I first met him at the entrance examination I took for the famed Mir yeshivah of Jerusalem in 1967. Rabbi Nochum Partzovitz, or simply “Reb Nochum,” as he was known, was the head of the yeshivah. His style of scholarship was characterized by tremendous depth alongside meticulous attention to the language of a given Talmudic passage or commentary, to arrive at its true meaning. Thus he made a name as one of his generation’s greatest Torah geniuses, and crowds thronged to hear his lectures. In my third year at the yeshivah, I was able to hear them myself.

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At around this time, Reb Nochum was diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disease. Still, despite his condition, he continued teaching as before. In the winter of 1971, he traveled to New York to visit some specialists there.

While there, he was hosted in the Boro Park home of Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Lazerson, a longtime friend who had been his study partner during the Second World War when the Mir yeshivah was evacuated and relocated to Shanghai, China. In America, Lazerson had become an ardent chasid of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He would attend every one of the Rebbe’s farbrengens, rain or shine, and even on Shabbat, he would make the long trek from Boro Park to Crown Heights.

Rabbi Lazerson helped set up an appointment with the Rebbe for Reb Nochum and his wife and even accompanied them on the visit.

As soon as they entered his study, the Rebbe rose to greet them, and once they were seated, he asked: “Do you remember me?”

“Where would I know the Rebbe from?” asked a surprised Reb Nochum.

“Do you recall the time my father-in-law visited your parents’ home?” It was in 1932, and the Previous Rebbe was traveling to the Lithuanian town of Landarov (today Lentvaris), for the wedding of his youngest daughter, Shaina. On his way, and as a gesture of respect, he visited the rabbi of the nearby town of Trakai, Rabbi Aryeh Tzvi Partzovitz – Reb Nochum’s father. (more…)

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My family belonged to the Karlin chasidic group. However, that didn’t stop the Chabad yeshivah in Lod, Israel, from appointing my father, Rabbi Yisrael Grossman as dean, in 1956. That was how our connection with the Rebbe began. My father would report to, and receive instructions from, the Rebbe regarding the yeshivah. As a young man, I also wrote to the Rebbe, and I received a wonderful letter in reply encouraging me in my Torah studies.

Following Israel’s miraculous victory in the Six-Day War, the country experienced a dramatic spiritual awakening. I had the great merit of visiting the Western Wall on the day of its liberation, and while standing there, I thought: What can I do to express my thanks to G-d? I decided then to devote my life to bringing other Jewish people closer to their faith – something that the Rebbe frequently advocated for, especially through the tefillin campaign he launched before the war to encourage more Jews to perform this commandment.

I was also close with the Rebbe of Lelov, another chasidic dynasty, and around this time, he asked that I move from Jerusalem to Bnei Brak to head a Torah institution there. Our apartment in Bnei Brak happened to be on top of the Dubek cigarette manufacturing plant, and I noticed that the factory workers would come too early in the morning – and stay too late – to have a chance to put on tefillin. After receiving permission from the factory manager, I began coming to the plant several times a day, during their breaks, to help the workers lay tefillin. The Lubavitcher Rebbe was very happy when I informed him of all this, and he encouraged me to continue.

Then the Lelover Rebbe had another idea for me: “Maybe you should go to Migdal Ha’emek, and see what you can do for the young people there.”

Migdal Ha’emek, a northern development town that had been founded a decade earlier to house new migrants, was facing significant challenges in terms of employment, the local economy, and juvenile delinquency. I didn’t even know where it was on the map, or how the Lelover Rebbe had heard of it, but I didn’t ask questions. I got up and moved there.

It was 1968, and I was arriving straight from the religious hothouses of Mea She’arim and Bnei Brak. When I innocently inquired about the local yeshivot, people didn’t know what I was talking about.

“So where can I find the teens?” I asked.

“At the discotheque,” they said.

I had never heard the word before. Was that the name of a yeshiva? I went, and soon found out: Those disco clubs were like Purim in the middle of the year!

I found that I connected quickly with the young people in these places, and they began calling me “the Disco Rabbi.” Then, after hearing that some of the teens at the discos had relatives at the nearby Shatta prison, I began visiting there, eventually launching a successful prisoner rehabilitation program.

All the while, I made a point of reporting on my youth and prison work to the Rebbe, knowing how much he valued it. He, in turn, inquired after every detail, and always wanted to know what was going on.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that to make a real revolution, we needed a new educational institution for children who came from rough homes and needed extra care. Even after I was appointed rabbi of Migdal Ha’emek in 1970, I held on to this dream, despite not knowing where to begin such an undertaking.

In 1972, I was invited to come to the United States for a fundraising trip, and I finally met the Rebbe in person. Before my audience, I wrote a note for the Rebbe detailing everything that happened since my arrival in Migdal Ha’emek. Among other things, I shared some doubts about my rabbinical appointment: Was it a mistake to have taken on this burden? Was I even worthy of it?

