Monthly Archives: October 2022

While studying as a young man in the Chabad yeshivah in Lod, Israel, a few of us senior students developed a strong desire to spend time in the Rebbe’s court, in the yeshivah at 770.

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At the time, our entire yeshivah numbered less than forty students and there were ten of us, so the faculty was reluctant to let us go. But then in 1961, Rabbi Shlomo Chaim Kesselman, our dean of chasidic studies, proposed to the Rebbe a kind of student exchange program. While we traveled to the Rebbe, a group of American yeshivah students would come to strengthen the yeshivah in Lod. The Rebbe gave his assent.

The next step was getting student visas. The yeshivah in New York sent us affidavits declaring that they were assuming responsibility for us during our stay in the US. Then, our dean, Rabbi Efraim Wolf, began working on securing exit visas and conscription deferments from the Israeli military authorities, while we gathered the funds for our airfare. In those days, a ticket to the US went for some 1,200 Israeli pounds—about five times the average monthly salary!

We had asked for one year’s leave, allowing us to experience all of the festivals and special occasions in the Rebbe’s court, but the army granted us only one month. We decided to go anyway, and then apply for an extension from there. We joined a chartered flight of Chabad chasidim headed to New York for the holidays of the month of Tishrei.

In those days, the Rebbe would receive visitors for a private audience twice—once on arrival, around Rosh Hashanah, and then again before their return at the end of the month.

When it was time for my audience, I brought something with me: Outside my home back in Kfar Chabad, Israel, there were a few pomegranate trees growing, and I had picked the finest five I could find, as a gift to the Rebbe from the Holy Land. When his secretary Rabbi Laibel Groner presented them to him, the Rebbe instructed him to “leave one here, and bring the rest upstairs.” Upstairs in 770 was the Previous Rebbe’s apartment where the Rebbe would have the festival meals in those years. The first pomegranate, I assume, he took home. (more…)

Every year, as a yeshivah student in 770, I would participate in the summer visitation program run by Merkos L’inyonei Chinuch, Chabad’s education office. It was known as “Merkos Shlichus.”

In 1959, I was sent to the Caribbean Islands, together with my friend Yisroel Chaim Lazar. We started in Aruba, then went to Curacao, Trinidad, Barbados, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and ended up in Jamaica.

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In Trinidad, two days before the fast on the 9th of Av, we mentioned to one of the local Jews that we were hoping to have enough people for the day’s communal prayers. “You know what?” he said, “you’re about to go to Barbados. There you’ll sooner be able to make a minyan.” Barbados only had twelve Jewish families, but he explained that it was a more close-knit community. Following his advice, we flew to Barbados the next day.

Back then, before arriving somewhere on Merkos Shlichus you didn’t know where to go, or whom to speak to. If you were lucky, you had a few names and addresses from someone who had been there before but, in this case, we didn’t even have that. We had, however, been interviewed by the Trinidad Guardian, which was like the New York Times of the Caribbean, so readers on Barbados knew that we were coming.

And so, when we landed in Barbados, a man greeted us at the airport with a message: “My master sent me here to see you. He said that I should take you to his house.”

We were very happy for the welcome and went to the house, where we waited for this fellow’s master to appear. After twenty minutes or so, in walked a Jewish man – you could see it on his face – who started speaking in Yiddish. “I read in the paper that you are emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and have come here to strengthen Judaism,” he began. “Let me tell you who I am.” (more…)

As a young man, I studied in the Lubavitcher yeshivah in Montreal, but I would spend some of the holidays in New York. Once, in the late ‘50s, I came to New York on the first intermediate day of Sukkot. As always, the Rebbe held a big gathering – a Simchat Beit Hasho’eva farbrengen, as we would call it – that night in the sukkah. Thousands of people used to come for this event, and I was one of them. The next day, I was summoned by the Rebbe’s secretary Rabbi Hodakov.

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“The Rebbe saw you last night at the farbrengen,” Rabbi Hodakov tells me in his office, “and he asked me: ‘What is Nissan Mangel doing here in Crown Heights? He should be in Lakewood!”

“What do you mean?” I wondered out loud. Lakewood, New Jersey, is a bastion of Lithuanian non-chasidic Jewry in America, its Beth Medrash Govoha a famous yeshivah. The Rebbe had sent me there several times before to share teachings of Chasidut with the students, faculty and members of its Kollel for older students.

But this time, I tried making a case to stay in Crown Heights:

“I wasn’t here for Rosh Hoshanah and I wasn’t here for Yom Kippur; now that I’ve come to be with the Rebbe for Sukkot, I’m being sent to Lakewood?”

“Are you arguing with the Rebbe?” Rabbi Hodakov replied. “The Rebbe says you should go!”

Rabbi Hodakov instructed me to take along a lulav and etrog; I would be going for a few days, and of course I would need to perform this mitzvah every day of Sukkot. In addition, he also told me to bring hoshanos, the spray of myrtle used in the prayers on Hoshana Rabbah, the seventh day of Sukkot. (more…)

In 1962, I had the great fortune to travel from the Holy Land to the Rebbe for the High Holidays and have a private audience with him. I had exchanged several letters with the Rebbe since coming close to Chabad as a young man, but this was the first time in my life that I would be meeting him in person.

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Before leaving, my teacher and mentor Rabbi Moshe Weber asked that I tell the Rebbe about a certain yeshivah student from Jerusalem who had gone to study in 770 and who, despite years having passed, had not yet managed to marry. The assumption was that the Rebbe was unaware of this situation, so I was asked to solicit the Rebbe’s blessings and assistance on his behalf.

When I mentioned the name I had been given, the Rebbe immediately responded: “When it comes to finding a match, one has to look at what is important, and not at trivial matters. This fellow, however, is looking at the most trifling of trivialities; what’s the surprise that he hasn’t found anyone?”

Now, the yeshivah student in question had been unaware of our intervention, and when I met him afterwards, I asked why, despite his relatively advanced age, he was still single. As he had it, it was because the matchmakers were suggesting to set him up with some girls of Sephardic descent, and he thought they wouldn’t be right for him. This, apparently, was what the Rebbe meant by “trivialities.”

Later, this fellow married an American, a woman who had come from a family that was not religious. Unfortunately, they were ill suited for each other, and the marriage was short lived. But about a year later, he met and married another woman – from a Sephardic family – with whom he set up a Jewish home and enjoyed many long, happy years together. (more…)