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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After Lubavitch came to America in the 1940s, its first initiative to reach the outside world was the Jewish Released Time program for public school children.

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My father, Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Raichik, would go to New York every year for all the festivals of the month of Tishrei, from Rosh Hashana through Simchat Torah. Sometimes, other members of our family would go along. In 1972, my father decided that I should join him and my older brothers in New York for Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.

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When we had our audience with the Rebbe, he gave me a blessing for my ninth birthday, which was coming up on the ninth day of Kislev, and noted that it was a special one: “Nine on nine,” he commented in Hebrew: Tes on Tes.

The Rebbe also tested me on my studies in the Talmud. We were learning about the kinds of identifying signs one can use to prove ownership over a lost object.

Inside the room, there was a clock on the bookshelves that stood behind us. “What could serve as a sign for such a clock?” queried the Rebbe.

“The color of this clock could be a sign,” I suggested, and the Rebbe accepted my answer. There were three of us in the room at the time – me, one of my older brothers, and my father – but the Rebbe spent most of the audience focusing on me.

But all of this came at the end of our visit to New York. There was another personal interaction I had with the Rebbe before then, just a couple days after my arrival.

The trip from Los Angeles was actually my first time on a plane; my previous two trips to New York were by train, a two-and-a half-day journey each way. This time, I flew together with Marty Weiss, a family friend, and when we arrived in New York, it was a rainy morning.

Being so young, I was barely aware of what was going on. I was pretty green and had to be told what was happening, where to go, and what to expect. (more…)

The one private audience I had with the Rebbe was before my Bar Mitzvah. Having heard many stories about him, it was a special opportunity to finally be able to meet such a great person.

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He asked about where I went to yeshivah, and I told him that I didn’t go to Lubavitch.

“That’s okay,” he said, and, after I told him about the yeshivah I attended, he went on to ask which tractate of the Talmud I was learning, and about my studies on the secular front. He also asked about my Bar Mitzvah speech, and while I only said a line or two, I got the impression that he was interested in what I had to say, and interested in me as a person.

Although I didn’t learn in a Lubavitcher yeshivah, I do follow the customs of Chabad, and in fact my family has been deeply involved in Chabad for several generations.

When my father, Sholom Nelson, was growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, Lubavitch did not yet have a yeshivah in America, and so he went to Yeshivas Chaim Berlin for elementary school. But after the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe came to America in 1940 and opened a yeshivah, he immediately transferred to Lubavitch, where he was one of the first six students to enroll. He found that they offered a sense of inclusion, that they welcomed everybody and cared about every single student.

My father also became quite close with the Previous Rebbe’s family. He recalled that the Previous Rebbe used to sit near the window in 770, and when he saw my father walking by outside, he would occasionally ask for him, or send a message to him through his secretary, to see how he was doing. (more…)

I didn’t grow up in a religious home, but my life was changed when – at age 26 – I attended an “Encounter with Chabad” event for college students, also known as a pegishah. That pegishah – which was held at the end of December 1972 – included inspiriting Torah lectures as well as lots of robust singing of chasidic melodies. It proved very meaningful to me spiritually.

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The event ended around midnight on December 31 and, walking out of Chabad Headquarters onto Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, I saw non-Jewish people celebrating the New Year, mindlessly blowing horns and falling down drunk. The contrast between what I just experienced and what I was seeing in front of me couldn’t have been greater.

This had such a profound effect on me that when I went back home to Silver Spring, Maryland, I sought out the Orthodox rabbi of the Hillel House at George Washington University and the Chabad emissary at the University of Maryland, and I began regularly studying Torah with them.

Not long after, I decided to take a leave of absence from my job – as a teacher of sociology at Montgomery College – and I enrolled in Tiferes Bachurim, the Chabad yeshivah in Morristown, New Jersey, geared to students who were just beginning to learn about Judaism. While studying there, I had my first meeting with the Rebbe.

In preparation for that meeting, I wrote a note outlining my life issues for which I was seeking the Rebbe’s advice.

One of those issues was that I did not want to return to my job in Silver Spring because there was no rabbinic leadership there. Ethics of the Fathers teaches that one must have a rabbi to guide him – a point which later became the focus of one of the Rebbe’s campaigns – and I had no one there. (more…)

Yonason Adler

I met Devorah in graduate school, and after dating for a few months, I asked her to marry me. She said yes – but her mother objected. I was a real hippie type, with shoulder-length hair, and she was not comfortable with that. But I didn’t give up, I cut my hair, and after three years, in 1969, we got married, settling in Silver Spring, Maryland, near Washington D.C.

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By then Devorah and I were also in the process of becoming more observant, but even though my mother-in-law had agreed to the marriage, she still wasn’t completely happy with the idea of her daughter being religious. Because my mother-in-law did a lot of entertaining, hosting gatherings for family and friends, our refusal to eat food in her home that was not kosher to orthodox standards was a problem.

Initially, we tried making some changes that would enable us to eat there. She would buy meat from a kosher butcher, but then she would make some mistake so there were still kashrut problems with the food. We offered to get place settings that matched her fancy china and that we would cook for ourselves the same foods that that she was serving, but she didn’t like that idea. She kept pushing us to eat her food, we kept refusing, and the tension in our relationship kept getting worse.

During those years, my wife and I were very close with a Chabad emissary named Rabbi Itche Springer. After speaking with him about the trouble with my in-laws, he suggested we make an appointment to meet the Rebbe.

We came to 770 on a Sunday night. There, we sat on a bench with a list of questions for what seemed like forever. At about two o’clock in the morning, we went into the Rebbe’s room.

We had already been briefed on how to act during an audience with the Rebbe: Not to shake his hand, to stand rather than sit, and so on. But when we walked in, my wife was feeling very faint so the Rebbe took one look at her and said. “Sit down!” (more…)

It was a severe time for the Jewish people of Russia. Under Premier Brezhnev, the USSR was no longer sending people off to Siberia and shooting them, but it was still a totalitarian state, and Jews were still being imprisoned or losing their jobs for engaging in religious activities.

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For decades, a Chabad organization called Ezras Achim had been providing them with assistance, primarily in the form of parcels, but due to the tension between the two superpowers, it was difficult in the early ‘80s for Americans to travel there in person. Living in a more minor power, which is also closer geographically, Jews in England were uniquely positioned to cross the Iron Curtain. That is why I was enlisted, by an activist named Ernie Hirsch, to make the trip; he had learned that the Russian Jewish leadership was primarily associated with Chabad, so he wanted to send Chabad chasidim.

In 1981, Reb Nosson “Bobby” Vogel and I flew to Moscow from London. We went for exactly one week, over Rosh Hashanah. We barely brought any clothing because our suitcases were full with enough Kosher food to last two months, almost all of which we left behind. We also brought Jewish books; three beautiful etrogim, which we kept among apples and oranges so as not to arouse suspicion; and a few recordings of chasidic melodies being sung at farbrengens in 770, in which you could actually hear the Rebbe singing along. I also took tapes of the Rebbe’s public talks in Russian, disguised with some classical radio music I had recorded at the beginning and end of each tape.

When Reb Nosson and I entered Russia, a customs agent spent nearly an hour inspecting everything we had – including the tapes.

“Play this one,” he ordered, pointing to a specific tape. “Rewind it first, and don’t stop until I tell you to.” (more…)