I always felt that I would like to keep Shabbat and be religious. But unfortunately, when I lived in California during the ‘70s, I had to work on Shabbat. I wanted to stop working on Shabbat so badly that it was burning me inside, but in every job that I took, I had to do it.

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After twelve years, I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Myrtle Beach is popular with tourists, and in the tourist industry, Saturday is the most profitable day; if you refuse to work on Shabbat, you would be shown the door. By then, I had a family to support so once again I ended up applying for a job in a chain store selling beach gear, where I had to work on Shabbat. But one day, I decided that I couldn’t take it anymore.

It was a Thursday afternoon, in the fall of 1991. During my lunch break, I decided to call the local Chabad House to ask Rabbi Doron Aizenman what to do, and he suggested that I write to the Rebbe.

What am I going to tell him? How would I write this? “Please,” I asked, “sit down with me and show me what to do.” Rabbi Doron told me to come over, explained the traditional way to address the Rebbe in writing, showed me how to use his fax machine, and left me in his office on my own.

“One thing you should know,” he warned before leaving, “is that you’re not going to get an answer for a while. It might even take three or four months.” In those days, he explained, the Rebbe no longer had the time to respond to every question that came his way, and certainly not right away.

I wrote my letter, placed it in the machine, dialed the number, and waited for the beep that told me it had been sent. After going back to work, I closed the store, headed home, and went to sleep. (more…)

The oldest of four boys, I grew up in Tel Aviv in a traditional home where we soaked up a love of the Jewish people, its Torah, and its land. We had emigrated from Baghdad, Iraq, in 1935 when I was just two.

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Raised in the atmosphere of an up-and-coming country, I had a strong desire to be a part of the action. At seventeen, I was drafted into the army and signed up for permanent service. There, I served as an officer in the Nachal brigade and later, wanting to focus on education, as a commander at the Command Military Academy and in the Youth Corps, or Gadna.

In the early ‘70s, Prime Minister Golda Meir empaneled a special commission to inquire into the matter of Israel’s youth in crisis. In particular, it would be focused on youth within migrant communities, or “marginalized youth,” who, because of the inequalities in Israeli society and the discrimination they experienced, were suffering high rates of school drop-out and delinquency. I was then a colonel, and in light of my educational experience in the IDF, I was called on to lead the commission.

When the commission turned in its findings, we included a long list of recommendations for policy changes in the fields of education, housing, employment, health, and welfare. As a result, Golda Meir requested that I be discharged from the army, to join her office as an adviser for social welfare and to coordinate her staff’s efforts in implementing the commission’s recommendations, within the relevant government departments. Even after Meir’s resignation, her successor, Yitzhak Rabin, asked me to stay in this role, which I ended up filling for a total of four years. (more…)

When I was growing up in the early sixties, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was full of great Torah scholars. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the foremost Halachic authority in America, lived in our co-op complex. Not far away were the Kapishnitzer and Boyaner Rebbes, and Rabbi Yosef Eliyahu Henkin was there too.

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Rabbi Feinstein’s granddaughter was my sister’s best friend, and at some point, she suggested to her grandmother that I could come over and help out, to answer the phone, or to write Rosh Hashanah cards. I was only ten, but for the next two decades, I used to come by Reb Moshe’s, as he is known, on a regular basis. Later on I would even sleep over on occasion, whenever his wife was away and someone had to be there to see how he was doing.

The Feinstein home was like Grand Central Station. People were ringing the bell or calling the phone every minute, and Reb Moshe would spend time speaking with them in person. But he spent most of his remaining time writing, whether it was writing up his Halachic responsa or his classes on the Talmud, which have now been printed in his Igros Moshe and Divros Moshe.

One of the things I used to do for Reb Moshe was give out his books. When he would publish a new volume, I would give it out to a list of thirty or forty prominent rabbis in the Lower East Side.

One Thursday night in 1969, I came to Reb Moshe’s house, and told him that I would be going to have an audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. It was not my first time visiting the Rebbe; my father had taken my brothers and I to our first private audience a few years earlier, and we came back a few times after that for other audiences and public gatherings. (more…)

In the late 1950s, Jewish day school graduates began finding themselves in Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges – and I was one of them.

On campus, we encountered an environment that was often hostile to Jews. Classes were held on Shabbat and exams were often given on holidays; we bought our own kosher food, but we still had to pay for room and board and could not bring our food into the dormitories. We also found that people were asking us questions about Judaism that we couldn’t answer. Despite our years of yeshivah education, many of us felt that we didn’t know enough, and we wanted to continue learning.

