Monthly Archives: October 2024

I was born in Germany in 1946, and I moved to Israel with my family in 1948. There, we settled in Beit Gamliel, an agricultural village that my father had helped found.

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As a child, I attended the village school, and then a religious cheder with an old-school teacher in the afternoons. He used to discipline us with a little cane, which terrified me, especially on Thursdays when there was a test on the weekly parshah. Too afraid to go to school on test day, I would roam the fields. My father, who was worried about the fedayeen terrorists who were active in those days, had to go out and look for me. He didn’t know what to do about my education until a friend suggested that he send me to the Chabad school in nearby Rishon Letziyon. And so began my connection with Chabad.

Shortly after, I was acting out in class, when my new teacher, Rabbi Shlomo Greenwald, came over to me. But to my surprise, instead of hitting me with a cane or a belt, he gave me a kind pat on the head. I wasn’t used to that! I became an excellent student and continued to learn in Chabad schools for the next few years, before going on to high school and then the army. (more…)

In 1954, after I had finished college and got engaged to my husband, I had an audience with the Rebbe. First, he asked about how my life was going and what had been happening since the last time he had seen me. Then, because I was about to get married, he asked whether I was planning on wearing a sheitel – a wig worn by married women to fulfill the halachic requirement to cover their hair.

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I was raised always to be totally truthful, and I had a very open, honest relationship with the Rebbe, so without thinking about being diplomatic, I just said exactly what I felt: “No, I’m not planning on wearing a sheitel.”

The Rebbe didn’t get annoyed or seem disappointed. He just looked at me with a big smile and asked, “Why not?”

“Well,” I explained, “All of my friends are college graduates from nice religious homes, and none of them are planning to wear a sheitel. Only old people do that, and it’s not something I’ve ever considered.”

I had been living in Boston since I was fourteen years old – when the Previous Rebbe sent my father to assume a rabbinic position there in 1947 – and it was a different world from the Chabad community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. There was a large community of Jews of all types, many of them observant, but they were more secular on the whole, and there certainly wasn’t a Lubavitcher community; there were maybe two or three Chabad girls in the whole city, and none of them were my age.

“Are you going to keep your hair covered?” the Rebbe inquired further.

“Oh yes,” I replied. “I’m going to wear hats. That is what everybody in Boston does.” (more…)

My family left Russia in 1946, eventually arriving in Paris, where we remained for seven years. The Rebbe’s mother, Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, fled Russia shortly after we did, and for three months in 1947, she stayed with us.

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We lived in an apartment on the top floor of a big house in Paris owned by our uncle, Rabbi Zalman Schneerson; he was the brother of my mother, Yehudis Butman, and they were cousins of the Rebbe. We had a dining room and two bedrooms, one of which became Rebbetzin Chana’s. For as long as we lived there, we continued to refer to it as “Rebbetzin Chana’s room.”

The Rebbe, who was still simply known as “Rabbi Schneerson,” had left Europe for the United States years earlier, but that year, he returned to France to reunite with his mother and to bring her back with him to New York. During his stay, the Rebbe would come to our house to visit her twice every single day, in the morning and the afternoon. My mother would serve them tea, and sometimes cake as well.

Aside from our relation on my mother’s side, my family had another connection with the Rebbe’s family. During the war, my family had been living in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan; I was actually born there, in the town of Frunze, which is today Bishkek.

Not far from us was the city of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, where the Rebbe’s parents lived for several months in 1944. The Soviet authorities had arrested the Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, for his rabbinic activities, and exiled him to that region. Partly because of his ailing health – he passed away that year – his sentence had been lifted, allowing him and Rebbetzin Chana to move to Alma-Ata.

During this time, my father, Reb Zalman Butman, assisted the Rebbe’s parents with whatever they needed to cover their expenses each week. When the Rebbe came to Paris in 1947, he told my father: “Reb Zalman, I know you supported my father. I would like to know how much it cost so I can repay you.” (more…)