Lehisraanen Episode Nine: Rabbi Yaakov Reinitz

00:00 Speaker 1 Shalom aleichem, and welcome to another episode of the Lehitraanen podcast, where chassidim share experiences and memories of the Rebbe and the ways of chassidim. Today we’re with the chossid known as “the guide,” Rabbi Yankel Reinitz, our natural treasure trove of stories.

00:18 Speaker 2 Amen.

00:20 Speaker 1 First of all, we want to hear from you what I ask everyone: fun vanet shtamt ir—where do you come from? How did you come to Chabad? Where did you grow up?

00:30 Speaker 2 Well, my father, a"h, passed away at the beginning of the War of Independence, from what they called shelling. He passed away on 24 Tishrei 5709. Back then, the whole country wasn’t organized yet. My mother, a"h, was left with seven children. We were living in Katamon then, though we were originally from Ungarishe Hazer, the Hungarian neighborhood. We couldn’t live there because of the shelling, so the army moved us to Katamon.

01:12 Speaker 1 So you were born in Ungarishe Hazer and moved to Katamon.

01:15 Speaker 2 Yes. We were there for several years. Then my mother decided that Katamon wasn’t a place to raise children, where they could grow up as they should. So she decided to move back to Ungarishe Hazer. Meanwhile, we had kept the apartment. Materially speaking, the apartment in Katamon had belonged to the Iraqi ambassador—the Arab ambassador.

01:56 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

01:57 Speaker 2 It had several rooms, a bathroom, a yard, and a balcony. It had a kitchen too. And what was there in Ungarishe Hazer? A room and a half for seven children, with the toilet outside.

02:14 Speaker 1 Outside, and a shared kitchen.

02:15 Speaker 2 And we had to bring water up from the cistern downstairs. For a while there wasn’t even electricity. It was hard, but my mother said it was better for us to make do in Ungarishe Hazer, with the Talmud Torah there and the Hungarian shul, than to stay in Katamon. Katamon had people from all sorts of communities, and it wasn’t really a place for our education. That was in 1955. Then her sister arrived from Hungary. There was a revolution in Hungary and they fled, so my mother gave her the apartment in Katamon, and we went back to Ungarishe Hazer. Where did we study? At the Talmud Torah in Ungarishe Hazer. Originally, my mother told me, she was from Debrecen in Hungary, and there she had belonged to the chassidim of Kosov. Kosov.

03:19 Speaker 1 Kosov.

03:20 Speaker 2 Kosov.

03:20 Speaker 1 Vizhnitz.

03:21 Speaker 2 Yes, something like that. Whenever she needed to, she would go to various rabbis. She always felt drawn to Chassidus, but we knew nothing about Chabad, and things were difficult at home. So she decided—I don’t know who suggested it. We had a cousin named Yankel Safronovitch. His wife was Basya, who had been Yankel Minsky’s wife. They lived in Katamon, and he had gone to study in Lod. Maybe it was him, or Nachum Rabinovitch—I don’t know who it was. My mother had a kiosk in Katamon. We would travel to Katamon, and—

04:17 Speaker 1 Meaning you were living in [unclear]—

04:18 Speaker 2 She would travel—

04:19 Speaker 1 She would travel to work in Katamon.

04:20 Speaker 2 Yes, she had a little kiosk. They took three of us children: me, the eldest, Yitzchak, and Shlomo. We got on the train and arrived in Lod, and my sister—

04:37 Speaker 1 Because of your cousin Safronovitch.

04:39 Speaker 2 Possibly; he was already studying here. We arrived in Lod, and Rabbi Ephraim Wolf welcomed us. It was 5716, 5716. We were here for almost a year, I think. I don’t know whether it was a year or less; I don’t remember exactly. We were in the orchard with all the children. There was Rabbi Shloime Greenblatt. I was twelve then, and I studied here with Rabbi Yankel Katz, who was a teacher at the time. He was a bochur then. His classroom was where [unclear] was, where the shul was. Later, in the orchard, there was [unclear]. We studied, but we still didn’t know anything about Chabad. We were three orphaned boys, and among the bochurim there was Boruch Teichman.

05:29 Speaker 1 There were three of you brothers then.

05:29 Speaker 2 Brothers, yes.

05:30 Speaker 1 Three brothers.

05:31 Speaker 2 Boruch Teichman and the Lipsker family were very fond of us and helped us. I remember my mother once came to visit us in the hut. It was a hut near [unclear], with no electricity and just one tap outside. I remember that Binyamin Mizrachi and his brother Yosef Mizrachi studied in that hut. Their father was Rabbi Yankel Mizrachi. He was a carpenter, and he came and made them a wardrobe. At the time, that was something special.

06:08 Speaker 1 Before he became a member of the Knesset.

06:09 Speaker 2 Yes. By then we had already moved from the orchard into the hut. At first we slept in the orchard, but that year there was the incident with Dvorkin, between Kfar Chabad and Lod—

06:25 Speaker 1 Dvorkin, Rabbi [unclear] Dvorkin, the first one who was murdered.

06:28 Speaker 2 Yes, he was murdered. He had been a counselor in Kfar Chabad, and after that the children were frightened. They moved us from the orchard to the hut. The hut had five rooms. We slept there, and there wasn’t even a toilet. We had to go to the toilet near [unclear]; it was somewhere in the middle there.

06:48 Speaker 1 About how many children were you?

06:49 Speaker 2 In each room there were four children. Four.

06:52 Speaker 1 Twenty children.

06:53 Speaker 2 Yes. Once my mother came to visit us on Shabbos. She slept with us in one of the rooms, and a counselor came by—I don’t remember who—and said we weren’t allowed to go to sleep. It was Friday night, and there was a kerosene lamp.

07:07 Speaker 1 Yes.

07:07 Speaker 2 Because there was a big mouse running around, and we had to be very careful there wouldn’t be a fire. The hut was made of wood. We stayed up for hours until the lamp cooled down, and then we went to sleep. That was how things were. Later we left Lod and returned to Jerusalem, to Diskin.

07:30 Speaker 1 Yes, but before you move on to Diskin: when you say there wasn’t much Chabad, I’m just curious—weren’t there chassidic stories and things like that?

07:38 Speaker 2 No, it wasn’t an institution—

07:40 Speaker 1 An institution for children.

07:40 Speaker 2 A Chabad institution for children. But I was starting to get a sense of it. For me, it was—

07:46 Speaker 1 They weren’t talking to you about becoming a rabbi or anything like that yet?

07:48 Speaker 2 No, I was twelve years old. Only—

07:51 Speaker 1 Did you have any connection with Reb Shlomo Chaim yet?

07:53 Speaker 2 Reb Shlomo Chaim was also in the orchard.

07:55 Speaker 1 Meaning he wasn’t in the hut.

07:56 Speaker 2 No. I didn’t know Reb Shlomo Chaim then. But it left me with a good feeling. There was a bochur named Alavsky, Alavsky. He studied here in Lod.

08:13 Speaker 1 Leibele Alavsky?

08:13 Speaker 2 Leibele Alavsky. And his father—his father, yes, his stepfather—

08:19 Speaker 1 His stepfather.

08:20 Speaker 2 Was Rabbi Yehuda Levin.

08:22 Speaker 1 Yes.

