We had been married for more than a decade, with five children and one more on the way. After our marriage in 1946, we had been working at the Chabad school in Providence, Rhode Island, and then spent eight years in Buffalo, New York, teaching and working with the local community, until we had to leave when the school there closed down. Throughout this time, my husband, Rabbi Yitzchak Groner, had made a couple of trips to Australia and New Zealand, connecting with local Jews and raising charity for recent immigrants from Russia. On his second trip, the community in Melbourne asked him to stay on as a rabbi, but he had responsibilities and we weren’t yet ready to make such a move.

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I was raised in a Torah-observant family in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, where I attended religious schools through junior high school. But when I expressed the desire to continue my studies in a yeshivah, my parents objected. My father, an immigrant from Russia, wanted me to have a proper college education that would lead to a proper career so, as a compromise, I enrolled in Yeshiva University, which offered both secular and religious studies and which had a campus near our home in Washington Heights.

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While at Yeshiva University, I first encountered Chabad. This was in 1954, when a bearded young man approached me and explained that he was from Lubavitch. Berel Shemtov was his name, and he had a few books with him – they were copies of the Tanya, the seminal work of Chabad philosophy authored by the Alter Rebbe in the 18th century – and he invited me and several of my colleagues to join a weekly group to study it. He only spoke Yiddish, so we had a hard time communicating with him, but we joined the class, and for a few weeks we studied in the evenings in one of the empty classrooms.

But when the university administration found out, they objected and the class was stopped. Berel reported this to the Rebbe who advised him to speak directly to the YU dean, Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. Berel did just that; Rabbi Soloveitchik gave us his total approval and the class resumed.

After two years of Tanya studies, I was on fire spiritually – I felt as if I had acquired a new soul – and I wanted to quit YU in order to enroll in a Chabad yeshivah. Of course, my parents were not happy about this, and my father wrote to the Rebbe complaining: “My son wants to stop his secular learning. What is going to become of him?”

The Rebbe responded, “B’shum panim v’ofen nit – Under no circumstances” should I quit college. His opinion was that I should complete my studies, earn my diploma and use that diploma to spread Torah. (more…)

My father, Rabbi Nachum Goldshmid, was born in Yekaterinoslav (today Dnipro), Ukraine, where the chief rabbi was the Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, also known as “Reb Levik.” My grandfather Reb Yitzchak Goldshmid, the local kosher slaughterer, had a close relationship with Reb Levik.

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Aside from their eldest, the Rebbe, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak and Rebbetzin Chana had two younger sons: Berel and Leibel. The latter was the same age as my father, and the two forged a strong friendship that would last for many years.

Around 1909, as the boys were nearing school age, Reb Levik asked the chasid Reb Zalman Vilenkin to open a cheder, a small school, for his children and some other boys, in Reb Zalman’s home.

Many years later, when my aunt met with the Rebbe for the first time, her husband made mention of her maiden name.

“Goldshmid?” asked the Rebbe, looking at my aunt. “You are Reb Nachum’s sister?”

She confirmed this to be the case, and the Rebbe continued, “I learned with him in cheder. I also knew your father well.”

When she recounted her meeting to my father, he remarked, “I never learned together with the Rebbe in cheder. We learned in the same home, but I didn’t learn with him – he always studied on his own.”

The Rebbe was some four years older than my father, so when he joined the cheder, the Rebbe was already eight. The students were split into three classes, with the top “class” comprising one student, the Rebbe. In addition to being the oldest of the group, he was also, in terms of his abilities, without a peer. (more…)

When I was seven, my family moved to Parsippany, New Jersey — a place that, at the time, lacked an organized observant community. Despite this, my parents took it upon themselves to establish an Orthodox synagogue in our home, the first in the area, while my siblings and I attended a nearby Jewish day school. With no religious neighbors and a limited support network, we were incredibly fortunate to be just ten minutes away from Morristown, New Jersey.

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In Morristown, we found a lifeline in its vibrant Chabad community. Spending time with the students of the yeshivah and other members of this close-knit community, we deepened our understanding of what we were learning in school and integrated it into our daily lives. In the summer of 1977, just before my Bar Mitzvah, I attended Camp Gan Israel in Morristown, run by Chabad, and it was an experience that left a lasting imprint on my soul.

By then, our entire family had grown close to the Chabad community in Morristown. One evening, towards the end of that summer, we received an unexpected call at home.

“We’re heading to a private audience with the Rebbe tonight,” a family friend told my father. “If you join us, you too can meet him. Are you available?”

“Absolutely,” my father replied without hesitation.

They picked us up that evening and drove us to 770. I can still recall the thrill of sitting in the car with my father and brothers, each of us buzzing with anticipation. What blessing should we ask for? What would the Rebbe say to us? That alone left a profound impression on me, along with every other detail of the journey — driving into Brooklyn, parking the car, entering 770, and waiting outside the Rebbe’s door. We even practiced the blessing one recites before seeing a great Jewish sage. I had seen the Rebbe once before, as a young child, but this time, I was old enough to grasp the significance of the moment. (more…)

In 1953, most Lubavitchers in North America lived in Brooklyn; not in Crown Heights, but in Brownsville. That was when my family moved there as well, from Paris, where I was born following the Second World War.

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On Shabbat, we would walk half an hour to be with the Rebbe for the prayers and chasidic gatherings – farbrengens. In those days, the Rebbe’s farbrengens were short, less than two hours, and they took place in what is today the upstairs small synagogue in 770.

The platform that the Rebbe sat on during the farbrengens was a piece of plywood on top of a few milk crates, placed against the southern wall of the room. In front of the Rebbe were two rows of two tables, where a total of forty people sat, with more people standing around; in all, there were maybe one hundred and fifty people squashed into the room.

Directly across from the Rebbe there was a table where all the children under Bar Mitzvah would stand. We didn’t understand much of what the Rebbe was saying, but we could still see the Rebbe and participate in the event.

Unlike adults, who were able to have an audience with the Rebbe in honor of their birthdays, children couldn’t have their own private yechidus, as these audiences are called. But once a year, at the farbrengen preceding an upcoming birthday, we could push through the crowd onto the platform and tell the Rebbe: “This Thursday is my birthday.”

The Rebbe would give the child a blessing and say l’chaim. It didn’t take much time, but every kid was able to have his special moment with the Rebbe. (more…)

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?”

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“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.)

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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…)