Monthly Archives: July 2024

I came to New York from Brazil in 1950, a few months after the passing of the Previous Rebbe, and spent the next decade there as a yeshivah student, learning Torah in the vicinity of his son-in-law, who would soon become the seventh Rebbe.

One day, as I was learning in the study hall at 770 Eastern Parkway, Rabbi Hodakov, the Rebbe’s secretary, called me into his office, and asked whether I spoke Spanish. Being from Brazil, I was fluent in Portuguese, but I also spoke Spanish fairly well.

“Can we trust you with translating the letters that the Rebbe gets in Spanish and Portuguese?”

Click here for full-color print version

“Yes,” I answered.

“You must understand that these letters are private; you need to forget about what you read after writing the translation,” he warned drily, making clear the office’s strict rules for confidentiality – which I accepted.

So, for a few years, I was given the letters written to the Rebbe in Spanish and Portuguese, and I would translate them to the best of my ability. Some of the envelopes had already been opened by the Rebbe, and some had not, but usually the Rebbe wrote an instruction “to be translated,” on the envelope, underlined, in Hebrew.

There were several such letters per week, not a very heavy volume, but translating them was time consuming. Just deciphering the handwriting was often difficult, and then I had to figure out what the writer wanted to say, without knowing them or the situation they were describing. It made me think about what the Rebbe went through on a daily basis with all of the other letters he received.

If I didn’t understand what somebody had written, I would write a literal translation, and then add a few dots indicating that I didn’t know what the words meant. I might also add a note saying that I had difficulty understanding the letter.

Living in the yeshivah dormitory as I did complicated things further: I had to find a time and place to do this work without any of my colleagues seeing what I was doing. (more…)

After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Rebbe pushed for increasing efforts into Jewish outreach. Over the course of the next year, he introduced four new “mitzvah campaigns” – in addition to the tefillin campaign that he launched in 1967, before the Six Day War – calling on Chabad chasidim to promote Torah study, mezuzah, owning Jewish books, and charity. (There would be five more such campaigns over the next few years – for Shabbat candles, kosher, family purity, education, and love for a fellow Jew, for a total of ten.)

Click here for full-color print version

By this time, I had been studying in the Central Lubavitcher Yeshiva at 770 Eastern Parkway for a couple of years, having arrived there in the summer of 1970. Together with the other yeshivah students, I enthusiastically joined in these outreach activities, or “mivtzoyim,” as they became known.

Later that same year, there was a terrible terrorist attack that took place in the northern Israeli town of Maalot, in which over a hundred high school children were taken hostage, and over twenty murdered during the rescue attempt. Once again, the Rebbe spoke of the imperative to spread Jewish observance through the mivtzoim. It was in the wake of those events that outreach activities with the famous “mitzvah tanks” began in earnest.

Back then, the mitzvah tanks were not yet the fancy mobile homes they are today; they were just plain old trucks decorated on the outside with different Jewish-themed banners. On top of the vehicles, we strapped speakers playing lively chasidic music. Then, we hauled a few tables from the shul at 770, brought our tefillin and a few basic Jewish books – prayer books, Chumashim, and Tanyas – and spread out across New York City.

It was the yeshivah boys who took the initiative in making the mitzvah tanks, but the Rebbe took a real liking to them and encouraged them tremendously. (more…)