The Rebbe began by discussing my doubts about being a rabbi. He quoted a Talmudic story which says that it is predestined whether a person will take up a rabbinic or leadership role. Thus, if I had been made the rabbi of Migdal Ha’emek, clearly it was meant to be.

As a rabbi, the Rebbe went on to say, my first responsibility should be the laws of Family Purity. With that, he encouraged me to make sure the local mikva’ot (ritual baths) were Halachically sound and – no less important – beautiful. A mikvah has to be spotless, properly maintained, and staffed by younger women; that way, noted the Rebbe, the new generation of women would have someone they can comfortably communicate and identify with, to help them observe this mitzvah.

I was amazed at how this great Rebbe had such practical and straightforward solutions to complex issues. He spoke about the benefits of educating boys and girls in separate institutions – not from a religious standpoint – and about strategies for upholding kosher standards in local food establishments. He knew the spiritual state of Migdal Ha’emek as if he had been there himself.

In that audience, I also mentioned my dream of founding a new educational institution that would bring young people closer to Judaism, while keeping them away from crime and giving them a chance for a better future. The Rebbe listened with great interest when I told him about some of my successes in this field. He gave me many blessings and promised that if I did found such an institution, I would see further success.

When we eventually did lay the cornerstone of the Yeshivat Migdal Or, as we called it, I informed the Rebbe, and he immediately sent a telegram with amazing blessings. The next year, I visited him, and when I told the Rebbe that we had sixth to eighth-grade classes, he encouraged us to keep on expanding, and then added a surprising suggestion: “There are new housing units that were just built around your property – you should try to buy them.”

I was taken aback at first; we scarcely had enough funds for our own institution. But, with a bit of gall, I approached the housing authorities who oversaw those buildings and managed to purchase the entire adjacent street – which ultimately allowed us to expand our yeshivah.

The Rebbe followed the development of these institutions all along the way. In honor of the fundraising dinner we made each year, the Rebbe would send us a special letter expressing his love for the work of Migdal Or, while urging others to support it. Before the dinner, I always visited the Rebbe, and afterward, his secretary, Rabbi Leibel Groner, would call to ask how it had gone.

On one occasion, I was at one of the Rebbe’s public gatherings with Shaul Amor, the mayor of Migdal Ha’emek at the time. Migdal Or had become quite large by then, even though there had been some opposition to this growth, but the Rebbe told the mayor that one Migdal Or in the city wasn’t enough!

The mayor, who happened to be having some foot pain at the time, then asked the Rebbe to bless him with a full recovery.

“A public figure like yourself must be healthy,” responded the Rebbe. “You don’t have time to be ill! Your task is to spread Torah in the city and to help Migdal Or expand. When you are healthy, the whole town will be healthy!”

Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, founder and president of the Migdal Or institutions, has served as rabbi of Migdal Ha’emek since 1970. He was interviewed in his home in May of 2012.

I was born in Israel in the town of Rosh Pinah, in the winter of 1918. I was named “Aviv” – “spring” in Hebrew – for the new era that was dawning in the Land of Israel at the time, after its conquest by British imperial forces and the end of the Ottoman era.

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The house in which I was born, raised, and then lived for the rest of my life was built by my grandfather Reb Aharon Yirmiyahu Keller. He was one of the founders of our town, along with a group of young families from Old Tzfat (Safed) that had been just scraping by with the help of the Old Yishuv charity distribution system known as the chalukah. Together, they decided to leave the mountain-top town of Tzfat, go down, and set up a new agricultural settlement so that they could live independently off the land.

The story that I would like to share took place on a summer’s day in 1929, when I was ten years old. In those days, every afternoon, my family used to gather in the home of my uncle, Shimon Keller, to drink tea together. And so, the family was sitting in Uncle Shimon’s garden and chatting, when a long, black Mercedes pulled up outside the house. We had never so much as seen such a car before, and it immediately aroused our curiosity. As I recall, the car had three rows of passenger seats, in addition to two seats at the front, alongside the driver. As the limousine came to a halt, my grandfather turned to my uncle. “That,” he announced, “is the Rebbe of Lubavitch.”

My grandfather had never actually seen Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn – the Previous Rebbe – but he had been reading the local press coverage of his historic visit to the Holy Land, which was then underway. He also had a good eye, so he was able to immediately recognize the distinguished-looking rabbi in the car. Indeed, that day was the fifth of Av, which is the yahrzeit of the 16th century kabbalist Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, “the Holy Ari,” and the Lubavitcher Rebbe was making his way to pray at the great mystic’s resting place in Tzfat. (more…)

We came to Israel from Casablanca when I was five, and for the first seven years, we lived in a migrant camp in Pardes Chana. My twin brother Eliyahu Moshe and I studied in a government school, but when our parents realized how far it was from traditional Judaism, they moved to Bnei Brak, where we received a proper Torah education. When we graduated from the school in Bnei Brak, they sent us to the Chabad yeshivah in Lod and then to Kfar Chabad.

