As far I’m concerned the Jewish women’s liberation movement was started by the Rebbe.

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When I was a young woman growing up in Williamsburg, what was there for girls? If any Rebbe held a chassidic gathering, women couldn’t go. Women were excluded, and this was true across the board – whether it was Satmar or Klausenberger or whatever.

The involvement of girls and women was pioneered by Lubavitch on the Rebbe’s direction. You never saw it anywhere else. In fact, most people couldn’t even understand what he was trying to do.

Who encouraged the women like the Rebbe did? Who talked about the women like the Rebbe did, and explained this issue to all the chasidim?

The Lubavitch women were liberated long before our sisters out there were, and we didn’t even have to fight for it. The Rebbe fought for us and put us on a pedestal, and we didn’t have to ask for the pedestal.

The Rebbe, obviously, anticipated the challenges that modern Jewish women were going to face. He saw that if he wasn’t going to get the women involved in Judaism, the women would get involved in other things.

When the Rebbe sent out his emissaries, his shluchim, he didn’t send a husband and a wife – he sent out a couple, and he gave them both a task to do. (more…)

I first met the Rebbe when I visited him to discuss my mother’s illness.

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I was not a chasid. In fact, I was educated in the Mesivta Chaim Berlin and I received rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner. But when my mother fell ill, I went to the Rebbe because everyone among the Orthodox Jewish public already knew – it was in the public domain, so to speak – that to get good advice, to get a compassionate answer to a difficult question, to glimpse a solution to a complex dilemma, you went to the Rebbe, and that the Rebbe’s door was never closed to anyone.

My mother’s doctors could not agree on whether they should operate or not. An operation offered the possibility of a cure, but it carried a risk. Yet doing nothing meant that things would go on as they were, with the inevitable ending.

As a son, I was torn. And my mother, may she rest in peace, couldn’t make the decision. So I went to the Rebbe. I wanted to get his blessing and his advice.

Now, the Rebbe didn’t know me, didn’t know my mother, didn’t know anything about the family … But when I told him my dilemma, he looked at me and I saw tears in his eyes. He reacted as if he was my brother, and I felt as if I was discussing the problem with my brother. (more…)

In the early 1950s, I came to the Rebbe with a group of young girls from Junior Hadassah. At that time Hadassah was a very popular women’s group, and Junior Hadassah was made up of the teenage daughters of the women who belonged to Hadassah.

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Although I wasa newly-married bride at the time; not much older than these girls, I became the leader of the group in Worcester, Massachusetts. They used to come to our house, and I would teach them about Judaism.

I had told them about the Rebbe, and they wanted to see him in person, to hear him speak. At one point, we decided to go visit the Rebbe as a group. And one girl’s mother decided to come along with her daughter. The girl’s name was Estelle Greenberg, and her mother, Mrs. Greenberg, said that she, too, wanted to see the Rebbe.

It was a large gathering. Other groups of young people came that day as well, and the Rebbe spoke to all of them together. When there was a break in the program, Mrs. Greenberg requested a private audience with the Rebbe. She went in, and she was there for quite a while. When she came out, the Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Hodakov, approached me and said,  “Please, the Rebbe wants to see you. Go in and see the Rebbe.”

I was surprised that the Rebbe should want to see me, and I went in wondering, “What could it be?”

The Rebbe greeted me with a broad smile and said, “Mrs. Greenberg came to ask for a blessing so that her daughter should find a husband. I gave her a blessing, but she doesn’t believe me.” At that he laughed. (more…)

In 1977, when I graduated from the New York College of Podiatric Medicine, after doing a residency at Maimonides Hospital, I opened an office in Crown Heights. Part of the reason I chose Crown Heights was that, although not being Chabad Lubavitch myself, I had a very nice feeling toward the Chabad community.

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Of course, before I opened up my office in Crown Heights, I wrote to the Rebbe to ask for a blessing. And an answer came back that the Rebbe would give me a blessing on one condition – that the halachic authority of Crown Heights would rule that I was not violating Jewish law concerning unfair competition, meaning that my opening a practice would not put someone else out of business and deprive him of a livelihood. The Rebbe was very strict about this issue – that one person wouldn’t harm another in this way.

