Monthly Archives: February 2023

I came to the army from yeshivah in 1951, and met Rabbi Shlomo Goren right away. As the Chief Rabbi of the IDF, he transferred me into chaplaincy to work alongside him. Although we didn’t agree on everything, we became very close.

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Rabbi Goren admired the Rebbe because the Rebbe said what he believed, whether or not it was popular. Both the Rebbe and he, and to a degree myself, were nonconformists, who were unafraid of the backlash that came with going against the grain.

This was also the relationship I forged with the Rebbe. As the rabbi of the moshavim, Israel’s agricultural settlements, and later as a member of Knesset, I would have an audience with the Rebbe every time I was in the US. Sometimes, I would express views that I knew he did not share, but he always heard me out. “I know that you think what you say and you say what you think,” he once complimented me.

The Rebbe brought up my independent spirit, indirectly, the very first time I met him in 1959. It was a late-night meeting that went for hours, and at the end, just before the Rebbe went to morning prayers, I remember he had one more question for me:

“Reb Menachem, are you a chasid or a misnagid?” he asked, using the term for the historical opponents of Chasidism. (more…)

This story is an excerpt from the book My Story 2: Lives Changed. Get your copy today at www.jemstore.com.

In 1966, I had given birth to Danny, the youngest of my three sons. As he grew, he did not speak anywhere near as early as his brothers. When I asked the pediatrician, “Why is Danny not speaking yet?” I was told that he might have a hearing problem. After some testing, the pediatrician confirmed that, indeed, Danny had a severe hearing problem.

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At eighteen months of age, he was fitted with a hearing aid. In those days, that meant wearing a harness that carried battery-operated equipment which was connected by wires to the buttons in his ears. It was not a very pleasant setup, to say the least. Danny was an active toddler, and it was a constant battle to prevent him from pulling out this contraption and throwing it on the ground. Eventually, though, he understood that this bulky contraption helped him communicate with his friends.

To be clear, by no means were we strangers to the problems faced by hearing-impaired children. Our oldest son, Barry, had begun to lose his hearing when he was four years old, and it continued to deteriorate until he was seven. But Barry had already learned to speak quite well before his hearing loss. Danny would have to learn to speak after he had lost his hearing – an overwhelming challenge for a young child.

In the summer of 1967, we moved to Skokie, Illinois, so that Barry, our oldest, could start first grade in a Jewish day school there, and Danny would be able to enroll in a special education program at Northwestern University that had a big center for young children with hearing problems.

Back then, there was a huge disagreement among educators as to whether hearing-impaired children should learn to communicate with sign language, or they should be taught how to talk. Northwestern University was on the side of trying to teach them to talk, so this is the kind of therapy Danny received until he was three, when he was enrolled in a special education nursery program in our local school district. (more…)

When the war came to our home in Kharkov in 1941, my family ran away to Samarkand, and then about five years later we escaped again, in the hopes of leaving the Soviet Union and seeing the Rebbe. We went through Poland, Germany, and France, and then spent eighteen months in Cuba before coming to the United States. But then, a month before we left, the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe passed away. My father, Rabbi Tzemach Gurevitch, was beside himself; he locked himself in a room and couldn’t eat or sleep. It was terrible to see. Finally, we came to America in March of 1950, when I was twelve years old.

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Six years later, I got engaged. My future husband, Yaakov, was originally from Brazil, and because life as a religious Jew was so hard there, he hoped to bring his parents to America.

Having made our decision, we went to seek the Rebbe’s blessing. I remember the moment vividly. In front of the Rebbe’s desk stood two chairs for visitors, and we were standing across from the Rebbe, right behind those chairs. He gave us his blessing on our marriage and then said that he would like us to be his emissaries in Brazil. I almost fainted. I held onto the chair, but I didn’t say anything. We had gone through so much to come to America, and now the Rebbe was asking us to keep on going.

“Don’t worry,” the Rebbe reassured me, after seeing that I had gone white, “it’s going to be good for you.” I accepted what he said but it was a daunting assignment, and I felt terribly anxious.

We paid for our tickets to Brazil on our own, using the money we had received for our wedding. The Rebbe had suggested that we look at several cities before deciding where to settle, so at first, we went to Rio de Janeiro where there were some other religious Jews.

It was the time of the famous “Carnival” when we first arrived, and I thought it was a wild country. Sitting alone in our hotel room, I wondered what I was doing in such a foreign, far-off place. “I’ll get lost here,” I thought. “I’m not prepared for this. What do I even have to offer?” (more…)

I was studying applied mathematics in Wits University of Johannesburg with ambitions to go to Israel. In fact, I was in the middle of finishing off my fourth-year honors, which would have qualified me for Haifa’s Technion university. It was 1972, and that was when Rabbi Mendel Lipskar arrived in South Africa, which changed things dramatically for me.

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Between the ongoing Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, our society was full of questions and turmoil. I – along with my fellow students – was searching for the truth, and Rabbi Lipskar had lots of fascinating takes on what was happening in the world. After hours and hours of conversation, my friends and I realized what Judaism had to offer and, over the next two years, we became more observant. At one point, Rabbi Lipskar said, “It’s time to go to Crown Heights and see the Rebbe.” That was when the adventure began.

At that stage, I was doing a postgraduate degree at Wits, but December was vacation time at the university so I made the trip. By then, I had already met my future wife Chana in South Africa and she had also gone to the States to attend a Chabad women’s seminary in Minnesota.

I joined Hadar Hatorah, a yeshivah for men who are new to Torah observance, and spent my days in its study hall, which is how I came to see the Rebbe for the first time. It was a Thursday morning, and I was towards the end of my daily prayers, when my host, Rabbi Sholom Ber Groner came up to me. “Did you immerse in the mikveh this morning?” he asked. I had. “Come with me to the Rebbe’s minyan,” he said.

I walked into 770 and entered the room where the Rebbe would join the morning prayers. As is traditional following an overseas trip, I recited the Hagomel blessing after the reading of the Torah, with the Rebbe standing right next to me. I read the Hebrew words haltingly, and could feel the Rebbe watching me as I did. That was the first time I encountered the Rebbe’s quiet, humble strength; there was a real power I felt just by standing next to him. The next time I saw him was in a more public setting, at a farbrengen. As he sat there on the dais, with so many chasidim facing him and listening, I was struck by his spiritual grandeur. (more…)

I arrived in the United States with my family, in 1975, as a representative of Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration. Together with my colleague Chaim Edelstein, I would be running the large aliyah office in Brooklyn, assessing candidates for compatibility and providing them with assistance wherever possible, particularly with economic and material matters. My job also involved giving talks about the aliyah process throughout the state of New York.

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With the approach of Simchat Torah that year, I was invited to join the hakafot dancing in 770. We arrived to find the place so packed that not even a sardine could squeeze inside. With no other choice, I was put on my back and then passed over the heads of the crowd, until I reached the dais at the front of the synagogue.

Standing on the dais was the Rebbe, and next to him was a delegation from the Israeli consulate. The Rebbe shook everyone’s hand, and asked for our names and positions. It was a unique experience for me; I had never seen so many people dancing and singing together as one.

That Chanukah, the Rebbe’s secretary Rabbi Binyomin Klein called our office to inform me of a decision to send a group of Chabad families and yeshivah students to Israel. They would be traveling right after the 10th of Shevat, which as I later found out, was the day the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe passed and was succeeded by the Rebbe. (more…)