08:22 Speaker 2 Rabbi Yehuda Levin lived in Mishorim and had a watch shop; he was a watchmaker. Every so often he would come to Jerusalem. There was Shimon Lazarov, who also studied here and would come to Jerusalem. His mother was the principal of [unclear]. And there was someone else too. There were a few people I got to know here.

08:51 Speaker 1 So you already had a connection.

08:52 Speaker 2 I remember hearing Chabad niggunim at the Teichmans’ house, where we ate. I was drawn to it, but nothing had really come of it yet. Then at Diskin there was also—

09:09 Speaker 1 By Diskin, you mean the Diskin Orphanage.

09:10 Speaker 2 The Diskin Orphanage.

09:11 Speaker 1 Not everyone knows what that means.

09:12 Speaker 2 The Diskin Orphanage was there—

09:14 Speaker 1 In Givat Shaul, where it is today.

09:16 Speaker 2 Near the beginning of Givat Shaul. That’s where they made my bar mitzvah. At my bar mitzvah there was Rabbi Tzvi Shleiderovitch [unclear]. He was sort of—

09:26 Speaker 1 The Jerusalem authority on meticulous observance, yes.

09:27 Speaker 2 He was something like the rabbi of the place, and he gave me a few words of Torah to say. In Jerusalem the custom is to say a few verses and then go straight on.

09:39 Speaker 1 Rabbeinu—

09:39 Speaker 2 All the children there had special clothes they wore at Diskin, a sort of khaki.

09:47 Speaker 1 Clothes.

09:48 Speaker 2 Yes, with a kind of beret. We were Jerusalemites, so we didn’t wear that, but we were there. My mother and sister came to the bar mitzvah and brought a big tin box of those large Weinberg biscuits and a crate of black beer. That was the whole bar mitzvah. My older brother Yossel looked after me. At first they wanted to give me the kind of tefillin they gave all the orphans, just any tefillin. So he went to Rabbi Kapora—Kapora, that was his name—Rabbi [unclear]. He was the director there. My brother told him, “My brother didn’t just come in off the street. He’s a child from a home…” So my brother arranged for the sofer Reisenbach to make me proper tefillin batim, and those were what I had. The tefillin bag was like a bread bag, a red bag. That was what we had. After Diskin I went to study elsewhere. They would always send the children to study in Jerusalem, so I went to Yeshivas Har Levi in Katamon. I studied there a bit too, not for very long.

11:08 Speaker 1 That was when it had just been established.

11:10 Speaker 2 It had just started. There were fifteen—

11:11 Speaker 1 Rabbi Zalman Sofer.

11:13 Speaker 2 Yes, he was there.

11:13 Speaker 1 He was my grandfather’s uncle.

11:15 Speaker 2 Rabbi Yochanan.

11:16 Speaker 1 Rabbi Yochanan.

11:18 Speaker 2 He was the rabbi.

11:18 Speaker 1 Yes, the uncle. Rabbi Zalman was his uncle.

11:21 Speaker 2 Yes. So we would go to his home. He had a family—he was very fond of children. There were boys who had come through the Holocaust, older boys, and there they cooked their own food and cleaned the fish for Shabbos themselves. Some fifteen or twenty older boys. After that, I don’t know exactly why, I left there and went to Mishorim, to Tiras Tzvi. Tiras Tzvi is opposite the synagogue of the Baal HaTanya.

11:55 Speaker 1 The Baal HaTanya asks.

11:55 Speaker 2 Yes.

11:56 Speaker 1 The Ketzeles Ragon[?] is there today.

11:58 Speaker 2 Ketzeles Ragon was there, and the main event I remember was that they would come out of there wearing sackcloth on Independence Day, and all the children would come out—

12:10 Speaker 1 Tiras Tzvi.

12:10 Speaker 2 All the children would go to a demonstration with a rabbi, with Levi, and shout, and that was the whole story. Now, at that time I was in a class of [unclear], and it was also from Talmud Torah [unclear]. They were. Now, in 5707, that Talmud Torah opened a yeshivah ketanah. Then the yeshivah ketanah there, in Rav Vira[?], broke up. It broke up. Everyone went to a different yeshivah, though most of the class went there. And as children in Jerusalem, we always used to study at the evening study program. It was a place that kept everyone together. They gave out prizes and organized trips, with people like Reb Baruch Rosenberg—Rosenberg, Klein, and Eichler. And Eichler. They were the main ones. So the children were drawn in; they gave out prizes and trips, and it was something special. One day—actually, as I understand it, they established it to hold on to the families, because many were leaving then for the army. Yes, many had—there was hardly a family in the Hungarian shul in Mishorim that didn’t have someone from a very good family who left religious life and went to Lehi or the Irgun, as far as I know. The forces of Lehi and the Irgun, though the army apparently seemed more interesting to them. And there, it was very warm and welcoming. Every night they gave you a glass of a cold drink. What was that? Like a glass of raspberry cordial. For a child, a glass of raspberry cordial was something special. In winter they gave you a glass of tea. There were no plastic cups; it was tea in a glass. When it was very cold, they gave out sahlab. Sahlab was quite something. They wanted the children to come, with the prizes, and it was very welcoming. The place where we prayed was in the Hungarian shul. If you notice, in all the neighborhoods they built synagogues that way: a Chassidic synagogue and a Perushim synagogue. It was the same in Shaarei Chessed, in [unclear], and in all those neighborhoods.

14:42 Speaker 2 That was how it was. So the evening study program was in the Perushim synagogue, but only in the evening. And in the Hungarian shul, the Chassidic one, the congregation was Sanz. It was a Chassidic shul. Once, two boys from Toras Emes came there. One was called Yitzchak Dovid—Yitzchak Yehuda Kovotchik—and the other was Hillel Levinson. They met me and a few other boys and gave a Tanya class. We didn’t even know what Tanya was. We knew it was something from Chabad, but Jerusalemites were like that then: a Chabadnik, a Chabadnik—it wasn’t really something familiar. Fine, so I went. They also told stories about the Alter Rebbe and Tanya, and invited us there. And who taught the class? It was Yisroel Boim, Yisroel Boim. He was warm, very warm. There were a few fellows, not many. Once, after Pesach, Hillel Levinson asked me where I was studying. I told him, “Right now I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going to study.” I said, “Rav Vira[?] has closed, our class, and I don’t know where to go.” So he said to me, “Maybe you’ll come to the preparatory program at Toras Emes. They’ve opened one.” I said, “Look, I’m a young boy. The boys studying there are sixteen or seventeen; I’m fourteen, maybe something like that.” He said, “You’re tall and stocky; no, they won’t ask you.” He took me to the yeshivah. The mashpia? No. Ah, Shapira. The mashpia—Mashpia Shapira. No, the mashpia was Reichman. Ah, Reichman was the mashpia. But Rabbi Moshe Leib Shapira. Rabbi Moshe Leib. Yes. He asked me what I was studying. I said we were learning Bava Kama, [unclear]. He said, “Come tomorrow or the day after. I’ll test you. If you know it, I’ll give you a note so they’ll accept you.” So I went to the Hungarian shul and met Eisenbach’s father there, Wolf Eisenbach. He has a grandson in Kfar Chabad, Asher Eisenbach.