I did what he asked, and then he gave me a blessing.

I started working in Crown Heights, and then one day a call came into my office that there was a woman who wanted me to make a house call. I did not usually make house calls, as the streets could be dangerous for a doctor carrying his medical bag, but I took the call to find out the woman’s problem and why she couldn’t come into the office.

It turned out she was an elderly woman who had recently fractured her hip, so I asked her, “What is your name?” And she said, “My name is Mrs. Schneerson, and I live on President Street.”

So five minutes later, as I was leaving the office with my medical bag my secretary said to me, “I thought you didn’t make house calls?” I replied, “If I practiced in London and Queen Elizabeth called, I would also make a house call, even if she lived in a bad neighborhood.” (more…)

I was born in Paris, France, and the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin were the kvatters at my bris. That is, they carried me to the circumcision ceremony when I was eight days old.

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Of course, at that time, the Rebbe was not yet Rebbe. The Rebbe Rayatz was the Rebbe of Chabad Lubavitch at the time. He was living in Otwock, Poland, having been exiled from Russia by the Communists. This was in the 1930s before World War II broke out.

The Rebbe had married one of the Rebbe Rayatz’s daughters, Chaya Mushka, and the two of them were living in Paris. The Rebbe was very close to my father, Laibish Heber, as they had known each other back in Russia. At that time, there weren’t too many Lubavitcher chassidim in Paris and so they naturally gravitated toward each other.

My father had set up a business in Paris in which he was very successful. The Rebbe was a student at the time and of modest means. My father saw that he had rented an apartment in a hotel that was called Max – it wasn’t actually an apartment, but a studio, just one room that was both a bedroom and a kitchen. This made my father upset, because it was not fitting for the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin. So he rented them a nice apartment and decorated it, and he went to see the Rebbetzin to tell her about it. Her response was, “I have to discuss it with my husband.”

Later, she told my father the answer, “I talked it over with him and he feels that we should stay over here.” And that little studio was the apartment they lived in for many of the years they were in Paris. (more…)

When I was thirteen years of age, I was doubly orphaned. My mother had passed away when I was a child, and then, when I was almost fourteen years old, I lost my father as well. I had to move into yeshiva full-time, as I had no other place to go.

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I spent the next part of my life – from age fourteen until age seventeen – living at the Manchester yeshiva, and then I spent nine months at the yeshiva in Gateshead, until I turned eighteen.

As far as I’m concerned, the big day came when, in September of 1958, I was granted permission by the Rebbe to come to America on a student visa and start studying at the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. So it was with great excitement that I arrived in New York, where I learned for the next four years.

During the time I was there, I had several opportunities to have an audience with the Rebbe – usually on my birthday. These visits were short. I wasn’t a businessman; I wasn’t a married man; I was a boy in yeshiva. What problems can a boy in yeshiva have? Still, the Rebbe always imparted words of encouragement to me.

The next major milestone in my life occurred four years after my arrival in New York, in the summer of 1962, when I got engaged to my future wife, thank G-d.

I went in to see the Rebbe to ask for the Rebbe’s advice on what I should do now – where should I settle down, how should I support my future family. (more…)

The first Lebanon War in 1982 was a unique war, during which the Israel Defense Forces reached Beirut and conquered it, causing the expulsion of the Palestinian forces from Lebanon.

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PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and his men went to Tunisia and established their command there. At that time, there was a small community there of about five thousand Jews in Tunisia.

After analyzing the facts, we in the Mossad came to the conclusion that, as a result these events, the Jews of Tunisia were in greater danger than before, and we felt that the time had come to evacuate this community to Israel.

Since the government of Israel was established, it has made it a policy to take responsibility for the fate of Jews living in foreign countries where they might be in danger. We feel that this is the responsibility of the State of Israel because it is the state of the Jewish nation. And since the State of Israel has the power and the ability to intervene overseas when needed, it has the right and the obligation to do so.

