In 1908, around the time my grandfather, Rabbi Eliezer Pupko, got married, he accepted a rabbinic position in a town called Velizh in the Smolensk region of Russia. Half of the residents were Jewish, and it was an enclave of Chabad chasidim, although my grandfather himself was not a chasid. He remained the rabbi there until 1930, when he, along with my grandmother and their children who were still in Velizh, escaped to Latvia under the noses of the OGPU – as the predecessor to the KGB was known.

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This meant that they experienced the upheaval of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the bad times that followed. Once the communists had taken control, they ruled with an iron hand.

Now, at the time, Velizh still had a large religious community, with one main synagogue and two or three smaller ones. My grandfather would spend every Shabbat in a different synagogue, but for the festivals and High Holidays, he would be in the main one. Although these synagogues were allowed to keep functioning into the 1920s, the communists had spies and infiltrators all over. As a result, it became very difficult to do anything related to religion without being spied upon, harassed, or worse. Teaching or helping others observe Judaism was even more dangerous, especially when it came to the education of children.

One of the first things the Soviets did after coming to power was to take over the schools and compel every child to attend. At school, the children would be asked to report on the activities in their own home and if, for some reason, the child said the “wrong” thing, their parents could be taken out and shot.

As a result of this kind of pressure, there were many Jewish people – members of the Velizh community included – who decided to take on the “free life” of being communists.

In the first half of 1927, when things were really bad, a group of these Jewish communists came over to my grandfather with inside information. They revealed that the then-Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, was going to be arrested on account of his “counter-revolutionary” activities in continuing to promote Judaism in the Soviet Union. These people had been Lubavitcher chasidim, and carried strong feelings of affection for the Rebbe. They couldn’t bring this information directly to the Rebbe, who was at the time in the city of Leningrad – today, as in tsarist times, S. Petersburg – and so they asked my grandfather to go to the Rebbe and pass on this message. (more…)

My father, Reb Nosson Vogel, had connected with Chabad chasidim in London in the early 60s, but it was when he traveled to visit the Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1965 that he was totally captivated by him, and became a chasid. My father subsequently founded the Lubavitch Boys’ Grammar School in London, which eventually morphed into today’s Yeshivah Gedolah.

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When I was eleven, in 1966, my father took my older brother and me to New York for the holiday of Sukkot to meet the Rebbe. For my father, the yardstick to measure how much we wanted to go to the Rebbe was whether we would come up with our own money for the ticket – and we did.

During our private audience with the Rebbe, my father told the Rebbe that our trip had been scheduled during our school break so that it wouldn’t come at the expense of learning Torah, which gave the Rebbe great satisfaction. Then, when my father mentioned that we had paid for our own tickets, the Rebbe smiled broadly and opened the drawer of his desk to give us each a fifty-dollar note. “I want to participate in paying for your trip,” he told us.

My second audience was in 1971, on my own, as a sixteen-year-old yeshivah student. Beforehand, I prepared a note with some questions for the Rebbe. One thing on my mind was my younger sister Hensha (Eliane) who was nine years younger than me. She was profoundly autistic. As an older brother, I felt that there was something I ought to be doing for her, at least spiritually. “What can I do to help my sister?” I wrote to the Rebbe.

“You are a yeshivah student,” the Rebbe answered after reading my note. “Go deep into your studies of the Talmud and Chasidut. By learning Torah, and by delving deep into it, you will reach the depth of your sister.”

The Rebbe was pointing out that my sister had a depth to her, something more than meets the eye. I could connect to that depth in her, and have a meaningful effect on her, but the way for me to access this depth was through studying Torah. (more…)

Towards the end of 1980, I traveled to New York with a group of friends, as part of the kvutza program, in which graduates of Chabad yeshivot in Israel spend a year with the Rebbe, studying at 770.

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Chabad students usually spend their Fridays on Jewish outreach, going out to help people put on tefillin or to distribute Shabbat candles, and that year I was hoping to do the same. After speaking to Rabbi Shraga Zalmanov, head of the Lubavitch Youth Organization’s Hebrew-speaking division, I found out that he would be visiting the local Israeli consulate on Sukkot – but nobody went there on a weekly basis. When I asked to come along, he happily agreed.