17:01 Speaker 2 Asher. I said to him, “Wolf, I don’t have a father. I need to be tested. Maybe you could study with me?” He said, “All right.” So he prepared me with Rashi and Tosafos and the rest. The next day I went to Moshe Leib Shapira. He tested me and, boruch Hashem, I answered what I needed to. He gave me a note: “Go to [unclear].” It was at the end of the lane, at the end of the lane, on the corner, where [unclear], the Galician kollel[?], Kollel Chaim [unclear] in Jerusalem. My grandfather’s. Yes. So I went there and spoke to Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld. He was the yeshivah’s secretary. Yosef Chaim? Sonnenfeld, that was his name. Yes. I think he’s alive; Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, quite elderly now. He was in charge of the... your father, you know, Glitzenstein. Shimon. Shimon; he was the administrator of the physical side of things. Anyway, they took me in. I gave him the note and they admitted me to the preparatory program. Who was in the program? Rabbi Shmuel Halperin taught the class and was the mashpia. Up to then, it had been older boys. There weren’t even twenty boys in our class, perhaps. There were Nachum Margolis, Menachem Wolfs, Nosson Cohen, Pinchas Cohen—Jerusalem boys. Even Safranovitz, when he came to Jerusalem, would come. And a few other fellows were there. And he brought me further into it—Shmuel. Shmuel Halperin. Yes, Halperin. I arrived as a Jerusalem boy, with a round Jerusalem hat. I had long peyos, three-quarter-length ones, with long socks and a coat, and a gartel like that. Jerusalem boys had long peyos, and slowly, slowly, slowly I began to get into it. He said, “Don’t get carried away; take it slowly.” Even when I wanted to change my tefillin to Chabad-style ones, he said, “Slowly. First get used to the Chabad nusach.” And I had a siddur, an ordinary Polish-style siddur that I’d received for my bar mitzvah, with a leather cover. That was something special back then. Leather—

19:25 Speaker 2 A fine one. My name was written on it, and it was very hard for me to part with it. Mm-hmm. That was what I prayed from; I kept it in my tefillin bag. And when I came to Chabad, they began praying with a different nusach. Mm-hmm. But I got past that and said, “I’m going to follow Chabad.” And when you come into Chabad, it isn’t just that you’ve joined Chabad. Someone who grew up in a Chabad home usually doesn’t notice it: Birchas Hamazon is different. Krias Shema al hamitah[?] is different. The tzitzis strings have sections tied into them; before that, mine didn’t. Every little thing: you’re not allowed to eat sunflower seeds on Shabbos. A Jerusalemite without—without sunflower seeds on Shabbos, it was as though... So I came home and said, “I’m not eating sunflower seeds.” They looked at me: “What?” After the meal, that was just what people did then. Yes. In short, Rabbi Shmuel Halperin took me along slowly, studying with us and guiding me gradually. From time to time he would bring us to strengthen the Koidanov synagogue in Beis Yisroel. Beis Yisroel. His father, Chanan Yosef—Chanan Yosef—was the rabbi there. His brother Yitzchak also prayed there—Yitzchak, the educator Rabbi Levi Yitzchak from [unclear]. The [unclear] family prayed there too; they would come. And many others, including Wexelstein. There were all kinds of Chabadniks from Jerusalem, and they always needed support. We would come there, sometimes even on Shabbos, to help make the minyan. So little by little he strengthened me that way. And among the students was Moshe Zov, who passed away not long ago; he studied there too. In Tzvi[?]. What? In Tzvi. In Tzvi, yes. There were others I don’t remember now, but it strengthened me to have something like a role, a place where I belonged. And over time I changed my tefillin to the Chabad style. Back then there still wasn’t

21:51 Speaker 2 Reb Nosson wasn’t there at all. Was there already some connection with the Rebbe then? Writing to the Rebbe? A little, a little. Before Rosh Hashanah, writing to the Rebbe? A pidyon nefesh, a pidyon nefesh. On Yud Shvat and before Rosh Hashanah, yes, they would do that. What about 19 Kislev—was there a celebration? On 19 Kislev we would go to [unclear]. Rabbi Zevin would come there—Rabbi Zevin. Zevin and Rabbi Shashonkin, Rabbi Landau would come more often, but mainly Shmuel Halperin would farbreng with us. He brought the boys a little of that warmth, but we still didn’t really know what the Rebbe was. Around that time—I don’t remember whether it was before or after—a shliach of the Rebbe came to Jerusalem. His name was Reb Berel Baumgold. Berel Baumgold from Argentina. They publicized it widely, and he farbrenged that Shabbos in the shul in [unclear]. All the Jerusalem people came. He took a lot of mashke and spoke very freely, very fluently, but he didn’t speak with much respect about the leaders of the chassidic community. Afterward, I remember, they took him back to Toras Emes. There was a procession, and they danced in the street in [unclear]. It was a whole event. Not long after that, another shliach arrived, named Yitzchak Dovid Groner. Yitzchak Dovid. Yitzchak Dovid from Australia. From Australia. He was more of a scholar, and they organized—Radner also spoke there. They made a big gathering in Jerusalem for a Chabad shliach. It was special that he came. Maybe this was before—maybe he wasn’t even in Australia yet. Could be. Maybe he went to Australia from [unclear]. Could be. I think he was in Chicago first. Maybe he was on his way. Anyway, they made a whole event of it.

24:04 Speaker 2 One of the things he told us there was about the Rebbe. He said that before he left, the Rebbe told him in yechidus, “You’re going to Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, you have to be very, very careful how you speak.” Then the Rebbe opened a drawer and showed him how many letters had arrived after Berel Baumgold—

24:30 Speaker 3 A little less [unclear].

24:32 Speaker 2 —had come. There were so many letters asking, “How can a shliach of the Rebbe say something like that?” So the Rebbe—

24:39 Speaker 3 Prepared him.

24:40 Speaker 2 Prepared him on how to speak. This was in 5716, after what happened in Kfar Chabad—when was the incident in Kfar Chabad?

24:52 Speaker 3 The vocational school.

24:53 Speaker 2 The vocational school. I was still studying at Diskin then. Yankel Minsky was at Diskin, and he sent several boys to study at the vocational school in Kfar Chabad.

25:10 Speaker 3 Yes, he mentioned that he sent several students.

25:12 Speaker 2 So one—

25:12 Speaker 3 —whom he felt weren’t as strong as the others. Yes.

25:15 Speaker 2 One of them was killed and another was seriously wounded, and I knew them. So anything that happened in Chabad—

25:27 Speaker 3 It affected you.

25:28 Speaker 2 It did. And later that same year, the twelve shluchim arrived—Posner, Butman and Krinsky.

25:40 Speaker 3 Of the Baal Shem Tov.

25:41 Speaker 2 Kirsch and Herzog. After they went back, two stayed at Toras Emes—Shlomo Kirsch and Shraga Herzog. They stayed there and were given a room off to the side. Every shliach—we would look at him and think, “He’s a shliach.”

26:05 Speaker 3 With an aura of honor.

26:08 Speaker 2 Wearing those American clothes. But the way they davened, the way they... They didn’t rush through davening. Slowly, slowly, they studied Chassidus and everything. It was very... At that time there were farbrengens. Later we moved up from the preparatory class; we were older and went upstairs to the advanced class. The mashpia in the advanced class was Moshe Yehuda.