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We began organizing different groups: At Barnard, where I was, we called our group Ari; at Columbia, they called theirs Yeshurun and used to gather for afternoon prayers in the laboratory of a doctoral student; in Harvard, they called it Taryag; while Cornell had a Young Israel House with a kosher kitchen.

Once we heard about each other, we decided to establish a single body to coordinate all the groups. We called it Yavneh and our founding convention was in February 1960. Our goal was to promote Jewish learning and observance on campus, to ensure that Jewish students wouldn’t feel alone, and that if they wanted to learn more, we would be there to help them.

Everybody had his or her own reason for the name, but I was trying to carry on an organization that my father, Rav Mordechai Pinchas Teitz, had started before immigrating to America, when he was a fourteen-year-old in Latvia. After coming home from the Ponevezh yeshivah and discovering that the boys he had grown up with had joined the Communist Party, he founded a club – Yavneh – for Jewish boys to learn and have fun while getting a better feeling about their Jewishness. (more…)

Three months ago, we published Rabbi Cohen’s description of his first encounter with the Rebbe in 1972. Here is his account of two subsequent audiences.

As an administrator and fundraiser for various institutions associated with the Sadigura community, I joined the recently appointed Sadigura Rebbe, Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Friedman, and a group of his chasidim on a trip to the United States. The year was 1980, and we were going to attend the wedding of the son of Reb Avraham Yosef “Monye” Shapiro, a leading Sadigura chasid as well as a relative of the Rebbe’s family. Reb Monye was a successful industrialist, as well as being politically active; later he would become a member of the Knesset for the Agudat Yisrael party.

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Upon arrival, I made contact with Rabbi Hodakov, secretary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I myself had met with the Rebbe before, but this time, I set up an appointment for the Sadigura Rebbe with the Rebbe. The two already knew each other, from the time that Rabbi Friedman lived in Crown Heights, while heading up the Sadigura study hall there, years before succeeding his father as Rebbe.

I invited Reb Monye to join us on the visit to the Rebbe’s court. As a wealthy businessman and a leading figure within Agudat Yisrael, he was close with the leaders of the Labor party (then Mapai) and was generally influential within Israel’s upper political echelon. The last time I had met with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, I told Reb Monye, I promised to return with someone who could assist the Rebbe’s “Mihu Yehudi campaign” to legislate Halachic standards on questions of Jewish identity. He agreed and came along.

The meeting was a lovely, dignified affair, and it lasted for an hour and a half. For the most part, the Rebbe conversed with the Sadigura Rebbe and Reb Monye, although at the end, as we were heading for the door, he turned to me and expressed his appreciation for organizing the meeting.

Throughout their discussion, which was recorded and eventually released in print, they exchanged words of Torah and also touched on many matters of public interest.

One subject was that of natalist policies in Israel. The Rebbe observed that, on one hand, the Israeli government offered new immigrants an “absorption basket” valued at some thirty thousand dollars so as to encourage population growth from abroad. On the other hand, they were spending money on “family planning” initiatives in order to reduce the domestic birth rate, rather than increasing incentives for having more babies. (more…)

This story is an excerpt from the book My Story 1. Get your copy today at www.jemstore.com.

I was raised in South Africa, where my parents – who were not Jews but Christians, specifically Presbyterians – emigrated from England when I was nine. Eventually, after a lot of searching, I made my way to Israel and in 1965, at the age of twenty-five, I converted to Judaism.

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Shortly after my conversion, I got married. My husband was a Jewish psychiatrist at the Sha’ar Menashe Mental Health Center near Haifa, where I worked as a social worker. At first I was very enthusiastic about Judaism but after interacting with many non-observant Jews who questioned my observance, I became confused and riddled with doubts.

Fortunately, two years later, we moved to South Africa. There, I was able to restore my faith and my Torah observance after coming in touch with Chabad. This led to my desire to meet the Rebbe, which I first did in 1972.

In advance of that audience, I had written to the Rebbe. I had been told to limit my letter to one page, but I had so much to say and so much to ask that I wrote in very tiny script to fit it all in. When I presented this one-page letter to the Rebbe, he actually took out a magnifying glass in order to be able to read it.

Among the many things I wanted to know was, “Can I really still count myself as a Jew?” I was worried that my lapse in observance had disqualified me somehow.

The Rebbe looked at me as if he was seeing through me. His eyes were so bright and full of light, I felt as if he was seeing my soul. And then he said – after noting that my conversion by the Haifa Rabbinical Court was sound in the eyes of Jewish law – “You most certainly can count yourself as a Jew. Indeed, you must. But how good a Jew you are going to be – that is up to you.”