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In those yeshivot, the children of Yemenite and Moroccan families learned alongside the sons of old-stock Russian Chabad families. And so did we discover the world of Chabad, imbibe its spirit, and eventually adopt its way of life as devoted chasidim of the Rebbe. That is why it was only natural that I joined a group of students who were going to study in New York, in the Rebbe’s court – a program known today as “kvutzah.”

When we arrived in 1965, I was thrilled to be the first member of the Malka family to ever visit the Rebbe. A few weeks later, after Rosh Hashanah, a friend of mine asked me whether I could help build the Rebbe’s sukkah. “But no looking around, and no questions,” he warned me. Of course, I agreed, while wondering to myself how I – a simple, wide-eyed yeshivah student – had landed the privilege of working for the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

First, we carried sukkah walls from the basement of 770 up to the second floor, which was where the Previous Rebbe had lived. There I met the Previous Rebbe’s wife, Rebbetzin Nechama Dina, for the first time. Until her passing in 1971, her son-in-law and her husband’s successor, the Rebbe, used to have meals during festivals in this apartment, and there, on the balcony, we built the sukkah that would host them.

Next, we built a sukkah at the Rebbe’s home on President Street – which was another first for me. The Rebbe’s wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka, opened the door for us when we came, and after we finished working, she brought out some fruit and other treats. “You worked hard,” she explained, and encouraged us to partake. (more…)

I was born in Germany in 1946, and I moved to Israel with my family in 1948. There, we settled in Beit Gamliel, an agricultural village that my father had helped found.

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As a child, I attended the village school, and then a religious cheder with an old-school teacher in the afternoons. He used to discipline us with a little cane, which terrified me, especially on Thursdays when there was a test on the weekly parshah. Too afraid to go to school on test day, I would roam the fields. My father, who was worried about the fedayeen terrorists who were active in those days, had to go out and look for me. He didn’t know what to do about my education until a friend suggested that he send me to the Chabad school in nearby Rishon Letziyon. And so began my connection with Chabad.

Shortly after, I was acting out in class, when my new teacher, Rabbi Shlomo Greenwald, came over to me. But to my surprise, instead of hitting me with a cane or a belt, he gave me a kind pat on the head. I wasn’t used to that! I became an excellent student and continued to learn in Chabad schools for the next few years, before going on to high school and then the army. (more…)

In 1954, after I had finished college and got engaged to my husband, I had an audience with the Rebbe. First, he asked about how my life was going and what had been happening since the last time he had seen me. Then, because I was about to get married, he asked whether I was planning on wearing a sheitel – a wig worn by married women to fulfill the halachic requirement to cover their hair.

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I was raised always to be totally truthful, and I had a very open, honest relationship with the Rebbe, so without thinking about being diplomatic, I just said exactly what I felt: “No, I’m not planning on wearing a sheitel.”

The Rebbe didn’t get annoyed or seem disappointed. He just looked at me with a big smile and asked, “Why not?”

“Well,” I explained, “All of my friends are college graduates from nice religious homes, and none of them are planning to wear a sheitel. Only old people do that, and it’s not something I’ve ever considered.”

I had been living in Boston since I was fourteen years old – when the Previous Rebbe sent my father to assume a rabbinic position there in 1947 – and it was a different world from the Chabad community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. There was a large community of Jews of all types, many of them observant, but they were more secular on the whole, and there certainly wasn’t a Lubavitcher community; there were maybe two or three Chabad girls in the whole city, and none of them were my age.

“Are you going to keep your hair covered?” the Rebbe inquired further.

“Oh yes,” I replied. “I’m going to wear hats. That is what everybody in Boston does.” (more…)

My family left Russia in 1946, eventually arriving in Paris, where we remained for seven years. The Rebbe’s mother, Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, fled Russia shortly after we did, and for three months in 1947, she stayed with us.

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We lived in an apartment on the top floor of a big house in Paris owned by our uncle, Rabbi Zalman Schneerson; he was the brother of my mother, Yehudis Butman, and they were cousins of the Rebbe. We had a dining room and two bedrooms, one of which became Rebbetzin Chana’s. For as long as we lived there, we continued to refer to it as “Rebbetzin Chana’s room.”

The Rebbe, who was still simply known as “Rabbi Schneerson,” had left Europe for the United States years earlier, but that year, he returned to France to reunite with his mother and to bring her back with him to New York. During his stay, the Rebbe would come to our house to visit her twice every single day, in the morning and the afternoon. My mother would serve them tea, and sometimes cake as well.