26:42 Speaker 3 Moshe Yehuda.

26:42 Speaker 2 I remember we studied RaN"T [unclear]. Even the RaN"T books were stenciled. There weren’t many books. We studied Chitas and Chassidus. Mainly, there were the published maamarim, the kuntreisim. That’s what we had, those [unclear] maamarim.

27:03 Speaker 3 Of the previous Rebbe, of the Rebbe—

27:03 Speaker 2 Of the Frierdiker Rebbe.

27:05 Speaker 3 How many students were upstairs, in the zal?

27:08 Speaker 2 There weren’t many boys upstairs either, but there were more married men learning.

27:15 Speaker 3 Like a kollel.

27:15 Speaker 2 Like a kollel. But the boys all came from non-Chabad homes. Hershel Eisenbach, the Greenbaum family, Weissberg—all kinds of names. They were there, and gradually...

27:36 Speaker 3 Did you study Tanya?

27:37 Speaker 2 We studied Tanya, yes. I even remember the minyan. We didn’t sleep there; there was no dormitory. Rosenblatt, Rosenblatt’s father—

27:46 Speaker 3 [Unclear]? No, no, no.

27:48 Speaker 2 I don’t remember. He supervised the morning Tanya study session. Whoever came to the Tanya session would get a little money.

27:59 Speaker 3 A little money.

27:59 Speaker 2 He would give, I don’t know, half a shekel, half a lira, or less—I don’t remember. But in the end there wasn’t even a minyan. Rabbi Moshe Yehuda Reichman was already wearing his tallis and tefillin. They would stand on the balcony and call people up to make a minyan. Sometimes there was a minyan and sometimes there wasn’t, so afterward he would go daven at the shtiblach. Rabbi Yehuda [unclear] made sure to say the blessings of Krias Shema every day, and then he would daven at the shtiblach. But at that time, the one who really brought in more farbrengens was Moishe Weber. He had a stronger drive for how one should daven, how one should have yiras Shamayim, and things like that. But we still didn’t know that much about the Rebbe then.

28:55 Speaker 4 Of course, there were still no recordings, no voice.

28:58 Speaker 2 It was 5720.

29:00 Speaker 4 Oh, by then it had arrived.

29:01 Speaker 2 When a recording arrived—Shmuel, Shmuel, Shmuel [unclear]. He came after Purim—

29:07 Speaker 4 He had been with the Rebbe.

29:08 Speaker 2 He had been with the Rebbe, and we would sit—

29:10 Speaker 4 Noach Rabinowitz was there then.

29:11 Speaker 2 Could be. Klimansky was there too.

29:13 Speaker 4 Klimansky was there too.

29:14 Speaker 2 So those of us boys who were there sat and listened to the recordings. It was a big tape recorder. We listened, and it brought us a little...

29:24 Speaker 4 Brought us closer.

29:25 Speaker 2 Brought us closer. And people said to go and seek advice here and there. There still wasn’t... no, to the shul. To Toras Emes.

30:35 Speaker 4 Ah.

30:35 Speaker 2 Rabbi Eliezer Perlstein was at Toras Emes.

30:38 Speaker 4 Yes.

30:38 Speaker 2 I was very close to him too. In the end, we became related through marriage. He was a baal menagen. They also held melaveh malkahs at Toras Emes. Rabbi Pinchas Dovid Schertzel would tell stories at the melaveh malkah. There was that kind of atmosphere. I remember when we were children at [unclear] yeshivah; he was there too, at [unclear] yeshivah, [unclear].

31:16 Speaker 4 Mm-hm.

31:17 Speaker 2 They would take all the boys on Motzaei Shabbos and hold a melaveh malkah. They’d give us a piece of challah and a piece of herring. Everyone would sit together and sing with such enthusiasm. What did they sing? All the Chabad niggunim, [unclear], Vizhnitz niggunim—whatever came to mind, all with such smiles. I remember, around this time of year, before Shavuos, they would sing [unclear]. Then they’d come to [unclear], and that song there—

32:03 Speaker 4 “Al yedei zeh.”

32:04 Speaker 2 “Al yedei zeh,” “the judge sits,” and everyone would dance and rejoice. Whatever they had, that was it. They also held seudah shlishis and melaveh malkah at Toras Emes. One of the boys was named Meir, Meir Ronteri. Upstairs, by the staircase, he had a little nook of a room. He sold Chabad books.

32:37 Speaker 4 There in—

32:39 Speaker 2 [Unclear]. There weren’t many books, but he had siddurim and whatever else people needed. So, boruch Hashem, that’s how we got through it. There was Lozer, Lozer Ronteri. I remember his vort; they held it in the yeshivah. There was also the wedding of—what was his name?—one of the Perlsteins, in the yeshivah. His father-in-law was Munish, who repaired beds beneath Toras Emes. That was his house. His daughter now lives in Kiryat Shmuel; she’s the mother of the [unclear].

33:31 Speaker 4 Yes.

33:31 Speaker 2 So she was Reb Munish’s daughter. There weren’t many boys there. I remember once—

33:42 Speaker 4 There was no connection with Lod? You didn’t go to Lod?

33:44 Speaker 2 Later, when there were more boys, we started thinking of going to Lod. Not only Lod. I remember we traveled to big farbrengens on 10 Kislev and Yud Shvat. We went to Lod; we even went to Tel Aviv. There was a rabbi—what was his name? One of the Chabad rabbis.

34:08 Speaker 4 Zislin.

34:09 Speaker 2 Zislin.

34:09 Speaker 4 [Unclear]?

34:10 Speaker 2 Rabbi Zislin had a shul or something in his home. We would go to Rabbi Landau in [unclear], and to Rabbi Shaul Brook in Rishon. A few boys would go, sometimes here, sometimes there. That’s when we saw people who had been in Lubavitch. Rabbi Shashonkin was there too, but he was rather quiet here. Rabbi Shaul Brook, though, was close to the young people.

34:39 Speaker 4 More [unclear].

34:42 Speaker 2 Rabbi Landau told more stories about Lubavitch.

34:46 Speaker 4 He had been there.

34:46 Speaker 2 And yes, Reb Sholom Chaim was already like a magnet. He drew people in more. He spoke this Yiddish and Polish, you know. People would come to him, and on the trips we made, that began to warm us to these things even more. Once we went—I went, I don’t remember with whom. It was Yud Kislev, on Shabbos, and I arrived, I think, in Kfar Chabad [?]. Just before that, they had offered me a position at the evening yeshiva in Toras Emes. Since I had also been a student in the masmidim yeshiva, and I knew all the—

35:38 Speaker 4 The evening yeshiva was the equivalent of—

35:40 Speaker 2 The equivalent. And I would really fight to keep the children from going to the masmidim yeshiva. I would go to Gershon Chanoch Cohen; I spoke with Tuvia Blau and with someone else, Erez Leizer [?], to get them to give more prizes, more of that sort of thing.

35:58 Speaker 4 So it would draw the children away from the masmidim to—

36:00 Speaker 2 So I was an instructor at the evening yeshiva.

36:05 Speaker 4 Where did they hold it?

36:07 Speaker 2 At Toras Emes.

36:08 Speaker 4 Oh, at the yeshiva—

36:09 Speaker 2 At the Toras Emes yeshiva. There was one branch—Naftali Roth had one in Shaarei Chessed. Yossel Blau had one in Pagi, there in Sanhedria. And Beis Yisroel and Toras Emes were practically together.

