The Anonymous Article The Rebbe Edited

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Historic Treasures — Episode 48: "The Anonymous Article the Rebbe Edited"

"Historic Treasures" is presented by Rabbi Sholom Ber Schapiro, Director of Nissan Mindel Publications (NMP), exclusively for COLlive.com.

Each program shares treasures from the archives of Rabbi Schapiro's father-in-law, Rabbi Dr. Nissan Mindel, OBM, a prolific writer who served as a personal secretary of the sixth and seventh Chabad Rebbes. The program uncovers fascinating stories, rare artifacts, and precious documents from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

This week, Rabbi Schapiro shares a fascinating report, written anonymously, by a person who witnessed the arrival of the Frierdiker Rebbe in March of 1940 and then, ten years later, participated in his levaya after his passing on Yud Shvat 5710.

"This heartwarming, first-person experience, which he describes in great detail, brings the Frierdiker Rebbe to life and instills in us a deep love and appreciation for him," Rabbi Schapiro says. "This report was reviewed and edited by the Rebbe — the Ramash, at the time."

The full article is presented here, as well as a sample page with the Rebbe's notations.

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**THE WONDER RABBI**
By Anonymous (with the Rebbe's notations)

On March 19, 1940, I saw him the first time when they carried him down the special landing bridge off the S.S. Drottningholm, to the cheers of a huge crowd of followers and curious spectators and the flashes of press cameras.

I had heard of wonder rabbis and the adoration and absolute obedience which they command of their followers. But I had never seen one. It was therefore with a great deal of curiosity and skepticism that I had joined the hundreds of men and women from all walks and paths of Jewish New York who had responded to the notice of the arrival of the famous "Lubavitcher Rebbe" after his escape from the hell of occupied Warsaw. Young and old, rich and poor, bearing the traditional kaftans, black hats, beards and peyos, or the most elaborate creations of Parisian couturiers or their Fifth Avenue competitors, they pushed and jostled each other to get closer and have a look at the man in the round fur hat with the reddish-grey long beard and the deepest, fiery eyes, who was slowly transported to the pier to be greeted by a galaxy of senators, congressmen, judges, and civic leaders. His very presence seemed to electrify the large crowd, and some of their feverish excitement penetrated my shell of skepticism. But as I walked away, I shrugged off the experience as an interesting instance of mass psychosis of faith, fame, and curiosity. A few months from now, I thought to myself, after the novelty has worn off and the curiosity been stilled, this rabbi too will be forgotten in the anonymity of the Eastside humdrum life that has swallowed hundreds of former celebrities from the Old World whose arrival in the United States had caused a quick flurry of excitement.

I was wrong. A few months ago, almost ten years to the day, I was again standing at the fringe of a huge crowd, many times larger than the one that had lined the pier and even more colorful and variegated. But there were no cheers, no pushing and jostling. There was only the mute grief, the incredulous, hushed silence of people too shocked to grasp the reality of the moment. They almost seemed in a hurry to bury their dead leader on the dreary, drab Sunday morning of January 28, as they walked out of step, hundreds of men high, in thick clusters behind the car that carried the body of Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, through the streets around his mansion in Brooklyn, that were lined by thousands of mourners and spectators. Towards noon the sun broke through the clouds and warmed up the frosty air and reflected from the shiny Buicks, Cadillacs, and Packards, the rickety old Model T Fords, the long line of buses that carried the mourners towards the cemetery.

Again I walked away in silence, lonely with thoughts, trying to shake off the powerful emotions of the present. But this time the feelings of a deep, personal loss, of a tragedy only partially understood, persisted; for meanwhile I had become acquainted with some of the qualities of the man whom they were carrying to his eternal rest. Not that I had become a Chassid, a true and pious believer in the near-miraculous powers of the Rebbe and his teachings. The inherent skepticism of my education was too strong for that. Yet as I followed the bier from afar, the realization suddenly overwhelmed me that I had come to think of him as one who can do the impossible, who with his inexhaustible optimism, courage, and idealism had conquered the sluggish resistance of our negative culture. He had taught me and thousands of other people like myself to believe again in the truth of "where there is a will there is a way."

His Chassidim swear to the truth of numerous miracles of foresight and insight he has performed before their eyes. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. I would not know. But there is no doubt in my mind that Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn, the half-paralyzed Lubavitcher Rebbe, whom I had seen carried off the gangplank in an almost helpless physical state, has during the decade of his stay in this country achieved miracles of organization, social service, and education. And something else I have seen, for which the term miracle may be too small. I have watched numerous people enter his office tense, worried, and tortured by conflicts, and then I have seen them leave with a glow of inner happiness and ease, radiating the joy of an extraordinary experience. I don't know whether the man with the deep, searching eyes, to whom they presented their small and big problems, had seen beyond the fogs and clouds of their difficulties. But he certainly must have had the capacity of probing their hearts and finding the kind of words and the type of answer that loosed their tightness and transformed it into the dynamic certainty of conquering all difficulties and problems. This key to people's hearts, more than any other phase of the Lubavitcher Rebbe's life and work, convinced me that the term "wonder rabbi," which I had ridiculed in youthful disdain, had its own meaning and place in twentieth-century civilization.

