I was raised in a traditional Zionist Jewish home in Sydney, Australia. While on a visit in Israel, I became attracted to Chabad-Lubavitch and, upon return to Australia, I enrolled in a Chabad yeshiva, which eventually led me to learning in New York. That is when I found out I had Chabad ancestors – including the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Rebbe of Chabad – and I

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became a loyal follower of the Chabad Rebbe.

While I was in New York, I was approached by a prestigious rabbi from another chasidic group, who told me about a family that was searching for their long-lost daughter. She had been born and raised in Boro Park, and she had married there; unfortunately, the marriage ended badly, but her husband – for whatever reason – refused to agree to a divorce.

After this went on for a period of time, she “snapped” (to use a slang term), and she suddenly disappeared. Her family had learned that she had gone to Australia, but they had no idea where. Since I was from Australia, the rabbi w

My name is Ben Zion Shenker. My parents came to the United States in 1921 from the Lublin area of Poland, settling in New York, where I was born and raised.

When I was about 13 years old, a famous cantor by the name of Joshua Samuel Weisser heard me sing in our synagogue – this was a Polish shtiebel in Bedford Stuyvesant – and he asked my father if I could join his choir. At first, my parents wouldn’t give permission but Cantor Weisser persisted. Finally they agreed, with one condition: If I had to travel away from home because of a performance, then I would have to be housed at the home of a local rabbi, so that they could be sure I was in good hands.

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Cantor Weisser was chazan at the Avenue O Jewish Center in Bensonhurst where Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Kazarnovsky, a Chabad-Lubavitch chasid, was the rabbi. It is at Rabbi Kazarnovsky’s Shabbos table that I first heard Chabad teachings, and I learned to sing Chabad niggunim which I found very stimulating.

In 1946, when I was 21 years old, I accompanied my father on a trip to Eretz Yisrael and there I met a man by the name of Moshe Shimon Geshuri, who was very involved in chasidic music. Mr. Geshuri requested that I take some material back to New York to be delivered to a certain Rabbi Schneerson, who was the son-in-law of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

When I returned home, I went in search of this Rabbi Schneerson and found his office at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. Although I appeared there without any appointment, he welcomed me in. I had no way of knowing that, in a few years, he would become the Rebbe. I do recall, however, that he made quite an impression on me. He had a lot of charisma, that’s for sure, and he took an interest in me. I thought that I would just hand him the material from Mr. Geshuri and go, but he started asking me questions. He wanted to know who I was, where I was learning, and why I had gone to the Holy Land. So I explained that my father went to visit his brother and had taken me along. While in Eretz Yisrael I composed a niggun to Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” which they immediately started singing in a shul in Haifa. Eventually, this became my most famous composition.

Not long after that meeting with the Rebbe, I started attending addresses that he was giving on special occasions. These classes were not specifically geared to Lubavitcher Chassidim, and they had become popular with other yeshiva students in the area – students from my school, Torah Vodaas, from Chaim Berlin, and from other yeshivas. (more…)

I am the daughter of Rabbi Sholom Posner who, for many years, operated a Yeshiva Day School in Pittsburgh. That’s where I was raised and that’s where I went to school until age 12, when I was sent to a Bais Yaakov seminary in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

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It is from this time that my memories of the Rebbe begin. I and another girl would walk from Williamsburg to Crown Heights to observe the Rebbe’s farbrengens. I always waited for the Rebbe to look in my direction as he was passing by, because the Rebbe’s smile would light up a room.

I had previously accompanied my parents when they went to see the Rebbe about matters dealing with the yeshiva, but my first private audience came in 1960 when I was finishing teacher’s seminary, and I was trying to decide what to do next. I had four options – to teach at my father’s school in Pittsburgh, to accept an offer from a school in New York, to travel to Eretz Yisrael, or to join my sister Bessie in Milan, where she and her husband served as Chabad emissaries. I didn’t know what to do and I made an appointment with the Rebbe to seek his advice.

I was very nervous and worried about how I would begin explaining everything. Then my turn came and the door opened. As I walked in, the Rebbe was sitting behind his desk, writing something, and he lifted his head. “Good evening, Miss Posner,” he said. I wasn’t expecting that, and I just burst out laughing. My nervousness completely left me.

The Rebbe asked me lots of questions – why I was so thin and had dark circles under my eyes – and I explained that I was studying very hard for final exams, plus also teaching in another school. So the Rebbe gave me a blessing that I should be successful in all my endeavors. He also told me not to worry about what to do next year, just to take some time off and relax. (more…)

My ancestors came to America from Europe in the late 1800s and settled on the Lower East Side of New York. When the Williamsburg Bridge was built, they moved across the river, and established a yeshiva in Williamsburg, the famous Yeshiva Torah Vodaas.