I replied, “I want to be one completely.” (more…)

I was born in Yemen in 1944, and five years later my family emigrated to Israel. Our material circumstances were harsh; brought from one migrants’ camp to the next, we lived in tents that let in the winter rain. I remember once, in the middle of the night, that our entire tent simply flew off into a powerful storm, leaving us exposed to the rain.

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Nor were the spiritual conditions straightforward. There wasn’t yet a well-organized public religious education system, and so although we all came from observant homes, the authorities put us Yemenite children into classes combining boys and girls, with nonobservant teachers. Additionally, they attempted to draw us away from our faith. For example, they cut off our long peyot, under the pretext of a scalp ringworm outbreak. Once, they even tried to make us desecrate the Shabbat, but we refused and ran off. Eventually we left the school, and stayed home, where we received a traditional education.

In time, I attended the Porat Yosef yeshivah in Rechovot until 8th grade, before moving to another yeshivah high school in Kfar Haroeh. In my last couple of years there, Rabbi Yissachar Meir came to teach our class. He had been one of the first students of the well-known Ponevezh Yeshivah in Bnei Brak, and before joining us, he spent some three years in Morocco, setting up boys’ and girls’ Torah institutions.

Before our graduation, Rabbi Meir convinced our class to join him in forming the nucleus of a new yeshivah in Netivot which became known as the “Yeshivah of the Negev.” I ended up spending ten years there, through to 1968.

A year before that, in 1967, I got engaged and the question of where my wife and I would live came up. Of course, I wanted to remain in Netivot and continue my studies close to Rabbi Meir, to whom I had become attached. But my wife wanted to be in Rechovot so that she could live near her parents and help care for her sick mother. Having learned in the Chabad institutions of Rechovot, she had a connection with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, as did Rabbi Meir. With his guidance, we decided to write to the Rebbe, seeking advice on our dilemma. (more…)

My father, Yankel Katz, was born in Mogilev, Belarus, to a Lubavitcher family that moved to Chicago a few years later, in about 1905.

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He began working as a child laborer in a printing plant, and by the age of fifteen was the main provider for the Katz family since his father could not provide very well for them.

Although my grandfather parted ways with Chasidism, my father was dedicated to the community, and became an outstanding member of Congregation Anshei Lubavitch, an elegant synagogue that was one of four Lubavitcher shuls in Chicago at the time. He was also a friend of great rabbinic leaders, and as a young man in the 1920s, he would correspond and donate money to the great rabbis of Europe, like the Chafetz Chaim and Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzinski.

In 1929, the Previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, visited Chicago and my father was fortunate enough to make his acquaintance. There, in the Lubavitcher shul, began a close and dear friendship. My father was smitten with the Rebbe’s charisma, his manner, and his friendship. (more…)

In the mid-‘70s, I was diagnosed with a murmur in my heart. A certain procedure had recently been developed for my condition, and the chief cardiologist at Miami’s Mount Sinai Hospital was going to perform it on me.

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I went into the hospital, and everything seemed to go very well. Since the procedure required general anesthesia and I was still out, the doctor informed my wife that I was in recovery. In the meantime, she went home to get some things. At the time, we lived just three blocks from Mount Sinai on North Meridian Avenue.

After enough time had passed and I was supposed to be out of recovery, she decided to call me in my room to ask me how I was. She called, and there was no response. So she hung up and tried again.

I was sharing the room with another gentleman, and eventually he woke up and picked up the phone.

“What’s going on with my husband?” she asked him. “Where is he?”

I was right next to him, sleeping.

“Well, wake him up.”

The guy tried calling out to me by name, but got no response. “Listen,” he told her, “your husband is not waking up.” (more…)

Gail Goldberg

My husband and I both grew up in the suburbs of Chicago in middle-class Jewish families. We dated in high school, reconnected again later on, and got married in 1965.

My first pregnancy went okay – for a while. But then we learned that the baby was not developing fully. The doctors didn’t know why, and all I know is that I went into labor, and had a baby that I never saw: It was a stillbirth at seven months.

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It was a depressing experience, but we were still newly married and still planned on having children. We moved, and a couple years later I got pregnant again. I had a new doctor, a new hospital, and we were also increasing our Jewish observance after joining a new synagogue with a wonderful rabbi. But that pregnancy also ended up as a stillbirth.

David Goldberg

By this time, we had moved to Washington, D.C., where we were both working for the CIA. The doctors had advised us against pursuing another pregnancy, as there was a potential risk for my wife due to some health problems she was experiencing as a diabetic, so we decided to try to adopt a child. We applied, and were placed on a short list. But when we decided to move back to Chicago, it turned out that this ended the adoption procedure we had begun in Washington, and we had to start over again.

