Monthly Archives: September 2023

I had grown up in a quiet neighborhood of Tel Aviv, but in 1976 my family moved to New York. Back in Tel Aviv, I had attended Moriah, a religious, non-chasidic school with a strong emphasis on learning. As a fifteen-year-old, I loved it there and it was hard to find another school like it in New York.

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My older sister Michla Breindel, of blessed memory, who had just married a Lubavitcher named Yehuda Blesofsky, was living in Crown Heights. Although it was not long after their wedding, they generously invited me to come and board with them so I could attend the local Chabad girls’ high school, Bais Rivka.

I went to try it out just before Rosh Hashanah, and it was quite an adjustment. The religious environment I had come from was intellectual but reserved, while the education that the girls in Bais Rivka were receiving was so warm and exciting. I loved it and decided to stay.

I also had to adjust to the neighborhood. The streets of Crown Heights, with their festive hustle and bustle and the guests who had come from abroad for the holidays, were so different from where I had come from. The real shock, however, came from what was going on inside my sister’s home.

In those days, Crown Heights had no prominent hospitality organizations for hosting or providing meals for visitors. Families simply opened their homes and had guests over for every holiday meal – and my sister did the same. I was a little spoiled growing up as the youngest of four children, but I wasn’t going to let my sister deal with this alone. Oblivious to the activity surrounding the Rebbe in 770, I focused on helping my sister make sure that everyone was fed, and keeping her from collapsing.

That Rosh Hashanah, I threw myself into the tasks at hand – cooking, serving, cleaning. On the day before Yom Kippur, there were more guests, and before Sukkot, yet more. In Israel, most of the holidays are only observed for one day, and so the two days in the beginning of Sukkot felt endless, especially since we had to make constant trips up and down the steps of her home to the Sukkah outside. (more…)

Being privileged to grow up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as a child, I would see the Rebbe all the time. Typically, we saw him on Shabbat, as there was school during the week, but I remember how exciting it was when we would be able to go to 770 for the Minchah service on days there was no school. At 3:15 in the afternoon, the Rebbe would come into the synagogue, and he would hand us each a coin to place in a charity box.

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One memory that stands out was in 1973, the Shabbat before the fast of the 9th of Av. I had just turned six and my father took me to the farbrengen, the public gathering that the Rebbe often led on Shabbat afternoons. We walked into 770 and went to our spot; my father normally stood towards the end of the long table the Rebbe sat at, on the Rebbe’s left, while sitting me down on another table adjacent to it. The synagogue was a lot smaller than it is today, but being summertime, with children away in camp and families off in Upstate New York, there was more room than usual.

That summer, the Rebbe had spoken several times about the power of children, referring repeatedly to the verse from Psalms, “Out of the mouths of babies and infants You have established strength … to silence the enemy and avenger.” As the summer went on, he brought up the subject with increasing regularity, in public addresses, and in letters to educators and summer camp administrators, focusing on how important it was that Jewish children receive a Torah education and their power as role models. Now, as he walked into the room for the farbrengen, he looked directly at me, and then around the room. My father had a sense, as he later told me, that the Rebbe was looking to see whether there were any other children present: Something was going to happen with the children at the farbrengen that day.

Sure enough, after addressing the assembled, the Rebbe said that he wanted all of the children to say a special l’chaim. The way he put it was interesting: “If it isn’t too much of an inconvenience,” he said, as if he was asking something of an elderly person, “the children who are under Bar or Bat Mitzvah can come up.” On occasion, the Rebbe would pour wine for people to say l’chaim on, but never before did he distribute to children only, and as far as I know, it never happened again either. (more…)

Back in the Soviet Union, in the city of Samarkand, my parents had run an underground yeshivah. My father taught a group of young men, while my mother cooked for them and hosted them in our home. Those boys were like her own children. There was an underground cellar where they would hide if the secret police showed up, we had a minyan for Shabbat, a mikveh, and my father also secretly served as a kosher slaughterer. It was like an underground Chabad House.

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Before we finally left in 1971, my parents had never seen the Previous Rebbe or the Rebbe – and of course neither had I. In communist Russia, even a picture of the Rebbe was something that had to be kept hidden – I had only ever seen one – but we were raised in the underground with the knowledge that the Rebbe was with us. In that country, we felt anti-Semitism all the time – I was constantly having to escape, fight, or be assaulted by non-Jewish kids – and often, I would feel a sense of despair about our predicament. But in those moments, the thought that the Rebbe was with me made me feel strong and determined to continue the struggle and continue being the Lubavitcher boy I was raised to be.

After spending seven years as refuseniks, waiting for permission to leave Russia, we emigrated to Israel, and soon began making plans to visit the Rebbe. Just a few months later, in the summer of 1971, Israeli chasidim chartered a plane in order to spend the festive month of Tishrei with the Rebbe. People borrowed and collected money to buy a ticket, although afterwards the Rebbe actually reimbursed us Russian emigres for all our travel expenses.

We were due to arrive on the Thursday before Rosh Hashanah when I was fifteen years old. Our flight landed in New York at around 4:30 AM, and we were able to drive into Crown Heights, run to immerse in the mikveh, and get ready for the Rebbe to walk into the synagogue for selichot, pre-Rosh Hashanah supplications, at seven o’clock. (more…)

After studying in Jerusalem’s famous Sefardic Porat Yosef yeshivah, at eighteen years old I joined Kollel Torah VeHora’ah in Tel Aviv. The kollel, an advanced rabbinical seminary, was run by Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, who had just been appointed the city’s chief rabbi, and I was ordained there as a rabbi myself. In 1977, in consultation with several prominent rabbis, I joined a group from the kollel who decided to enlist in the army, hoping to devote ourselves to improving the Jewish character of the IDF.

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After going through an expedited basic training, we graduated as officers in the army chaplaincy. After serving in the 460th Brigade, the armored forces’ training formation, I was appointed rabbi of the 162nd division, and eventually of the Merchav Shlomo Command, which had been placed in charge of the southern Sinai Peninsula since the Yom Kippur War.

My duties as a senior army rabbi involved supervising the provision of kosher food, overseeing synagogues and holiday services, and distributing essential religious supplies like tefillin and Torah scrolls for all service members, on large bases and the most distant outposts. I was also responsible for Halachic matters relating to marriages, conversions, and mourning, and for the division’s burial unit, which had to always be ready to identify and bury any casualties in the most appropriate way.

By the time I came to the 460th, Israel’s peace deal with Egypt had already been signed and the plans for the evacuation of the Sinai were well underway. As an aside, orchestrating this handover meant that we had to liaise with several Egyptian officers. Being an Arabic speaker, I became friendly with some of them, and as a result of these relationships, on occasion, I managed to learn some pertinent information that I passed on to IDF intelligence.

In 1981, on the night following Yom Kippur, a lieutenant came to my office, complaining that he had been forced to work on the holy day. However, I didn’t recognize the name of his unit. I had an excellent and open working relationship with all the senior commanders, and had never experienced them hiding information from me.

I asked the lieutenant to wait in my office, while I went and spoke with the head of Command. “I have a lieutenant here who claims he was compelled to work on Yom Kippur. But I don’t recognize his unit!” (more…)