The first book that I published – my entrée into the publishing industry – was a pocket Book of Psalms, Tehillim. In 1975, when I traveled from Israel to the Rebbe and had a private audience with him, I brought along a copy, and I submitted it to his secretary in advance.

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During the audience, the Rebbe reached into his drawer, took out the Tehillim, and leafed through it. He inquired about whether we had been successful in selling the books.

“Thank G-d,” I replied.

“I heard that it’s going well in the army,” he noted, meaning that the soldiers of the IDF sought after such Tehillims, for the spiritual protection they provided.

“Have you ever seen such a Chumash [Five Books of Moses] that also includes Rashi’s commentary?” he continued.

I replied that I had seen a Chumash of that size, published by Sinai, but without any biblical commentaries.

“There is such a Chumash with Rashi,” he informed me, “but I don’t know if the text they used for the commentary is accurate without mistakes.” For years, I searched for such a book, and I eventually found a miniature Chumash with Rashi, slightly larger than our Tehillim, published by “Levin-Epstein.”

I subsequently printed Tehillims of six different sizes. Computerized layout and printing was coming into its own in those days, which enabled me to produce clear, newly-typeset texts with beautiful letters. When my wife next visited the Rebbe, she brought him one of the new volumes and, in turn, the Rebbe presented her with a dollar bill “for your husband, the publisher.” (more…)

Even before we met, my husband and I were on a quest for spirituality; it was the sixties and we were both on the hippie path. We wanted to know whether there was some foundational truth that existed throughout the universe, beyond what any individual person believed.

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I had grown up in an assimilated American Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland, and unfortunately, my parents couldn’t teach me what they didn’t know. My parents never had the opportunity to have a Jewish education, although it was important to them I had one; I attended Sunday school as a child and our family also belonged to a Reform Temple.

I spent time exploring groups like Hare Krishna and then, as a high school exchange student in Argentina, I met Shlomo Carlebach. He encouraged me to learn about the Torah and my heritage and we remained close for years after. He was the only rabbi I knew and trusted, and when Dovid and I later decided to get married, he came to Baltimore and officiated at our wedding.

We spent the summer of 1971 in my husband’s hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, where we got to know Rabbi Hershel Fogelman, the local Chabad rabbi, as well as other families in the community. They began encouraging us to take up different mitzvot. “Try eating kosher,” they would say. “Try one Shabbat; see if you like it. This is the mikveh; see what you think about it.”

We were open to all of it. “Teach us, show us, and then we will decide what we can handle and if we want to continue with it,” we told them. We tried everything, and kept on asking questions until we got answers that satisfied us. Then, Rabbi Fogelman sent us to Crown Heights for Yom Kippur. (more…)

The person telling this story should really be my husband, Dr. Larry Resnick, but since he is not with us anymore, I will have to do the best I can.

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The story begins in October of 1977 when, on the holiday of Simchat Torah, the Rebbe suffered a heart attack. He did not want to be hospitalized, so the doctors who initially treated him set up a coronary care unit in his office at 770 Eastern Parkway. But after two weeks, they had to return to their regular patients, and my husband was called in.

Now my husband was by then quite famous as a brilliant scientist. A child prodigy, he graduated college at 16 and medical school at 21, becoming the youngest person in the United States to be awarded an MD degree. Eventually, he developed specialties in endocrinology and cardiology, focusing his research specifically on the causes of hypertension.

When he was called in to the Rebbe, he was visiting New York, but upon being invited to stay on as the Rebbe’s primary physician, he had to decline. He was then serving in the US Army, running the clinical research center at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, and he could not go AWOL.

The Rebbe’s staff  began pulling strings with several US Senators to get him transferred from Hawaii to New York, and the request went all the way up to the White House. The end result of that was a phone call from President Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff demanding to know who Larry thought he was. To this my husband replied that if the leader of another religion had asked for an American doctor to care for him in Rome, the White House would be so proud it would hold a press conference to blast the news. Well, someone who is of utmost important to the Jewish people should receive the same treatment. (more…)

It was a seven-day voyage from Tunisia to Montreal, and I was fifteen years old. For seven days all we saw was the sea, yet the boat traveled in a fixed direction the entire time. That’s how it is in life: Without a goal, you can go in all kinds of ways, and end up lost at sea. You’ve got to have a destination. With this thought in mind, I came to Montreal in 1957, looking for some direction.

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Before long, I found what I was looking for. I began attending a class delivered by a young Lubavitch yeshivah student, and then learning Tanya with another. At the suggestion of the yeshivah boys, I began writing to the Rebbe in French. I wrote about my studies and my situation, including some difficulties I was having, and I asked for his blessings.