Aside from our relation on my mother’s side, my family had another connection with the Rebbe’s family. During the war, my family had been living in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan; I was actually born there, in the town of Frunze, which is today Bishkek.

Not far from us was the city of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, where the Rebbe’s parents lived for several months in 1944. The Soviet authorities had arrested the Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, for his rabbinic activities, and exiled him to that region. Partly because of his ailing health – he passed away that year – his sentence had been lifted, allowing him and Rebbetzin Chana to move to Alma-Ata.

During this time, my father, Reb Zalman Butman, assisted the Rebbe’s parents with whatever they needed to cover their expenses each week. When the Rebbe came to Paris in 1947, he told my father: “Reb Zalman, I know you supported my father. I would like to know how much it cost so I can repay you.” (more…)

My mother came from a Munkatcher chasidic family, and a long line of Hungarian rabbis. Both her parents and some of her siblings were killed in the war but she survived Auschwitz and came to the US in 1946. She always was a woman with strong and pure faith. I remember her praying Mincha on Shabbat afternoons for half an hour, all the while wiping her tears with a handkerchief.

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She and my father lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I was born. But after a few years, my father sold our house and moved to an apartment at 848 Park Place, near the corner of Nostrand Avenue, in Crown Heights. At the time, many Jews were living in the neighborhood but they were mostly non-observant. As a result, my mother missed Williamsburg, where the streets felt Jewish and she was surrounded by familiar faces.

One day in the early fifties, she walked up to Eastern Parkway with her baby carriage and was happy to catch sight of a few chasidic looking young men.

“Who are they?” she asked.

“They’re from Lubavitch,” she was told. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe lives nearby.”

“I would like to speak to him,” she said, and she made an appointment to meet the Rebbe.

After explaining to the Rebbe what had been bothering her since the move, she told him that she wanted to convince her husband to go back to Williamsburg.

“One should never go backward,” the Rebbe told her. (more…)

My parents – Rabbi Gershon Mendel and Rebbetzin Bessie Garelik – married in the summer of 1958. Almost immediately after, they began writing to the Rebbe that they wanted to become his emissaries, serving a Jewish community somewhere in the world. Back in those days, there were very few such shluchim, and it was still a novel concept even within the Chabad community.

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One day my father was walking down the hallway in 770 when he met the Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Mordechai Hodakov.

Now Rabbi Hodakov may have looked somewhat naive, but he was an unbelievably shrewd man who was always on the ball and knew how to handle any situation that came up. But usually, people didn’t just stop Rabbi Hodakov to talk with him; he was very orderly, and you had to make an appointment if you wanted to speak with him.

But on seeing my father he remarked: “You and your wife keep writing that you want to go on shlichus. You have to understand that the Rebbe cannot send people like you.”

“Why not? What did I do wrong?” my father exclaimed.

Rabbi Hodakov explained that he hadn’t done anything wrong. The issue was that, even before getting married, my father had been teaching in the Chabad yeshivah in Newark, which has since relocated to Morristown, New Jersey. “The Rebbe will not take someone from one institution and send him somewhere else. It doesn’t work that way,” the secretary concluded.

“Well, if that’s the problem,” my father thought, “I can take care of it.”

As soon as their conversation ended, my father went up to the third floor of 770, to the office of the Rebbe’s brother-in-law, Rabbi Shmaryahu Gurary. Known as “Rashag,” he was in charge of the Chabad yeshivah network. (more…)

I was twelve years old when my father first took me from London, England, to visit the Rebbe. My Bar Mitzvah was coming up and we came a few months before then for the holiday of Simchat Torah. It was 1973, which meant that the Yom Kippur War had broken out just over a week before and was still going on.

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In his public addresses throughout the preceding summer, the Rebbe had paid an unusual amount of attention to the education of Jewish children, as well as to the spiritual power that children have to nullify any threats to the Jewish people. In this context, he repeatedly invoked the verse from Psalms 8:3, “From the mouths of babies and little children You have established strength… to put an end to the enemy and avenger.”

When children came back home from summer camp, he called for special gatherings to be held for them, where they would hear words of Torah and give charity. Since the month of Elul was coming up, he had also said that children should specifically be told the parable of “the king in the field.”

According to this chasidic allegory, first explained by the Alter Rebbe, the founder of the Chabad movement, G-d is compared to a king who can normally only be approached in his palace, and then only by his ministers and members of his court. But when he is returning from one of his travels, and passes through the fields outside the city, he is accessible to all people. Men, women, and children can come out to greet him, and the king receives them with a smile.

Similarly, during the High Holidays, accessing G-d is like encountering the king in his palace. However, during the preceding month, Elul, anyone can meet Him. As the Rebbe pointed out, this parable is not only something that children could understand, but it has a special relevance to them: One has to be an adult to become a minister in the royal court, and children cannot simply go into the palace to meet the king on their own – but they can when he is in the field. (more…)