The following Friday, I returned on my own. I didn’t know whether I would be allowed in the building, which housed Israel’s diplomatic delegation to the United Nations, but I gave it a shot.

At the entrance, I rang the intercom.

“Who are you?” a voice inquired.

“Menashe from Chabad,” I answered. “I was here on Sukkot. Now I’ve come to offer tefillin to whoever is interested.” The door opened.

Within a month, I became a regular at the consulate. The security guards would open the door as soon as they saw me, and then come out to greet me with a warm hug. (more…)

When I first came to the Chabad yeshivah here in Montreal as a teenager, towards the end of 1958, I was pretty raw. It was my first exposure to Chabad, and Tomchei Temimim of Montreal was a top yeshivah – the students there were studying Talmud and chasidic philosophy (Chasidut) on a serious level.

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Later that year, in my first audience with the Rebbe, he made it very clear that he expected me, like all the other yeshivah students, to take my Torah studies very seriously.

In his public addresses, the Rebbe would say that a student should be so devoted to studying Torah that he doesn’t even notice the time passing by. “If they could,” he once quipped, “they should throw away the clock altogether!” Our official daily schedule ended at 9:30 PM, but if you continued learning until 10:30 PM, so what? Of course, we had to be punctual in coming to class, as the Rebbe once emphasized in a letter to me.

Our legendary Chasidut teacher, Rabbi Zev Greenglass kept a record of our attendance, and he gave us up to five minutes of leeway. Our daily schedule began at 7:30 AM, and if we came past 7:35, he would make a note in his little book. That book went to the Rebbe every couple of weeks – along with a report on the students – and the thought of bad marks being sent to the Rebbe motivated us.

In those years, the concept of yeshivah students engaging in Jewish outreach had barely begun. Instead, the thing that gave the Rebbe the greatest pleasure, or nachas, was seeing us totally devoted to Torah study. On one occasion, the Rebbe sent our yeshivah a profound and mystical explanation for why this was so.

It was in 1961, and we traveled to New York to join the Rebbe for the 10th of Shevat – the anniversary of the Previous Rebbe’s passing. A gathering would be held for the occasion, an important event, attended by a large crowd including visitors from other communities. But that year, it became apparent that the evening had not been properly organized, much to the Rebbe’s consternation. (more…)

When World War Two broke out in 1939, my father, Rabbi Yosef Portowicz, was studying at the Lubavitch yeshivah in Otwock, near Warsaw, Poland. Along with his fellow students, he fled east and, by the grace of G-d, found refuge in Shanghai, which was then an international city. There, the Lubavitch yeshivah was reestablished and he studied there until the war ended and he immigrated to the United States.

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By then he was already married – to a Jewish refugee girl in Shanghai – and he settled with my mother in New York, where I was born in 1949. But, although he was a highly-respected Torah scholar, he found it hard to earn a livelihood not knowing English, and he struggled to support his family.

That’s when the Rebbe came to his rescue. At the time the Rebbe was not yet the Rebbe – he was assisting the Previous Rebbe and running (among other things) Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, Chabad’s central educational arm. He suggested that my father become a fundraiser for this organization, and he told him exactly how to raise money. My father was to visit various synagogues in the New York area for Shabbat and speak there. During his speeches, he was to explain the outreach work Chabad was doing; then as people from that community would donate money to Merkos after Shabbat, the organization would pay him a percentage.

So this is what my father did, with varying degrees of success. Every Shabbat, he would leave our family and travel to some other place and try his best.

Along the way, an amazing thing happened. As a child, I never ceased hearing about the Friday afternoon when my maternal grandfather came running to our house to summon my father to his telephone. My grandfather was the only person in our Brownsville neighborhood who had a telephone at that time – this was the late 1940s after all. What was so urgent? The Rebbe had called three times and needed to speak with my father before the onset of Shabbat. (more…)

My father, Rabbi Moshe Yitzchok Hecht, was one of the first emissaries that the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe sent in the United states. In 1942, he was dispatched to open a yeshivah in Worcester, Massachusetts, which he did very successfully.

