Monthly Archives: December 2023

The first book that I published – my entrée into the publishing industry – was a pocket Book of Psalms, Tehillim. In 1975, when I traveled from Israel to the Rebbe and had a private audience with him, I brought along a copy, and I submitted it to his secretary in advance.

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During the audience, the Rebbe reached into his drawer, took out the Tehillim, and leafed through it. He inquired about whether we had been successful in selling the books.

“Thank G-d,” I replied.

“I heard that it’s going well in the army,” he noted, meaning that the soldiers of the IDF sought after such Tehillims, for the spiritual protection they provided.

“Have you ever seen such a Chumash [Five Books of Moses] that also includes Rashi’s commentary?” he continued.

I replied that I had seen a Chumash of that size, published by Sinai, but without any biblical commentaries.

“There is such a Chumash with Rashi,” he informed me, “but I don’t know if the text they used for the commentary is accurate without mistakes.” For years, I searched for such a book, and I eventually found a miniature Chumash with Rashi, slightly larger than our Tehillim, published by “Levin-Epstein.”

I subsequently printed Tehillims of six different sizes. Computerized layout and printing was coming into its own in those days, which enabled me to produce clear, newly-typeset texts with beautiful letters. When my wife next visited the Rebbe, she brought him one of the new volumes and, in turn, the Rebbe presented her with a dollar bill “for your husband, the publisher.” (more…)

Even before we met, my husband and I were on a quest for spirituality; it was the sixties and we were both on the hippie path. We wanted to know whether there was some foundational truth that existed throughout the universe, beyond what any individual person believed.

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I had grown up in an assimilated American Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland, and unfortunately, my parents couldn’t teach me what they didn’t know. My parents never had the opportunity to have a Jewish education, although it was important to them I had one; I attended Sunday school as a child and our family also belonged to a Reform Temple.

I spent time exploring groups like Hare Krishna and then, as a high school exchange student in Argentina, I met Shlomo Carlebach. He encouraged me to learn about the Torah and my heritage and we remained close for years after. He was the only rabbi I knew and trusted, and when Dovid and I later decided to get married, he came to Baltimore and officiated at our wedding.

We spent the summer of 1971 in my husband’s hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, where we got to know Rabbi Hershel Fogelman, the local Chabad rabbi, as well as other families in the community. They began encouraging us to take up different mitzvot. “Try eating kosher,” they would say. “Try one Shabbat; see if you like it. This is the mikveh; see what you think about it.”

We were open to all of it. “Teach us, show us, and then we will decide what we can handle and if we want to continue with it,” we told them. We tried everything, and kept on asking questions until we got answers that satisfied us. Then, Rabbi Fogelman sent us to Crown Heights for Yom Kippur. (more…)

The person telling this story should really be my husband, Dr. Larry Resnick, but since he is not with us anymore, I will have to do the best I can.

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The story begins in October of 1977 when, on the holiday of Simchat Torah, the Rebbe suffered a heart attack. He did not want to be hospitalized, so the doctors who initially treated him set up a coronary care unit in his office at 770 Eastern Parkway. But after two weeks, they had to return to their regular patients, and my husband was called in.

Now my husband was by then quite famous as a brilliant scientist. A child prodigy, he graduated college at 16 and medical school at 21, becoming the youngest person in the United States to be awarded an MD degree. Eventually, he developed specialties in endocrinology and cardiology, focusing his research specifically on the causes of hypertension.

When he was called in to the Rebbe, he was visiting New York, but upon being invited to stay on as the Rebbe’s primary physician, he had to decline. He was then serving in the US Army, running the clinical research center at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, and he could not go AWOL.

The Rebbe’s staff  began pulling strings with several US Senators to get him transferred from Hawaii to New York, and the request went all the way up to the White House. The end result of that was a phone call from President Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff demanding to know who Larry thought he was. To this my husband replied that if the leader of another religion had asked for an American doctor to care for him in Rome, the White House would be so proud it would hold a press conference to blast the news. Well, someone who is of utmost important to the Jewish people should receive the same treatment. (more…)

It was a seven-day voyage from Tunisia to Montreal, and I was fifteen years old. For seven days all we saw was the sea, yet the boat traveled in a fixed direction the entire time. That’s how it is in life: Without a goal, you can go in all kinds of ways, and end up lost at sea. You’ve got to have a destination. With this thought in mind, I came to Montreal in 1957, looking for some direction.

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Before long, I found what I was looking for. I began attending a class delivered by a young Lubavitch yeshivah student, and then learning Tanya with another. At the suggestion of the yeshivah boys, I began writing to the Rebbe in French. I wrote about my studies and my situation, including some difficulties I was having, and I asked for his blessings.

I was overjoyed when I received the Rebbe’s reply, which was written in English. The very thought that the Rebbe had sent me a letter was unbelievable to me.

He told me not to be discouraged by the ups and downs I felt from my “inner battle with the yetzer” – my evil inclination – and advised me to study the Tanya’s “very illuminating and useful guidance” on this subject. The good things I was doing, he reassured me, would lead to more good and would not be wasted, “for all that is holy is eternal.” I had mentioned that I was studying science in school, so he added, “you know that nothing in the physical world is lost, and this is especially so in matters of the spirit.”

Being Chanukah, the Rebbe wrote that “If ‘a little light dispels a lot of darkness,’ how much more so a growing light, which… is cumulative in its effect, and which is also symbolized in the lights of Chanukah which are increasing in number every night.”

As an immigrant to Canada, I had to live there for five years before I could become a citizen and travel outside the country. But with Hashem’s help, I found a way to go to New York and meet the Rebbe in person just three or four years after my arrival. (more…)

Although I had attended a secular high school in Sydney, Australia, and planned to continue to university, I was influenced by student emissaries of the Rebbe to take a break and spend two “gap” years studying Torah at the Yeshivah Gedolah in Melbourne.

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I vividly recall those shluchim – Rabbi Yosef Minkowitz and Rabbi Hirshel Morozov – when they first came to my high school during the intermediate days of Sukkot. Although they spoke briefly, they spoke passionately about Judaism, in a language the students could relate to, and they moved the hearts of several youngsters like me, who became followers of the Rebbe. Later on, I heard it said that the Rebbe had compared education to nuclear energy, and that is certainly what happened that Sukkot. It was as if the Rebbe took a Yiddishkeit bomb and dropped it on Australia through those shluchim.

After two years at the yeshivah, I went on to Sydney University to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree.

In December 1974, during the summer vacation in Australia, I came to visit the Rebbe in New York.

During that trip, I was granted a private audience with the Rebbe. I knew it would be a life-changing moment and I meant to take full advantage of the opportunity, writing a long note to the Rebbe in which I enumerated all my issues and questions. When I finally came before him, I saw my note on his desk with many detailed pencil markings on it. I understood that the Rebbe had spent time reading everything I had written and had something to say about it all. I was awe-struck by that thought.

In my note, I had mentioned that I was becoming disenchanted with university. I had already completed two years toward a three-year Bachelor of Arts degree but I had no intention of continuing on with a fourth year, which would grant me the Diploma of Education, because I wanted to return to yeshivah. (more…)