To understand the great love, respect, and admiration which hundreds of thousands of Jews the world over had for Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn, it is necessary to know some of the facts of his life and his achievements in all fields of Jewish endeavor.

Rabbi Schneersohn was born in the small town of Lubavitch, in Russia, on the twelfth of Tammuz 5640 (1880), as the scion of the famous Schneersohn dynasty that goes back to the so-called Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi. This profound thinker and scholar, a disciple of the Maggid of Mezritch, created the Chassidic ideology of Chabad, which represents the initials of Chochmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), and Da'as (knowledge), in his authoritative treatise, Likkutei Amarim, better known as the Tanya. Like this famous progenitor, who was the official spokesman of the Chassidic movement in the controversy with the Gaon of Vilna, and who commanded great respect even at the Czarist court in Petersburg when he helped the Russian cause against Napoleon, the young Joseph Isaac was destined to play a major role in Jewish communal and religious life. As a small child, he was already initiated into the whirlpool of activities concentrating in and about the court of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. For his father, Rabbi Sholom DovBer Schneersohn, himself a man of extraordinary scholarship and communal leadership, was determined to mold his son from the cradle on, for the role which the spiritual leader of a worldwide movement like Chabad has to fill. By the time the boy had reached his fifteenth birthday, his father appointed him his personal secretary, thus placing him in a strategic post from where he was able to gain intimate knowledge and acquaintance with all the phases of the religio-political and religio-philosophical currents passing or emanating from Lubavitch. Not only did many of the great scholars of those days visit Rabbi Sholom DovBer to consult him on research problems or on matters of public Jewish concern, but frequently the Lubavitcher Rebbe was invited to attend the rabbinical conferences and the emergency sessions of the Jewish political and communal leaders every time one of the frequent crises in the Pale of Jewish Settlement arose. For besides his qualities as a leader, few Jews had such good standing at the court of Russia as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, ever since Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in recognition of his valuable services to the country, had been given the status of a privileged citizen for himself and for all his descendants. And wherever Rabbi Sholom DovBer went, his young son came along, gaining valuable experience and insight into the forces and problems of the Jewish situation in those days of economic and political oppression.

Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn's marriage to a relative, Nechama Dina, the daughter of the prominent scholar Rabbi Avraham Schneersohn, when he was seventeen years old, marked not only a week of joyous celebration for the followers of Chabad Chassidim, but it was the occasion on which Rabbi Sholom DovBer announced the founding of the first Lubavitcher Yeshivah, named Tomchei Tmimim, which was to set the pattern for numerous similar institutions the Jewish world over. For in its curriculum, Tomchei Tmimim yeshivos attempted to combine Talmudic scholarship with intense study of Chassidic literature and way of life. Thus it represented the culmination of the Chabad ideology, which disavows exclusive concentration on Talmudics, like the misnagdim, as well as on Chassidus like most other Chassidic schools. One year afterward, at the age of eighteen, Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn took over the direction of the Tomchei Tmimim Yeshivah, and under his guiding hand it flourished and grew from a single institution to a large network of similar schools all over Eastern Europe, moving its center and new areas of concentration to every country where Rabbi Joseph Isaac resided subsequent to his departure from Russia. And it was in this realm of establishing yeshivos for boys and girls that Rabbi Schneersohn scored his greatest successes and spent his best efforts. For, time and again, he expressed the thought that the spreading of Torah was the supreme task of the time, to which everything else was secondary. In America too, the last station of his pilgrimage through the centers of the Jewish world, Rabbi Schneersohn achieved the highest and most impressive results in this vital yet greatly neglected field, by starting undauntedly where others feared to tread.

Another phase of his work that Rabbi Sholom DovBer entrusted very early into the hands of his eminently capable son was the field of diplomatic missions. For strange as it may seem to the outsider, the court of Lubavitch was not merely the seat and center of Chassidic and religious activities, but it played an important role in the political affairs of the Jewish world, particularly of the millions in the Pale of Settlement. At the age of 22, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn undertook the first of his numerous trips to St. Petersburg to intervene with the government on behalf of his Jewish brethren who were plagued with legal and illegal restrictions by major and minor officials in the various regions of the empire. His intelligent and polite, yet clear and firm conduct of the negotiations won him the favor of the highest circles at court, in St. Petersburg as well as in Moscow, and slated him for the role of spokesman of the Jewish people in his and other countries. He was only 25 years old when his experience in dealing with diplomats and princes was called upon to ease the terrible plight of the Jews in the wake of the October Revolution in 1905, when government-inspired pogroms plagued the Jewish community, as a diversion of popular attention from the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the ensuing unrest and rebellion against the hardships of Czarist oppression. It took a great deal of courage, care, and skill on the part of the young man to leave the country, establish relations with the most influential statesmen of those days in Germany and Holland, and induce them to intervene on behalf of the suffering Jews of Russia. Successful far beyond expectation, the young Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn returned to Russia as a hero of his people, who appreciated his help and offered him their love and admiration to a degree rare for a young man his age.