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Although I was not raised Lubavitch, I became a Chabad chasid through an interesting set of circumstances.

After I got married, I was teaching school in Borough Park in Brooklyn, and a fellow teacher who was a Lubavitcher suggested I meet his Rebbe. I wasn’t so enthusiastic. I said, “I’ve met other Rebbes and I didn’t see much difference between them.” He said, “Come – I guarantee you’ll see something different.”

He was right. When I met with the Rebbe for the first time he was still a young man – this was in 1957 – but I was extremely impressed. I saw in him a depth of mind, clarity of thought, and I felt a very strong attachment to him from the start.

After that I would try to see him at least twice a year, and I would talk to him about many things. He gave me very good advice – he encouraged me to get involved in communal work outside New York. And that’s what I did – I went to Miami and established a congregation there. And when I did that, he advised me on how to handle the donors, how to handle the board of directors and how to handle other rabbis in the community.

There came a time, in 1970, when I realized that we needed to rebuild the local mikvah. It had been built thirty years prior, when proper building materials were not available due to the war, and it was starting to deteriorate. So several local rabbis got together, and we raised the money to rebuild it. Some of us wanted to build the new mikvah according to a high standard, but we found out that the rabbi who was in charge of the design did not follow that standard, and the result was that his mikvah did not even qualify as kosher. But this rabbi refused to change the design. And he found some rabbis to approve his mikvah. (more…)

My name is Avraham Pinter. I was born in 1940 in Tarbes, France, to a family of Holocaust survivors. They were originally from Galicia, Poland, which they fled to escape the pogroms. And then they lived for a time in Berlin, Germany, until they ran to escape the Nazis. Eventually, after I was born, we all made our way to America and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

While my father was a youngster living in Berlin in the early 1930s, he had the great fortune to find himself in the company of some of the most esteemed leaders of his generation, notably Rabbi Chaim Heller, who wrote the famous Sefer HaMitzvos based on the order first proposed by Maimonides.

Rabbi Heller was known as a world-class genius, and many people – some of whom were great scholars in their own right – gravitated to him, treated him with utmost reverence and sought admittance into his study hall, though only a select few made it inside.

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Two of those that were part of Rabbi Heller’s inner circle in Berlin were Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who would later become the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, who would later become Rosh Yeshiva of the rabbinical school at Yeshiva University. Indeed, it was Rabbi Soloveitchik who related to me the following story about my father.

At the time my father was a young chasidic student gifted with a phenomenal memory and a very, very good head; one day he came into Rabbi Heller’s study hall and tried to catch the great teacher’s eye. When he finally succeeded, Rabbi Heller called him over and asked, “Young man, what are you looking for here?”

My father answered, “My teacher sent me here to glean bits and pieces of knowledge.”

“Who is your teacher?”, Rabbi Heller asked.

“Rabbi Chaim Tobias,” my father answered, naming the Rosh Yeshiva of Kesser Torah Radomsker Yeshiva network.

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I was born in 1935 in Montreal, Canada. As a youngster, I went to a Jewish school where the practice was to take off one’s yarmulke for secular studies. There I learned a bit of Torah and Hebrew, and after school, I attended a Lubavitch afternoon school, and in the summers also a Lubavitch camp.

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Later, when the Lubavitch school became an all-day yeshiva, I learned there full time. I was a very good student, but after my Bar Mitzvah, I decided to leave Montreal and to learn at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas in New York. That was in 1948.

But once I landed in New York, even though I was at Torah Vodaas, I came to all the Lubavitcher farbrengens in Crown Heights that I could. And in 1951, when I was 16, I had my first audience with the Rebbe.

I was told in advance that it was not proper to sit in front of the Rebbe, but he invited me to sit down nevertheless, and even though I was just a teenager, he spoke to me like you’d speak to a respected person.

He asked me what I was learning in yeshiva, and I told him that I was learning Mesechtas Gittin which is the tractate of the Talmud that speaks about divorce. And he said to me, “You know, the concept of divorce, in a spiritual sense, applies to every single Jew. Why? Because we all have to divorce our yetzer hara, our evil inclination.”

He also told me that my yeshiva learning should include time for Mussar – that is, Jewish ethical behavior – and also time for Tanya, the seminal work of the Alter Rebbe, the 18^th century founder of the Chabad Movement. (more…)

Back in the 1940s, when I was a student at Yeshiva Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan, the rabbinical seminary of Yeshiva University also known as RIETS, I became involved in a Chabad educational program, although I myself was not a follower of Chabad. It came about by chance. I had gone to do some weightlifting at the gym and another fellow there who happened to be a Chabadnik suggested that I get involved in their Released Time program.

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The Released Time program – which allowed public schools to release students for religious studies off the premises – was very popular in the 1940s with something like 2 million kids involved. It is still operational. All religions took advantage of Released Time, but Jewishly, it was Chabad’s bailiwick.