I was overjoyed when I received the Rebbe’s reply, which was written in English. The very thought that the Rebbe had sent me a letter was unbelievable to me.

He told me not to be discouraged by the ups and downs I felt from my “inner battle with the yetzer” – my evil inclination – and advised me to study the Tanya’s “very illuminating and useful guidance” on this subject. The good things I was doing, he reassured me, would lead to more good and would not be wasted, “for all that is holy is eternal.” I had mentioned that I was studying science in school, so he added, “you know that nothing in the physical world is lost, and this is especially so in matters of the spirit.”

Being Chanukah, the Rebbe wrote that “If ‘a little light dispels a lot of darkness,’ how much more so a growing light, which… is cumulative in its effect, and which is also symbolized in the lights of Chanukah which are increasing in number every night.”

As an immigrant to Canada, I had to live there for five years before I could become a citizen and travel outside the country. But with Hashem’s help, I found a way to go to New York and meet the Rebbe in person just three or four years after my arrival. (more…)

Although I had attended a secular high school in Sydney, Australia, and planned to continue to university, I was influenced by student emissaries of the Rebbe to take a break and spend two “gap” years studying Torah at the Yeshivah Gedolah in Melbourne.

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I vividly recall those shluchim – Rabbi Yosef Minkowitz and Rabbi Hirshel Morozov – when they first came to my high school during the intermediate days of Sukkot. Although they spoke briefly, they spoke passionately about Judaism, in a language the students could relate to, and they moved the hearts of several youngsters like me, who became followers of the Rebbe. Later on, I heard it said that the Rebbe had compared education to nuclear energy, and that is certainly what happened that Sukkot. It was as if the Rebbe took a Yiddishkeit bomb and dropped it on Australia through those shluchim.

After two years at the yeshivah, I went on to Sydney University to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree.

In December 1974, during the summer vacation in Australia, I came to visit the Rebbe in New York.

During that trip, I was granted a private audience with the Rebbe. I knew it would be a life-changing moment and I meant to take full advantage of the opportunity, writing a long note to the Rebbe in which I enumerated all my issues and questions. When I finally came before him, I saw my note on his desk with many detailed pencil markings on it. I understood that the Rebbe had spent time reading everything I had written and had something to say about it all. I was awe-struck by that thought.

In my note, I had mentioned that I was becoming disenchanted with university. I had already completed two years toward a three-year Bachelor of Arts degree but I had no intention of continuing on with a fourth year, which would grant me the Diploma of Education, because I wanted to return to yeshivah. (more…)

I was all of ten years old in 1967, when the Rebbe sent the first group of six yeshivah students from 770 – “the bochurim” as we called them – to Australia.

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There were venerable chasidim in Melbourne, my grandfather Reb Isser Kluwgant among them, but they inhabited a different world than us kids, and we didn’t personally relate to them or aspire to adopt their way of life. We loved and respected them, but they were distant.

And then along came these American boys, like a breath of fresh air. They were young outstanding Torah scholars who taught Torah at the yeshivah from morning to night and spoke in the synagogues on Shabbat. But beyond that, they brought Judaism to life for us, making it something we wanted to be a part of. They emanated joy, along with a deep fulfillment, and there was an innocence about them; they were wholesome and whole.

They also had a certain aura about them, a sense of something beyond our world. Later I understood it was the aura of 770, the fact that they were chasidim of the Rebbe. And so we were fascinated by them. We scrutinized their mannerisms, the way they spoke, their gestures – we absorbed it all. The Rebbe knew this would happen, which is exactly why he sent them.

Had these bachurim not come to Australia, it is quite possible I would have remained observant, but that I am a chasid and a shliach is a direct result of their influence and inspiration. (more…)

I was born in France in 1935, after my family fled there from Germany. Following the Second World War, we made our way to Israel, and soon after, my father, a graduate of the legendary Brisker yeshiva, passed away.

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As a young man, my own yeshivah career began in the town of Be’er Yaakov, in a Lithuanian-style yeshivah. During that time, I became connected to Chabad when I began participating in a secret Tanya class – something that went on for some time. My brother, Rabbi Aharon Mordechai Zilberstrom, had also become close with the movement during the war, and he helped found and run several Chabad schools afterwards. Eventually, because of these connections, I transferred to the Chabad yeshivah in Lod in 1955.

Two years later, the Rebbe asked the yeshivah faculty to send him a list of students who were capable of being teachers and strengthening Chabad’s expanding school network; of serving as “education emissaries,” as they were called. Of that list, the Rebbe chose ten names, including mine. This was how I began working in education while still a yeshivah student.