36:28 Speaker 4 That was Tuvia Blau.

36:29 Speaker 2 Tuvia Blau was in charge. He was older and had more responsibility by then.

36:35 Speaker 4 Who was in charge of the Toras Emes branch?

36:37 Speaker 2 Of Tzeirei Chabad.

36:39 Speaker 4 Who was in charge of the Toras Emes branch?

36:40 Speaker 2 Menachem—Menachem Gillela [?] was with me.

36:43 Speaker 4 Menachem Tzion [?].

36:44 Speaker 2 Menachem Tzion, a"h. And for quite a few years, from around 5720 [?] until 5722, I was an instructor there. I would tell them as much as I knew about the Rebbe, and I would invite them to come to seudah shlishis at Toras Emes. We sang Chabad niggunim. I started learning a little Kuntres Umaayan with some of them, to connect them to it. So that year, when I traveled to Lod on the 22nd, I had a friend there named Shmulik Beizenbaum. He was a bochur in Lod, and during the day he taught in Rishon LeZion, with Rabbi Sholom Ber Brook.

37:41 Speaker 4 In a class at the yeshiva.

37:42 Speaker 2 Now, at that time, the instructor for the children at the yeshiva in Lod was Moishe Hillel. That week, Moishe Hillel had to go into the army for a month. Glazer suggested to Shlomo—

37:59 Speaker 4 Glazer Hovt [?]?

37:59 Speaker 2 Hovt [?]. He suggested that Shmulik Beizenbaum be the instructor in the Pardes for that month. They needed someone in the Pardes to learn with the children, sleep there with them and eat with them for a month. I happened to arrive just then, and I was there for the whole Shabbos. It may even have been that Shabbos; I don’t remember exactly. We bochurim would also travel to high-school yeshivos. On another occasion we went to the yeshiva in Pardes Chana.

38:31 Speaker 4 The Midrasha.

38:31 Speaker 2 The Midrasha. There was someone named Yogel [?].

38:33 Speaker 4 Yogel [?], certainly.

38:34 Speaker 2 We were there—Rabbi Lipsker would go, Dovid Kurtz, Yossi Hartman, and all the bochurim in my group. We would go together, and they would spend Shabbos together with Chabad. Once we went to Ra’anana. There was also a yeshiva there, with a rosh yeshiva who later became the rabbi of Bar-Ilan. I don’t remember his name. Someone from Lipa [?] Kurzweig’s family studied there, in Ra’anana. I remember he once told me that the Shabbos we spent there—

39:17 Speaker 4 It kindled a spark in him.

39:18 Speaker 2 So he became connected to Chabad; he moved over to Chabad. That was our job, to run around doing this [?]. Sometimes you hear about the results, sometimes you don’t. Anyway, Reb Sholom Chaim had his routine.

39:32 Speaker 4 Wait, Sholom Leib was the one Glazer approached—Glazer suggested it to Sholom Leib—

39:36 Speaker 2 Then, when we returned to Lod from that Shabbos at the yeshiva—perhaps it was in Pardes Chana—it was Yud Kislev. Reb Sholom Chaim would be davening after everyone else had davened. Then they would daven Mincha, and he would go on davening. He would still be davening at eleven at night, and until five on Sunday morning. Reb Sholom Chaim always had a routine: when he finished davening, there would be a dance with the bochurim. He would always stand off to the side and dance with them. I also remember that earlier, when we were still in the Pardes, people wore boots. Reb Sholom Chaim, Reb Munya, and everyone who walked through the Pardes—it was muddy.

40:27 Speaker 4 With thin boots.

40:28 Speaker 2 Yes, they had those there. Anyway, he went to Rabbi Beilis—

40:34 Speaker 4 Sholom Leib.

40:35 Speaker 2 Sholom Leib, and he said to me—he said, “There’s a bochur here from Jerusalem. Maybe we should offer him the job of instructor at the yeshiva.” So Rabbi Beilis came to me and asked, “Do you have any experience with children?” He wasn’t going to take just any bochur. I said, “I’ve already been an instructor at the Toras Emes evening yeshiva for a few years.” “Oh? Well, that’s something.” So, all right. He then sent me to Moishe Hillel. In the morning, Moishe Hillel took me to the Pardes and brought me down beneath the building, to where his group was. He told me, “You stand here.” I was just a bochur standing there; I didn’t know what to do with myself. But little by little, the children came, and I had to eat with them and sleep there with them. I had everything I needed. It started in the Pardes, and afterward we moved here, by the train station. There was a dining room in the Pardes too; afterward there was a dining room here. In those years, until around 23 or 24 Teves—the 23rd—the yeshiva gedola—

41:49 Speaker 4 Moved to Kfar Chabad.

41:49 Speaker 2 Moved to Kfar Chabad. But until then, the yeshiva gedola, the yeshiva ketana and the cheder were all here. I was an instructor alongside Moishe Hillel. Anyway, the month ended, and Rabbi Beilis came and said, “I want you to stay longer.” I said, “All right, I’ll stay. I’ll just go get a few clothes.” And from then on I stayed, right up until the coronavirus pandemic, until 5780.

42:17 Speaker 4 Until ’80.

42:18 Speaker 2 Until 5780. That’s fifty-eight years. Well, after a year—during the pandemic they no longer knew what to do with me: who was contagious, who wasn’t. I was infected too. Anyway, I retired then. But that was how it began.

42:37 Speaker 4 When did your connection with the Rebbe begin, though?

42:40 Speaker 2 From 5722 I was in contact. We would write letters, like—

42:47 Speaker 4 Shoshana Vityovat [?].

42:48 Speaker 2 Yes, and about what was happening at the Toras Emes evening yeshiva.

42:53 Speaker 4 Oh, you wrote reports about the Toras Emes evening yeshiva?

42:56 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Reb Shmuel Halperin always taught me something. He said, “Don’t write a letter to the Rebbe unless you take it upon yourself to do whatever the Rebbe tells you. Otherwise, don’t write. The Rebbe isn’t just there to give blessings; he asks things of you. You should know that.” So we didn’t write all that often, but he would guide me on how and what to write. I remember once the whole preparatory class made a good resolution after a farbrengen, and everyone wrote to the Rebbe. Letters would come from the Rebbe. Usually many letters arrived before Rosh Hashanah, with a request to mention us for a blessing [?] and blessings for the holidays. Around Yud Shvat there was also the usual visit to the Ohel [?]. But even when I was at the Toras Emes evening yeshiva, as I told you earlier, I had something of a conflict with the Tomchei Temimim yeshiva—

44:00 Speaker 4 Over the competition [?], yes.

44:02 Speaker 2 Once it weighed very heavily on my heart, and I wrote to the Rebbe about it. A letter from the Rebbe arrived, but I completely forgot about that letter. I didn’t remember anything about it. What reminded me? A few years ago, I was sitting here in the yeshiva. Many years after it had happened, the rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Yitzchok Koenig, came over. He said he had met Berel Wels in Jerusalem, and Berel Wels had given him a letter from the Rebbe for me. Berel Wels? Now? What letter? How had a letter from the Rebbe for me turned up? The letter was from 5729.

44:46 Speaker 4 ’29.