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Then, in 1946, my father received a telegram from the Previous Rebbe, stating: “Now is the time for you to move to New Haven.” On that very same day, he boarded a train to New Haven, Connecticut, to begin his work anew. I was three at the time, and our family has been there ever since.

In addition to his organizational skills, my father was a brilliant orator, and on occasion, the Rebbe would send him to visit various Jewish communities on his behalf. In 1948, my parents were sent to South America on a six-week mission to visit several communities there, in particular those hosting newly arrived refugees who had survived the Holocaust. They were to meet with the survivors, gather them together, and strengthen them in their Jewish observance. The Rebbe requested a detailed report on how the Jews in these places were faring physically, emotionally and spiritually, as well as how these communities were doing in terms of Jewish education, kosher food, Shabbat observance, and family purity.

Some time after their return, our family merited to have a private audience with the Previous Rebbe. Despite not understanding the conversation, I was mesmerized by the shining countenance of the Rebbe’s holy face, and his loving smile.

I also noticed that there was a wheelchair in the room and after the audience, I asked my father about it. He told me of the Rebbe’s great self-sacrifice under the Soviet regime, and how the suffering he had endured in prison had taken a physical toll on him.

The evening after one Shabbat in the winter of 1950, we received a phone call telling us the devastating news of the Rebbe’s passing. The date was the tenth of Shevat. My father was extremely distraught. After a flurry of activity, we rushed to the car and set out for Crown Heights. (more…)

On an absolute lark, in the summer of 1972, I decided to go to Israel. I was a twenty-two-year-old public school music teacher from Niagara Falls, so this was a pretty way-out thing to do. My family, who was completely secular, didn’t even believe that I would go through with it.

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But I was dead set on going, and I ended up enjoying it very much, even staying on past the summer. One day, I was walking through the Tel Aviv central bus station when some yeshivah student came up and asked me if I wanted to do something.

“Alright,” I agreed, “how much will it cost?”

“Nothing,” he said, and the next thing I knew, he placed a kind of lemon in my one hand and some branches in the other. He instructed me to say some words and put the lemon and the branches together and then he began shaking them back and forth with me.

“What is going on here?” I thought to myself in embarrassment. And yet, somehow, that was the start of my Jewish observance. That student in the bus station might have gone home wondering what he had accomplished, but by helping me perform the mitzvah of lulav and etrog, he got the ball rolling.

When I got back to Niagara Falls, I began reading everything I could about Judaism, Israel, Jewish history – anything. I began taking Hebrew lessons from an Israeli, who told me about the Chabad House in nearby Buffalo. There I joined a Torah class led by a rabbi with a thick, straggly beard named Heschel Greenberg. We were just learning the plain text, without any deep explanations, but I was completely inspired. It felt real. (more…)

An enormous percentage of the photos and videos of the Rebbe that we have today were taken by my cousin, Levi Yitzchak Freidin – also known as “Levi Itche.” As Levi Itche passed away in 1992, I would like to relate here – from what I personally witnessed – how this came about and how a relationship between him and the Rebbe developed.

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Levi Itche lived in Holon, a largely secular city in Israel; he was not a Chabad chasid, per se, although he came from an illustrious line of Chabad chasidim in Russia. Because of this, the Rebbe asked Rabbi Efroyim Wolf, who ran the Chabad-Lubavitch network in the Holy Land to hire him as a photographer, which was his profession. In 1975, after working for Lubavitch for a couple of decades, Levi Itche decided to visit the Rebbe in New York. I got a call asking if he could stay with me; I agreed, and he arrived just before the High Holidays.

When he came, he had no idea what the place was all about and no idea what would be happening here during Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah. But he was a professional photographer and when he began to see the dramatic scenes taking place all around him, he was moved to record them. He was very enthusiastic, with a very lively personality, and he really responded to the Rebbe.