In Chicago, whether by serendipity or Divine Providence, we ended up in the same neighborhood as Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Hecht, an emissary of the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, who also had a relationship with Gail’s brother, Roy. Since by this point we had become more sensitive to Halachic observance, I asked him about some of the relevant laws pertaining to adoption.

Rabbi Hecht looked at me and said, “Before you adopt, there is a rabbi in New York I’d like you to see.”

At this point I was pretty clueless about Chabad, but Rabbi Hecht arranged for us to have an audience with the Rebbe. So in 1969, Gail and I flew out to New York, and dropped into what I can only describe as a parallel universe: We stayed with a family of ten, and the people there were all very nice and accommodating, but it was unlike anything we had ever seen. We attended a farbrengen held by the Rebbe in honor of the 19th of Kislev, and I remember that the singing and the excitement in that room reached an energy level I had never seen before.

Then it came time to prepare to meet the Rebbe in private.

It was a Sunday night, and the anteroom to the Rebbe’s office was packed. There were probably thirty or forty people waiting there for their audiences, some of them quite prestigious dignitaries. Rabbi Binyomin Klein, the Rebbe’s secretary, served as the gatekeeper, nervously looking at his watch and shuffling people in and out of the office.

Finally, it was our turn.

Those stories about the Rebbe’s penetrating blue eyes that look right into a person’s soul are absolutely true. We knew we were in the presence of someone special. We explained what we were there for, and we also handed the Rebbe a letter from Rabbi Hecht describing our situation. Meanwhile, Rabbi Klein began opening the door because we were taking too much time.

The Rebbe looked at us and said: “You will have a boy and a girl… Raise them in Yiddishkeit, and come back to me in one year with good news.”

It was probably no more than ten minutes, but it changed our lives dramatically.

Gail Goldberg

We had to run to the airport after that. Rebbetzin Chaya Sarah Hecht had said that we should write down everything – every word the Rebbe said – so that we wouldn’t forget, and I remember writing in the cab on the way to the airport. We came home, and I got pregnant right away, and then my son was born: fully formed, wonderful, and perfect.

“It’s a boy!” they exclaimed.

“Yes,” I said. “I know. I know it’s a boy.” There was no way to contain the strange, wonderful feeling I felt then; it was like I was bursting with spiritual oneness.

The hospital staff kept asking us to give a name, and although the whole thing was so overwhelming, we did have a name in mind from the previous pregnancies. Just then, Rabbi Hecht called us at the hospital and we mentioned to him that we were thinking of a name.

“What is it?” he asked. We had been considering Lev or Levi but we weren’t sure.

“Ahh,” he said when we told him. “The Rebbe’s father’s name was Levi Yitzchak.” And so that’s his name: Levi Yitzchak.

The Rebbe said we’d have a boy, and we had a boy. “Now I’m going to have a girl,” I assumed when I became pregnant again, “because that’s how it goes.” But instead, I had a miscarriage. “The Rebbe didn’t say a word about this!” I thought. “Maybe I should go to see him again.”

Shortly after, I went to a women’s conference in New York, run by the Lubavitch Women’s and Girl’s Organization. At one point, the Rebbe spoke to all the attendees, and then all the women went up to him, one by one. We all wrote down any questions we had in advance, and I gave him my note recounting what had happened. “What am I supposed to do now?” I wanted to know. “Is this the way it has to be?”

The Rebbe had the kindest look. Just being in front of him was wonderful. He would look through you, without expecting anything of you, and then it seemed that the words just came to him, without having to reach for them.

The Rebbe shook his head. “Go home,” he replied, “and send good news.”

“Okay, we’re still on the path here,” I thought. “We just had a little detour.” I went home, and got pregnant with my wonderful daughter, Batya Ruth, right away.

David Goldberg

So, that is our miracle story.

Sometimes, when people ask me about my level of my faith, I say that my faith is actually fairly shaky, but my belief in Hashem is not necessarily based upon faith. It’s based upon a certain level of empirical evidence, and then I relate this story. This isn’t some kind of blind faith, but something that happened to me; I could choose to ignore what I saw or come up with an alternative narrative but that would strike me as being the height of ingratitude, as well as being its own kind of blindness. As to what was this gift or power that the Rebbe had, I won’t even speculate. I can only tell you my experience.

After retiring from the CIA, David served as a business executive for a refrigeration manufacturing company for thirty years and Gail, who passed away in 2021, worked as an artist. They were interviewed in their home in July of 2014.