44:46 Speaker 2 ’19. It was about the evening yeshiva and the issues there [?]: I should pass on everything I had to Tzeirei Chabad, to the Chabad elders, to Colel Chabad, and they would arrange things, and everything would work out. So I went. First, though, I called Berel Wels. “What is this letter? I didn’t remember it at all.” He told me about what had happened then with the evening yeshiva. So I took it. We had received a letter addressed to me at Batei Ungarin, where I lived. The Rebbe had written, and I went with it to Colel Chabad. Rabbi Slonim was there, and Chernobil, Shleizach [?]—I don’t know who else. They talked and sorted everything out. Berel said that, for some reason, the letter had remained with him. He had forgotten about it and put it away somewhere. The week Rabbi Koenig brought me the letter, Berel Wels hadn’t been feeling well. He said, “I wasn’t feeling well, so I didn’t go to work. I was looking through the drawers at home, and suddenly I found the letter.” Apparently he needed—

45:58 Speaker 4 A blessing from the Rebbe.

45:58 Speaker 2 Exactly. A blessing from the Rebbe arrived at just that time—

46:03 Speaker 4 In 5779.

46:04 Speaker 2 It turned up in 5779, about two years before the pandemic, something like that. Look how—

46:12 Speaker 4 5779.

46:13 Speaker 2 5779, yes. The letter turned up. And—

46:18 Speaker 4 For instance, when you became an instructor in Lod, did anyone write to the Rebbe about it? You don’t know?

46:23 Speaker 2 No. It’s possible.

46:24 Speaker 4 It’s possible that Anus Lefroib [?] did, but no, there wasn’t any direct contact about it.

46:28 Speaker 2 So the year I was here in Lod was a special year. Ten bochurim came here—

46:35 Speaker 4 Reb Bais.

46:36 Speaker 2 Reb Bais, and then they wanted to do—

46:39 Speaker 4 Lipsker, Rabbi Shashonkin, the bochur who—

46:42 Speaker 2 No, not Rabbi Shashonkin. He was already... he was a teacher by then, already a teacher.

46:49 Speaker 4 Bais was already a teacher?

46:50 Speaker 2 Yes, he taught Tanach in fourth grade. But anyway, they came here. There was one Gury, who is now a mashpia in Canada.

47:01 Speaker 4 Chemed [?]. Chemed [?], Kravya [?], and Berel Lipsker.

47:04 Speaker 2 Lipsker.

47:04 Speaker 4 Yaroslav, Brams.

47:05 Speaker 2 There was Brams, there was a Rappaport—there was a list of ten bochurim. They gave classes here in nigleh and classes in Chassidus, and brought all that into the yeshiva. Back then it was still permitted to drink mashke; the restriction hadn’t been issued yet. They took the bochurim along. I was a counselor here then, in the orchard, waking the children early in the morning. I would come to [unclear]. All day I was in [unclear], and all day I was at farbrengens and lively celebrations; at night and during the day I would learn. There was Baruch Nachshon, there was Elad Finkel, and all the others who were there. Rabbi Yaroslavsky was there at that time. In short, it fired us up a great deal about the Rebbe and taught us—young bochurim—to stand up and speak before rabbis, before synagogues. A big [unclear]—who are you, after all? It was all done with that kind of boldness. Even the veteran shluchim who were—

48:09 Speaker 4 In [unclear].

48:10 Speaker 2 They were in [unclear] for a short time.

48:12 Speaker 4 Were you in [unclear] then? Yes, you went—you were on a trip?

48:14 Speaker 2 I was at Diskin then.

48:16 Speaker 4 So you went—

48:16 Speaker 2 I didn’t go with them, but I knew them. Especially the two—

48:21 Speaker 4 The ones who stayed.

48:22 Speaker 2 Posner was the one who stayed. He came to Toras Emes a lot, and that began to fire us up. But that year really fired us up. Now, that year Reb Ephraim, of course, didn’t have money to pay. He would say to me, “How much money do you need? Need to buy something?” “Yes.” “Take some from here.” Ephraim Wolf used to sell tickets. There was an agent from Tel Aviv named Iferman in particular; he was in touch with him and sold tickets to raise money for the yeshiva. I told Reb Ephraim, “I want to travel to the Rebbe.” Not many bochurim traveled to the Rebbe then. For a bochur, it was something special, and it cost money. I searched around, took care of things here, and managed. I bought a ticket. Then, before I left, I was in Jerusalem and met Rabbi Leisenberg. I’d also been with Rabbi Leisenberg in his home; we would farbreng together. He was very active at that time. Even before that, on Yud-Tes—back then they established the Reshet.

49:40 Speaker 4 The Reshet—he was there in—

49:42 Speaker 2 Yes, he was in Kiryat—

49:43 Speaker 4 Kiryat Menachem, yes.

49:45 Speaker 2 Then in [unclear], Or Ganim, there was Naftali Roth, and there was Zilberstrom—the father, Elazar Zilberstrom.

49:52 Speaker 4 Reb Elimelech.

49:53 Speaker 2 Yes, there was Eliyahu Zilberstrom. They would take the bochurim. Once they sent us bochurim to Kiryat Gat to register children, and we sat there in some shack or other. We came back to Toras Emes. After that, almost daily, we would travel to Or Ganim. There were many Romanians there. Yossi Yosef Marton was Romanian. The son—you remember—I would go to his house in Baka, wherever it was, and his father wasn’t so religious and would get angry with him. At any rate, he was among those who established Or Ganim. Rabbi Zilberstrom would take us around from house to house, here and there. There was someone named Angel who had a car, and they would use him to drive people around. He didn’t wear a yarmulke. When he had to go into city hall, he would take off his yarmulke and say, “I’ve come to register the children for the Chabad school,” as though he weren’t religious. And Zilberstrom—they needed to move equipment from Malcha to Or Ganim, from Sdot Micha. There was a school in Sdot Micha, near Beit Shemesh, and things had to be moved. We would travel and do activities here and there. At Toras Emes there were activities—

51:21 Speaker 4 With the connected communities, for example.

51:22 Speaker 2 Yes. For example, in Jerusalem Purim is on the 15th of Adar, while in the Jerusalem corridor it’s on the 14th. They would arrange a bus, and all the bochurim would leave Jerusalem on the night of the 14th—on the night following the 13th. They would drop off a few bochurim in each moshav in the Jerusalem corridor, and we would go to the houses: “It’s Purim today, and we’ve brought a Megillah to read.” I remember they dropped us off at a moshav near Abu Ghosh, one settled by Yugoslavs, I think. We knocked on doors until we found someone in charge. He opened some kind of clubhouse, brought a few people in, and we read the Megillah. Whenever they said “Haman,” they would light a match and let it burn, like that. From there we traveled on, until we reached—Tzvi Greenblatt was with us then; I think he was still a bochur. We got as far as Mishmar David, beyond Beit Shemesh. Afterward everyone gathered at some clubhouse in Beit Shemesh and did more there. There was a lot of activity.

52:43 Speaker 5 That was already the stage when it began to spread—

52:45 Speaker 2 Yes.

52:45 Speaker 5 And then they really began to branch out.

52:46 Speaker 2 There was matzah, too, for example. Once they rented space at Wexelstein’s bakery, and we baked matzos. Afterward we went around distributing the matzos in all sorts of places—to judges and other people like that.

