Monthly Archives: June 2024

My Bar Mitzvah was on Shabbat, at the very beginning of 1967, with the celebration set to be held in a local Crown Heights shul the night after Shabbat. On the Thursday night before, I went with my parents for an audience with the Rebbe.

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The first thing that struck me during the audience was the respect the Rebbe gave me when he asked: “What have you accepted upon yourself to learn and say over at your Bar Mitzvah?”

I told the Rebbe about the pilpul and the ma’amar – the Talmudic discussion and the chasidic discourse – that I had been preparing to deliver. The Rebbe tested me on both, and then he proceeded to give a blessing to my parents and to myself.

But I was taken aback at the way he had put the question: What did you accept upon yourself? I had simply studied the material that my father gave me to study! The way the Rebbe phrased the question made it as though my speech was my own doing. It had the effect of bolstering the self-esteem of a young Bar Mitzvah boy.

Now in those days, every Motzaei Shabbat, my father would teach a half-hour class live on the radio. The class had two segments: fifteen minutes dedicated to the study of Tanya, the seminal work of Chabad philosophy, and fifteen minutes reviewing the Rebbe’s latest Torah teachings. Although the Tanya segment could be prerecorded, since the second segment came from the Rebbe’s most recent talks, it had to be broadcast live. And since my Bar Mitzvah was being celebrated in Crown Heights, it was impossible to get to the radio station in Midtown Manhattan and back in time. Instead, together with the studio technician, he came up with what was, at the time, a pioneering solution. He would link up the radio station to the location of the Bar Mitzvah and broadcast directly from there.  (more…)

My family had just moved to Chicago when my father passed away. It was 1948, and I was eleven years old. At the end of the school year, my mother decided to move back to her family in Philadelphia, and then she sent me off to the Chabad yeshivah in Brooklyn. I traveled from Chicago to New York by train together with Rabbi Dovid Moshe Lieberman, then the rabbi of Bnei Ruven, a local Chabad congregation.

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Just a few years after the war, the yeshivah had a mix of American kids, some Russian boys, and even a few Hungarians and other non-Lubavitchers whose communities didn’t yet have yeshivot of their own.

I saw the Previous Rebbe a couple times before he passed away in the winter of 1950. On special occasions, he would lead a farbrengen in his apartment upstairs in 770, but on account of his health, only a small number of chasidim would be allowed in – along with the odd person who managed to get in before the door closed.

Towards the end of a farbrengen on the 19th of Kislev of that year, the Previous Rebbe announced that “all the doors should be open – everyone should come in.” I made my way in, but there were too many taller people standing around his table for me to see anything. Then, an older yeshivah student picked me up and held me in the air for a minute. I saw the Previous Rebbe, wearing a fur spodek, his face flushed red beneath it. This was two months before his passing.

I had also seen his successor, the Rebbe – then still known as “the Ramash” – by then. A few months earlier, at a farbrengen held during Sukkot, someone pointed him out to me: “That’s the Rebbe’s son-in-law,” he told me. I watched as all the chasidim followed his lead on Simchat Torah, dancing as he danced, and then stopping when he stopped.

Over the course of the next year, as the chasidim began urging the Rebbe to take over his late father-in-law’s mantle, he began to speak in public more regularly. At farbrengens, he would often cry when speaking about the Previous Rebbe, and would always talk about how, even after their passing, the righteous do not leave their followers behind. “The shepherd has not left his flock,” he would say. “The Rebbe has not gone away – he is here with us.” (more…)

One evening, the Rebbe’s wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka, called 770, as she often would, to speak with the Rebbe. The Rebbe often worked late, but on this occasion the secretary who answered informed her that he had left some time before, and was not in 770 anymore.

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