Naturally, this mission earned him little favor in the eyes of the Russian government, who had begun to be annoyed by the constant interference of the young rabbi from Lubavitch with their economic or political restrictions of the Jews. Even his status as a privileged citizen did not help him long, as he kept on commuting between his residence and the seats of the local and national governments in his efforts to avert trouble and prevent further decline of the already low economic state of the Jewish population and the ensuing moral depression. In due time his courageous standing up to the Russian officialdom caused him to be thrown into one prison after the other, never holding him long, and never frightening him from doing exactly the same thing time and again whenever the need arose. Official inquiries were never able to find anything criminal against him, and instead of a mark of shame, every case of imprisonment, particularly during the years from 1902 to 1911, turned into another personal triumph which increased the love of the Jewish people in Russia for this fearless young protagonist of their plight.

There were other ways in which Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn, from his early youth on, engaged in easing the economic pressure lying heavily upon the impoverished Jews of Russia. His illustrious forebears, beginning with the founder of the dynasty, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, had already realized that one form of escape from the constantly increasing economic ruin and the ensuing demoralization was the creation of concentrated, economically independent settlements. After the Rav's death, his son was granted a large strip of land around the city of Kherson by the Czar, who wanted to show his gratitude to the family of Rabbi Schneur Zalman and agreed to help the project of Jewish settlements. To many thousands of Jewish families, the Kherson colony meant physical as well as spiritual salvation, and it set the pattern for others to follow the road to the land. The grandson of Rabbi Schneur Zalman, known as the Tzemach Tzedek, from the title of his many-volumed collection of Talmudic and halachic responsa, continued the work of his father by establishing an even larger colony of settlements around the city of Shtzedrin [?]. Each Lubavitcher Rebbe in his turn continued this important trend away from the "luft-existence" of the East European Jewish masses, and by stressing the idea of agricultural colonization as a suitable occupation, helped transvaluate the pattern of popular depreciation of manual work.

Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn did not only further propagate the establishment of agricultural Jewish centers, which served not only to provide economic security but represented the strongest concentration of Jewish religious and communal activity. He promoted the idea of Jews learning skilled trades, in the face of the low self-esteem in which the baal melochoh was held in Eastern Europe. This social upgrading of the farmer and the craftsman paid rich dividends, not only in those days of economic exigency but later on when the Soviet regime superseded the Czar yet continued the imperial policy of oppression of the Jews under the pretense of eliminating the unproductive elements of the masses of Jewish dealers and businessmen.

In addition to establishing farming and craft centers, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn was also leading the movement to establish independent Orthodox Jewish industrial centers — factories where Jews worked in all phases of the productive process and acquired skills that became equally precious during the Soviet oppression, as the agricultural and craft training. The industrial center of Dubrovna, which Rabbi Joseph Isaac had helped organize as a young man, alone had enabled many thousands of Jews to survive. Thus the Chassidic ideology, which does not recognize the exclusive intellectual religiosity of the misnagdic philosophy, bore rich fruit in the work of the Lubavitcher Rebbe when he promoted the shifting of the masses of his Chassidim to the various forms of manual labor, over and against the popular deprecation of such professions for an Orthodox Jew.

In 1920, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn was called upon to become the official head of the world movement of Chabad, after the death of his father, Rabbi Sholom DovBer. Russia was in turmoil. Defeat in war, revolution, unrest, insecurity, and utter demoralization had wrought havoc with the very foundations of peaceful life for the Jews even more than for the rest of the population. In this terror-fraught situation, Rabbi Schneersohn, the new Lubavitcher Rebbe, was faced with the double task of securing a minimum basis of economic and spiritual survival for the distressed Jewish Orthodox masses. It was here that the agricultural and industrial training proved to be of great value. For it enabled all those who had engaged in it to retain relative independence, and more than that, it gave them the chance to live together in concentrated areas, thus assuring them of a maximum of inner strength and power of resistance against the violent attacks on their soul from the Soviets, led by the ominous Yevsektzia, the anti-Jewish Jewish section.

Undaunted by the terror methods of these enemies of the Jewish religion, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn fought almost single-handedly against the catastrophic secularization of the largest reservoir of the world's Jewish community. Openly and secretly, he defied death and severe punishment innumerable times, organizing schools, yeshivos, congregations, services, meetings, and study groups under the very nose of the suspicious officials. Unable to stay long in one city, he moved his residence continuously, travelled extensively, giving courage and inspiration to the small and large groups who did not yield to the pressure from the outside. His students and disciples followed his example and risked their lives visiting the near and far Jewish communities, teaching, organizing classes and services, and strengthening the general resistance. Economically too, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn organized financial help for the small craftsmen and artisans, enabling them to refrain from work on Shabbos, and support the rabbis and communities who would have perished without subsidy.

Naturally, the renegade officials of the Yevsektzia were not willing to put up with this "counterrevolution" of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and they used the full arsenal of their notorious methods of intimidation and terror to change his mind. But their worst and vilest forms of torture left the determined rabbi unimpressed. Even when they set the gun on his breast, he stated calmly that he would not give up his G-d. "I have only one G-d, and two worlds. Your little toy here does not frighten me."