I taught in several schools – first in Ta’anach, and then in the Malcha neighborhood of Jerusalem, where I later became principal. I also taught and headed up two newly-founded schools that had been set up for new immigrants to Israel from Morocco and Romania.

Those early days were hard. The authorities were often uninterested in cooperating with us and could make things quite challenging. We worked in difficult conditions, in rented classrooms into which we would drag our desks and chairs each morning – then out again in the evening – and in sheds with roofs that leaked in the winter. Along the way, however, we received letters from the Rebbe in which he would encourage us to carry on, while offering instructions and detailed educational guidance. (more…)

My love for the Land of Israel comes from my parents. They moved here when they were young – first to Tel Aviv, back when it was still small, then to a little farm in Kfar Hasidim – and they nurtured our connection to the land.

My family knew very li

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ttle about Chabad. After Baruch and I married, he wanted to go see the Rebbe. Personally, I felt my place was in Israel, but I went along with my husband. In 1964, we traveled to New York by ship, and when they finally met, the Rebbe encouraged my husband to attend art school in New York, which led to us living there for a year.

About a month after arriving, I had an audience with the Rebbe; I was pregnant at the time, and I wanted to receive his blessing ahead of the birth.

He spoke to me like a father to his child. He asked me many questions, such as whether I had friends in New York, and what the doctors had said about my pregnancy. He even gave me the names of some local women with whom I could speak Hebrew – women I have remained friends with until today. I had known nothing about the Rebbe, but after that first meeting, I felt very close to him.

After a year in Crown Heights, the Rebbe told us that our place was in Israel.

“Where?” we asked.

“Wherever you want,” he replied. (more…)

Back in the early ‘80s, I owned a bookbinding business in New York and had a few regular Chabad customers. They would tell me about their Rebbe, and around Passover time, they told me about a special gathering he would have before the holiday which they invited me to join.

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I went, and I was very impressed. There were a lot of people there, and the Rebbe sat at a long dais in the center of a cavernous room. There were some prominent Jewish leaders in attendance as well as some local politicians, some of whom were not Jewish.

The Rebbe spoke in Yiddish, but I was given a transistor radio that could play in my ear a simultaneous English translation of what he was saying. Every once in a while, shot glasses with wine were passed around and when the Rebbe was between talks, everyone would say l’chaim. You would hold up your cup, and the Rebbe would give you a toast. At one point, I made eye contact with him, he smiled, and I made a l’chaim.

It would be a long time before I had a real face-to-face with the Rebbe. In the meantime, in 1983, I married my wife Rebecca. We wanted to have a child, but it wasn’t happening. After a while, we began going to fertility clinics and trying out different medicines. When that didn’t work, we became a little discouraged.

“It’s not so bad,” my sister told me. “You can adopt.”

Well, one day in 1989, I was watching TV in the living room with Becky, when out of nowhere she said, “Jay, I want to go to the Rebbe to get a blessing. Maybe he can help us.”

I hadn’t seen the Rebbe since that gathering, and had never actually met him, but I knew that he received people every Sunday. You could go tell him what your problem was and he would give you a blessing. (more…)

After the Rebbe’s mother passed away, in 1964, the Rebbe introduced something new: Every time he would hold a farbrengen on Shabbat, he would select a gloss from Rashi, the classic eleventh-century Torah commentator, on the Torah reading of the week. He would ask detailed questions on it, and then give his answer, which was always brilliant yet simultaneously simple enough for a child to understand.

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In the ‘80s, however, the Rebbe requested that we present the questions on Rashi instead of him. “I want to address questions that others have brought up,” he told the chasidim.

Several yeshivot used to publish a weekly journal in which people wrote ideas or questions on a variety of Torah subjects – and many continue to do so today. And so, whereas the Rebbe would usually ask his own questions on Rashi, he said that people should now publish their questions in these journals, and he would choose one or more of those questions to address.

We also saw how the Rebbe took pleasure when we would analyze his own teachings carefully, publishing questions or explanations in the journals on things he had said. Sometimes, the Rebbe would even rebuke us when an obvious question on something he had said wasn’t noticed – “why didn’t anyone ask this?” he would demand.

On occasion, I would write questions on the weekly Torah reading directly to the Rebbe. In one letter to the Rebbe from the spring of 1983, I asked a question on something he had recently taught.

Commenting on the verse in the first parshah, Bereishit, “And the snake was more cunning than all the beasts of the field,” the Rebbe had wondered why it only says that the snake was smarter than the “beasts” – what about the fish or the birds? The answer, said the Rebbe, was that it was self-understood: If the snake is smarter than any other land animal, this would imply it is also smarter than other, lesser creatures. (more…)