to smash a baseball right through the dormitory window.

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The students came out to this cute little boy, and you know how Lubavitchers are: They started to talk to him. Before you know it, they were coming to visit our family at home.

Zalman Deitsch was one of the students who would frequent my house, and he would learn with me as well. I was already attending a yeshivah in Montreal, but before my Bar Mitzvah that summer, he suggested I go to the Chabad yeshivah in New York to study.

“It’s a fantastic yeshivah,” he told me. “You’ll love it there.”

So in 1965 I came – a young and petrified boy –  to the Lubavitch Yeshiva on the corner of Bedford and Dean streets in Brooklyn, New York. Everyone was very nice to me, but it was a tremendously new experience. During my first year, I had the merit of having an audience with the Rebbe.

My yechidus took place right after my Bar Mitzvah, which had been back in Montreal. The Rebbe was extremely warm, and when I came in he looked at me and asked, “Have you been to my farbrengens?” (more…)

Rabbi Yaakov Shpitzer

In 1981, my niece, Tzippy – my brother’s daughter – was diagnosed with a severe form of leg cancer, malignant melanoma. The doctors at Rambam Hospital in Haifa were very pessimistic about her chances of recovery. One doctor gave her only one month to live. Obviously, her parents did not take the news very well, and they were at a complete loss as to what to do. She was a young girl – only nineteen years old – and an only child.

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One Friday night, while my family and I were in middle of our Shabbat dinner, my neighbor, Rabbi Leibel Friedman, paid us a visit. He said, “I heard about your niece. You should know that the only person nowadays who can help her is the Lubavitcher Rebbe. My advice is that you go see him in the United States and do whatever he tells you to do.”

I was a little surprised to hear this coming from him, since he wasn’t a Lubavitcher chasid, but I listened to his advice and as soon as Shabbat ended I began making arrangements for the trip. I did not have a visa, and I knew that on Sundays the American consulate would be closed, so I contacted Rabbi Menachem Porush, who was a deputy minister in the Labor Ministry at that time. After hearing me out, he promised to assist in any way possible. I don’t know how he did it, but twenty-four hours later I was on my way to New York.

Immediately upon my arrival, I took a taxi to Crown Heights. I located one of the Rebbe’s secretaries, and after telling him the whole story, he promised to arrange an audience as soon as possible.

The next night, at around one in the morning, I entered the Rebbe’s study. Immediately, I experienced a feeling which is impossible to put it into words. Anyone who did not experience it will never understand.

The Rebbe looked at me and asked me what I needed. I attempted to hand him the X-rays and written diagnosis that I had brought with me, but he told me that he didn’t need them. “Just describe the problem, please,” he requested. (more…)

I came from Israel to visit the Rebbe for the festive month of Tishrei, 1973. During that visit, we noticed a number of changes to the Rebbe’s regular conduct. He cried profusely while blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, as well as at the close of Yom Kippur. During the intervening Ten Days of Repentance (at the very moment Israel’s enemies were finalizing their plans for a surprise attack, as we later learned) the Rebbe called for children’s assemblies “to subdue the enemy.” And he spent hours giving out coins, for charity, to the children – another departure from his norm at the time. Once the Yom Kippur War broke out, we understood what this was all about.

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I was supposed to have an audience with the Rebbe the day after Yom Kippur but I was informed of another change: The Rebbe went to pray at the resting place of the Previous Rebbe, and all the audiences planned for that evening were canceled. Clearly, this was due to the dire situation in Israel. I was rescheduled for after Sukkot.

Among the issues I hoped to discuss was the matter of my wife’s pregnancy. At the time, Chava Chaya was pregnant with our second child. However, as I told the Rebbe, her term had been very difficult until then, and fraught with problems.

“With the help of G-d,” the Rebbe assured me, “you will have nachas from your children.”

I noticed that he said “children,” in the plural, and I understood that there was nothing to worry about. And everything was fine; our son Itzik was born and we also had another son not long after that. (more…)