He began taking pictures as the Rebbe came and went, which got a rise out of the yeshivah students who would accompany the Rebbe, and who felt that photographing the Rebbe up close was not respectful. Indeed, in the early years of his leadership, the Rebbe largely avoided being photographed. Even later, when he became somewhat more amenable to it, it was not a common thing to do. However, Levi Itche wanted to take good pictures, not just snapshots, and to do this he would need to stand close to the Rebbe. This is why the students would give him a hard time and, at first, I had to accompany him to fend them off, and to advise him on when he could to take pictures without offending people.

To record the farbrengens, he used three-minute reels which were quite expensive and which then had to be spliced together. When he went home, he had a whole film put together of activities and celebrations from the month of Tishrei which he planned to show in numerous places in Israel. (more…)

After my wife and I got engaged in 1966, the Rebbe wished my father “Mazel Tov,” and then added: “They will be in Australia.”

My wife, Pnina, is from Australia – her father, Rabbi Chaim Gutnick, was a popular rabbi in Melbourne – but it was only after hearing those words that we knew our mission in life would be there.

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Before the wedding, the Rebbe told me to take the requisite tests on Jewish Law in order to receive rabbinic ordination. I had actually already been ordained the previous year when I was a yeshivah student in Israel. Still, now the Rebbe wanted me to seek as many additional certificates of ordination as I could, which I did: From the yeshivah in 770, where I was studying at the time, from Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung of Montreal, Rabbi Berel Rivkin of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the foremost Halachic authority at the time.

The Rebbe also specified that our wedding should be in Melbourne, as a large, community-wide event tied to the opening of the local Yeshivah Gedolah.

In addition, at the wedding and each of the Sheva Brachot celebrations over the following week, I was to deliver a chasidic discourse, along with at least three in-depth Talmudic lectures overall. The Rebbe also wanted there to be one Sheva Brachot in Sydney. Ostensibly, this was because my wife’s grandfather, Rabbi Asher Abramson, was the head of the Sydney rabbinic court, but the Rebbe specifically requested that the event be held in a different synagogue – that of the “Yeshiva” community.

Now, at around that time, a few members of this community had written to the Rebbe with a request. Mostly Hungarian and Polish survivors, they had founded a small yeshivah – giving the community its name – and now they wanted a day school. Although they weren’t Lubavitchers themselves, they had seen the school founded by Melbourne’s Lubavitch community flourish under the direction of a young, charismatic American named Rabbi Yitzchok Groner. So, they asked the Rebbe to send someone who would likewise be able to connect with the younger generation in Sydney.

At first, the Rebbe didn’t respond to this letter, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t take notice of it. In fact, the Rebbe had a vision for Sydney that would start to unfold with this community. (more…)

It was the summer of 1968, and my father had helped me get a part-time job at a charity called Ezras Torah. Founded in 1902 to help rabbis experiencing economic hardship, Ezras Torah had since expanded to become a general relief society, handing out stipends and assistance to anyone in need. My job was writing out checks, getting them signed, recording who received assistance, and other administrative tasks.

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Ezras Torah was close to the heart of the old Lithuanian Jewish community, which had historically been at odds with the chasidic community, and so I was very much in unfamiliar territory. When people came in and recognized me as a Lubavitcher, they would sometimes make a snide remark that could border on verbal abuse. “Oy vey,” one person said upon seeing me. “Those people have even reached here!” It bothered me very much, and eventually, I wrote to the Rebbe.

“I’ve been at this job for two months,” I wrote, “and I keep getting these jabs about being a Lubavitcher. Debating and fighting aren’t in my personality, so I keep quiet. But I feel that my silence implies that their criticisms are correct. I want to leave the job.”

The Rebbe’s answer was quick in coming. He wanted me to keep the job, and he advised me on how to handle the comments: “We are commanded by our sages to distance ourselves from even the trace of conflict. Therefore, you should remain silent.”

After that, my work experience changed. I continued to get those jabs, but with my instructions to stay silent, they went in one ear and out the other. The atmosphere at Ezras Torah suddenly became much more comfortable, even congenial, so I ended up staying there for the next few years. (more…)