53:03 Speaker 5 And all these things were written up in the reports, of course.

53:05 Speaker 2 Presumably, yes.

53:06 Speaker 5 Of Tzach, Tzach Jerusalem.

53:09 Speaker 2 And whatever was left, we put small packages into bags—there wasn’t even plastic then, just bags. We would go out on the night of the Seder, onto Jaffa Street. People were on their way to their Seders, and we would give each person a bag of matzos—

53:29 Speaker 5 Wow.

53:29 Speaker 2 Shmurah matzos. “This is the first matzah you should eat.” And the Rebbe would issue a letter for every holiday.

53:37 Speaker 5 A general letter.

53:39 Speaker 2 A general letter, together with the matzos. Some went to synagogues in Musrara, where Rabbi Moshe Weber [?] and someone named Aitch [?] were in charge. They would give Torah classes there. We would go and give matzos to the gabbai so that each person could take some shmurah matzah home to eat, even if the matzos were broken. There was activity, in other words. I remember once going with Rabbi Yosef Segal [?], the head of the Tzemach Tzedek yeshiva.

54:16 Speaker 5 The Tzemach Tzedek neighborhood.

54:17 Speaker 2 Yes. I remember there was this enthusiasm. The two of us went into some school: “Where’s the principal? We want to talk about the Jewish meaning of this holiday,” or something like that. We went in with such joy: “Come on, let’s...” That was how it was. Another time—this was many, many years later, about sixteen years afterward—I remember being in Jerusalem, after we were married. We had come there with [unclear], when the old [unclear] was still there, and I said we had to make a procession. It was Shavuos. “What are you talking about? A procession? What kind of procession?” There were five of us, five young married men. I remember Rabbi Sonnenfeld was among them; he had come to his father-in-law [?].

55:12 Speaker 5 Sonnenfeld.

55:12 Speaker 2 Yes, and Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman was there too. There were five of us. We decided we were going to make a procession. We went to Zion Square in Jerusalem. We stood there near Zion Square and did a sort of star-shaped dance.

55:31 Speaker 5 Yes.

55:31 Speaker 2 We danced, five crazy men standing there. People gathered around—there was nothing else to do, so they gathered. I remember there was one of those concrete kiosks where they paste up notices. We lifted Rabbi Grossman up to the top of it. He’s tall, so it took some effort.

55:53 Speaker 5 Celebrating like that.

55:55 Speaker 2 “Good Yom Tov, everyone! Good Yom Tov!” He said a few words, came down, and we danced again. That was the procession we made in Jerusalem. From there we went to the synagogue on King George Street. There was a synagogue there then.

56:12 Speaker 5 The old synagogue.

56:13 Speaker 2 The old one. We also climbed up on some—there weren’t even traffic lights there yet—some fence, and danced again. Afterward, near [unclear], we did that too. In short, that year, 5719, around Chai Elul, they fired us up tremendously about traveling to the Rebbe. There was already one group at the Rebbe: Nachum Kaplan and Arnon Alperin.

56:42 Speaker 5 Soloveitchik.

56:43 Speaker 2 Yes. They wanted—

56:45 Speaker 5 Three months.

56:46 Speaker 2 Yes. They wanted someone to replace them, but in the end it didn’t work out. So I signed up to travel in 5719, for Chai Elul, and we arrived at the Rebbe’s on Chai Elul. That evening there was a farbrengen with the Rebbe, a big farbrengen. At the hospitality center you received a blanket.

57:15 Speaker 5 That was Chai Elul.

57:16 Speaker 2 Chai Elul.

57:16 Speaker 5 That’s why we call it “5719, Chai Elul.”

57:18 Speaker 2 Yes, Chai Elul. And it was the Tzemach Tzedek’s birthday.

57:25 Speaker 5 Chai Elul.

57:26 Speaker 2 Chai Elul. People would come to the Rebbe then, and there was nowhere to sleep; there was no hospitality center. I was lucky that I knew some bochurim. One of them was Avremel Stone [?], and there was another—

57:38 Speaker 5 Yes.

57:39 Speaker 2 So he found me a place there in 770, in some little corner. They pulled out a mattress and said, “Stay with us; we’ll manage somehow.” And that’s how it was, boruch Hashem. But before the trip—as I started telling you earlier—I met Rabbi Eisendorf[?], and he told me he had a maamar, something, a manuscript. He didn’t know what it was, and wanted me to give it to the Rebbe.

58:06 Speaker 5 He knew you were traveling to the Rebbe.

58:07 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

58:08 Speaker 5 He had a manuscript.

58:08 Speaker 2 Not many people traveled to the Rebbe in those days.

58:10 Speaker 5 A manuscript.

58:11 Speaker 2 He said there was a young man, a student, who studied Tanya with him, and the young man had told him that his grandfather had left something behind, some writing. He didn’t know what it was. It was a large manuscript; I could fit it in the lining of my coat. He put it inside paper, in a paper bag, and said, “But put it directly into the Rebbe’s hands. Give it to the Rebbe.” You know—“Give it to the Rebbe.” All right, I didn’t know. I put it in my pocket. I arrived at the Rebbe, and then Rabbi Chadakov arranged the yechidus. It was during the Ten Days of Teshuvah, the Ten Days of Teshuvah. So I went into yechidus with the Rebbe for the first time, and then I took it out. I said, “This, this—”

59:03 Speaker 5 Before you gave your pan and all that?

59:04 Speaker 2 No, I gave my pan and took this out. Beforehand, Rabbi Chadakov had said that no one should hand the Rebbe anything they had; everything was to go through the secretariat. I played dumb. I didn’t know—I had a mission, and I had traveled there. So I gave it to the Rebbe. The Rebbe opened it, looked at it, said, “A dank,” opened a drawer, and put it in the drawer. Once he put it in the drawer, that was it. I had taken care of it. There were several very interesting things in that yechidus. By then my mother had married for a second time.

59:41 Speaker 5 To Rabbi Tzvia[?].

59:42 Speaker 2 Yes. He lived in Denver, Colorado. He had come here to Israel, and she met him. I don’t know—she had some connection with Rabbi Goren, or with the Nazir. I don’t know.

59:58 Speaker 5 Rabbi David Cohen.

59:59 Speaker 2 Yes. In any case, they made a shidduch between them, and my mother asked the children if they agreed. I was settled here in Lod[?], my sister was here, and there were my brothers. Everyone said it was all right. It had already become hard for her to run the kiosk, to stand on her feet from six until ten at night, so she went. She went there in the early fifties. Now, when I came to America, she wanted to send me a ticket to come visit her.

1:00:35 Speaker 6 From New York to Colorado.

1:00:36 Speaker 2 Colorado is a four-hour flight. In my note to the Rebbe, I wrote that I had come to the Rebbe, not to my mother, and that every moment with the Rebbe was precious to me, so I wanted to stay there. The Rebbe answered me that there was the mitzvah of honoring one’s parents. “Stay here for the entire month of Tishrei. After Simchas Torah”—there were a few days between Simchas Torah and Shabbos Bereishis, since Simchas Torah fell on Shabbos—“travel during those days and fulfill the mitzvah of honoring your parents. Before you go, see Rabbi Chadakov and take on a mission. He’ll tell you what to do.” All right, so I went to Rabbi Chadakov, and he told me, “When you get there, look for the rabbis and the community leaders and tell them what happened here during the month of Tishrei.” That was it. Incidentally, that year there was tremendous tension over Cuba. As a young man, I knew nothing about—

1:01:53 Speaker 6 The missiles, the Cuban missiles.