At the time that I was part of it, Released Time was chiefly funded by the Committee for Furtherance of Jewish Education administered by Rabbi J.J. Hecht. Later, after 1951, when the Rebbe became the Rebbe, he expanded the idea considerably under the slogan taken from the Book of Proverbs, “Yafutzu maynosecha chutzah – Let your wellsprings flow outwards.” Also, Chabad’s Kehot Publication Society started putting out books and pamphlets aimed at the Released Time kids. I remember The Story of Chanukah and The Story of Purim and The Story of Passover which were very captivating for young children and sold for only 20 or 25 cents a copy.

My yeshiva, RIETS, was not in favor of the program. My teachers didn’t try to stop me but I was given the message that my time would be better spent learning Torah and turning to education only after I completed my studies.

I saw it differently. My motivation was simple – these kids needed Jewish outreach very badly. Once, when I was conducting a Released Time class, I gave the students a quiz for a special prize. And I asked them, “What is the name of the son whose father was asked by Hashem to offer him up as a sacrifice?” And one of the children responded with the name of the founder of Christianity. (more…)

My name is Chaim Jacobs. I was born in England and brought up in a traditional family in the Stamford Hill neighborhood of London. We lived on Cranwich Road, which just happened to be the Lubavitch Street in London. The Rebbe’s emissary, Rabbi Bentzion Shemtov, lived on that street, and at 89 Cranwich Road, there was a Lubavitch Hebrew school. From the age of 5, I attended evening and Sunday classes there. This is how I and my whole family became involved with Chabad Lubavitch.

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Later, I learned in the yeshiva at the Chabad Headquarters in New York, where I had the privilege of watching the Rebbe in action up close.

While I was in yeshiva, on the Shabbos before the start of the month of Sivan – which fell on June 3, 1967 – the Rebbe spoke about the situation in Israel. At this time, there was a tremendous crisis in the Middle East, because a few weeks earlier, President Nasser of Egypt had evicted the United Nations’ peacekeeping force and blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba. Israeli ships could not come in and out of Eilat, and the crisis was becoming more and more serious every day. Quoting the Talmud, the Rebbe said that the verse, “The nations of the world see that the name of G-d is upon you, and they will fear you” refers to tefillin, and that this must be publicized to the Israel soldiers.

The next day, on Sunday, the Rebbe fasted, and on Monday – June 5^th – the Six Day War began. I remember how excited everyone was to hear that, on the first day of the war, Israel had destroyed the entire Arab Air Force – military planes of Egypt, Syria and Jordan were out of commission; they never even got a chance to take off.

On the second day of the war, following the Rebbe’s directive, I and several other yeshiva students went out to ask non-religious Jewish businessmen to put on tefillin. We visited shops in the area of Kingston Avenue, Empire Boulevard and Utica Avenue, saying to every person we met, “Let’s help Israel to victory.” There wasn’t one man that morning who refused to put on tefillin. Everyone was so inspired by the victory that Israel was achieving. (more…)

At the outset I would like to say that I am not a chasid. My family came from Lithuania, so my background is Litvish and Misnagdish – meaning that my forebearers were opposed to chasidic ways. My mother came from Kovno, Lithuania, and my father came from Lomza, Poland, but he studied in the famed Slobodka Yeshiva, which was located before the war in the suburb of Kovno. And that’s where he met my mother.

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My father came to the United States during World War One, in 1916, and eventually he brought over my mother and my three older siblings. He was offered a position as a rabbi in Canton, Ohio, and later became a rabbi in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he stayed until he retired and made Aliyah to Eretz Yisrael.

Growing up in small towns like Canton and Bridgeport was a challenge. Obviously, we were a minority among minorities because very few of the Jewish people living there were Torah observant and, certainly, the vast majority of the people in the community were not Jewish.

I went to public school, populated mostly by Italian and Irish kids, and I had to cope as best as I could with trying to find friends. I managed to have some Jewish friends and to forge an uneasy kind of a friendship with my non-Jewish schoolmates.

In 1938, I enrolled in Yeshiva Torah Vodaas, which I attended for the next six years. I was ordained a rabbi and I started working first as a teacher in a Jewish day school and then as a rabbi – first in Hartford, Connecticut, then in Saratoga Springs, New York, and then in Far Rockaway, New York, where I have been for the past 60 years.

As a rabbi, I became involved with Iggud HaRabbonim, the Rabbinical Alliance of America, which should not be confused with the Rabbinical Council of America. The Iggud HaRabbanim is a much more conservative organization and has taken much more conservative positions on Jewish issues, such as Mi Hu Yehudi – who is a Jew according to Jewish law. This issue was of great importance to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and it was in this context that I came to meet him in the late 1950s. It proved a very special encounter. (more…)