Thus, we began to work with the Jews in Tunisia. We sent people there to convince them to leave. But very quickly we encountered a problem. We identified an authority that was telling the Jews not to leave Tunisia. This was not a local authority; not the Tunisian government. It was the community rabbi! His name was Rabbi Nisson Pinson, and he was encouraging the Jews to stay in Tunisia. (more…)

Before the war, my father learned in a yeshiva in Hungary. Although he was not from a chasidic background, he made sure that I got some exposure to chasidism.

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When I was a kid he took me to see the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and also to Satmar and Bobov. He wanted me to experience the whole spectrum of Judaism – the modern side, the chassidic side, the non-chassidic side – to see what it’s all about. That way, wherever I found myself, I’d be able to fit in.

In 1973, my Bar Mitzvah year, my parents sent me to a summer camp in Israel. When I came back, I learned that my father was about to undergo surgery. It turned out he had colon cancer, and from that point on his health went downhill.

Two years later, just before Purim, my father’s condition took a turn for the worse. We went to the hospital, the doctors examined him, then they called me in and said, “You’d better go home; your father is staying here tonight.” That night they opened him up, but they saw that there wasn’t much they could do – just to try to make the end as painless as possible.

Of course, we didn’t want to give up, so we went to several rabbis for blessings. We even tried the alternative medicines of the time. My father was losing a lot of weight – he was five-foot-six, but pretty soon he weighed barely ninety pounds. Nothing was working.

Then one cousin told us, “You should go to see the Lubavitcher Rebbe.” (more…)

Before his historic first meeting with newly-elected U.S. President Jimmy Carter in Washington, Begin asked me to arrange a meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York.

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I myself had visited the Rebbe previously on behalf of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, and later as an advisor to Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s then-ambassador to the UN.

When we arrived, the Rebbe came out and escorted Prime Minister Begin to the entrance. Reporters were throwing out questions at the both of them, and I recall one question from a reporter for the Village Voice. He asked Begin, “Why do you seek out the Rebbe prior to your meeting with President Carter?” And Begin said, “It’s my first meeting with the new US President and it’s very important for me to get the blessings of the Rebbe for its success.”

He went on to say that the Rebbe had many insights, and that he was a man of awesome knowledge. “I can learn many things from him.” He said. He also described the Rebbe as an old friend.

Then he was asked, “Why doesn’t the Rebbe come to you – as you are Prime Minster – why do you go to the Rebbe?” And he said, “He is a great sage of Israel … he is a great leader himself.”

Actually, Begin thought that the Lubavitcher Rebbe was the greatest Jewish leader of the 20^th century. I had heard him say that. (more…)

While I was a student in the Lubavitcher yeshiva in Montreal, I rented a room from a family living in the neighborhood. And the woman of the house was pregnant at the time. She always had difficulties in childbirth and, in this particular instance; she was told that there was a very serious complication.

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As the husband told it to me, the doctor had done a lengthy examination and said: “The situation is critical. It’s highly questionable that the baby can survive a normal delivery. Based on my experience in such cases, I suggest that you abort this child. Otherwise, the mother’s life will be in danger and the baby many not survive anyway.

This doctor was the most famous and most competent that this family could find, because they had anticipated problems due to the wife’s medical history – and this expert was telling them the baby should be aborted.

Before he would sign on the form allowing them to abort the child, the husband said, “You have to give me a while to think about this.” And he went and called the Rebbe. After hearing all the details, the Rebbe said: “Don’t sign anything. Don’t allow the doctor to abort the child. Tell him that you insist that he should do everything possible to save the baby and the mother.”

The husband went back to the doctor and said: “I want you to do whatever you can to save my wife and my child!” To which the doctor replied, “Do you have to tell me that? If I could do it, wouldn’t I do it?” Then he added, “If you insist I have to save both your wife and the baby, you might just lose both of them, because the situation is critical.” (more…)