1:01:55 Speaker 2 I was with the Rebbe. Now, Denver, Colorado is closer to Cuba[?], but I didn’t know the first thing about it. I wasn’t interested. My mind was on the Rebbe. Anyway, I had a ticket for the day after Simchas Torah. In yechidus, the Rebbe had told me that I should begin putting on Rabbeinu Tam tefillin. “Now start putting on Rabbeinu Tam.”

1:02:29 Speaker 6 You were already twenty then.

1:02:30 Speaker 2 I was twenty by then, but I didn’t have Rabbeinu Tam tefillin. During the Ten Days of Teshuvah, I had a couple of days before Sukkos, and I borrowed them from one person and then another. Now the Rebbe had told me to travel there—where would I get Rabbeinu Tam tefillin? I searched everywhere around me. Maybe someone had left a pair there; I would return them. I knew it says you’re allowed to borrow tefillin. I couldn’t find any. It was a mess. I got up in the morning; I’d been sleeping on a bench. My flight was at eight. The first thing I did was run to look for a pair. I said to myself, “Surely the rabbi there will have Rabbeinu Tam tefillin.” All right, I counted on that. I ran to the Lincoln mikveh with my plane ticket. As I came out, I stopped a car. I didn’t know English. I said to him—

1:03:28 Speaker 6 “Airport.”

1:03:28 Speaker 2 “Airport.” He was a Polish Jew. He said, “[Unclear], but it says eight o’clock, and it’s already seven-thirty. How?” “Come in, give me a few dollars.” Where did he drive? I don’t know what roads he took, but he got me right onto the tarmac, right up to the—

1:03:48 Speaker 6 To the plane.

1:03:49 Speaker 2 To the plane, to the [unclear]. Back then they didn’t check.

1:03:53 Speaker 6 Yes.

1:03:53 Speaker 2 He drove me onto the tarmac, dropped me off, and I flew. I arrived at the airport in Denver. My mother hugged me, and the first thing I did was look for Rabbeinu Tam tefillin. I said, “I’ll go to the rabbi.” All right, we greeted each other and talked. Rabbeinu Tam tefillin? He didn’t have any. What was I going to do? The Rebbe had told me to put on Rabbeinu Tam. So my mother said, “There’s a shochet here, Sam Chosi[?]. Maybe he has a pair.” I went to him, and he said he had Rabbeinu Tam tefillin. I asked him, “How did you, Sam Chosi[?], end up here?” He was from Williamsburg. He told me that when he came after the Holocaust, he was young and had no livelihood. Back then, in the early [unclear], there still wasn’t [unclear] in America. Who was the Rebbe then? The Frierdiker Rebbe. So he went to him and asked for a blessing for a livelihood. The Frierdiker Rebbe asked, “What can you do?” And then: “They need a shochet in Colorado.”

1:04:58 Speaker 7 So they needed a shochet in Colorado.

1:05:00 Speaker 2 In Denver, Colorado. “There you’ll have a livelihood.” “And I’ve been there ever since,” he said. That Polish fellow[?] was already married by then, so he had Rabbeinu Tam tefillin, even though he wasn’t Chabad.

1:05:13 Speaker 7 Rabbeinu Tam tefillin.

1:05:13 Speaker 2 So I put on Rabbeinu Tam tefillin. Then I told my mother that Rabbi Chadakov had said I needed to speak to the—

1:05:19 Speaker 7 Community leaders.

1:05:20 Speaker 2 Right. So I went to Rabbi Shapira and told him. He said, “The rabbis worked hard all month of Tishrei. They’ve just finished Simchas Torah and have all gone off to [unclear]. There’s nobody here.” In short, I poured out to Rabbi Shapira everything I had to tell. He was the one who had stayed. That year I was very upset that I didn’t know the Rebbe’s niggun from Simchas Torah. And right after Simchas Torah I had traveled. It was fall, and suddenly it was difficult. I knew four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Yiddish, and Lashon Hakodesh. I asked him, but he didn’t know what I meant. He wasn’t a Chabad chossid; he didn’t understand what I wanted from him at all. So I said to my mother, “Maybe there’s somewhere else I can tell people about it.” She took me to a Jewish school. There was a Jewish man there named Phil. I told him that the Rebbe had asked me to pass on what had happened. “With great pleasure,” he said. I told him, “I don’t know how to speak English.” He said, “Speak Hebrew, in Lashon Hakodesh. They know some; they daven, and I’ll translate.” So he took me from first grade through eighth grade. In each class I told them what I had seen and what I had heard from the Rebbe. That was my mission there. Later, in short, it was 5720. I saw it here in the yeshivah too.

1:06:56 Speaker 7 Now, before that, let’s go back to the manuscript.

1:06:58 Speaker 2 Yes, the manuscript. All right, then came Shabbos Shuvah, Shabbos Shuvah 5720. The Rebbe said a maamar on the verse, “No man shall be in the Tent of Meeting.” After the Rebbe finished the maamar, the Rebbe said that he had intended to say a different maamar. But since they had brought a maamar of the Tzemach Tzedek from [unclear] in Eretz Yisroel, and it was relevant to the matters of the approaching Yom Kippur, he had said this maamar instead. When the Rebbe finished saying that, he turned to me and told me to say l’chaim. I didn’t know what to do. I was new there, a young man; it was my first time. The people standing around me said, “The Rebbe is telling you—don’t wait.” So I said l’chaim. The Rebbe kept looking at me and said, “Say another one.” I said another one. He kept looking at me—another one. Three times. I was already confused, but I later saw in the diary that it says the Rebbe told me four times.

1:08:03 Speaker 7 Four times.

1:08:04 Speaker 2 That’s what it says in the diary: four times.

1:08:06 Speaker 7 [Unclear], from the series of four maamarim for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkos, and Simchas Torah.

1:08:14 Speaker 2 It was printed afterward, edited by the Rebbe.

1:08:15 Speaker 7 Yes, edited, fifty-one.

1:08:16 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:08:17 Speaker 7 Based on [unclear], on a series by the Frierdiker Rebbe.

1:08:20 Speaker 2 It was published later in the kuntreisim.

1:08:21 Speaker 7 Yes.

1:08:23 Speaker 2 And afterward the Rebbe...

1:08:24 Speaker 7 I want to go back for a moment to Tishrei, when you arrived.

1:08:27 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:08:28 Speaker 7 [Unclear], the Rebbe—what else happened? Did you come alone, or were there other young men with you? Who came from Israel then? Do you remember?

1:08:35 Speaker 2 I don’t remember exactly, but there were a few others. Not many.

1:08:38 Speaker 7 Mm-hmm.

1:08:38 Speaker 2 But back then, people would come down from upstairs to daven. The Rebbe didn’t daven with us.

1:08:46 Speaker 7 Right.

1:08:47 Speaker 2 Only on Mon—

1:08:48 Speaker 7 On Mondays and Thursdays, he would come in.

1:08:49 Speaker 2 On Thursdays, for the Torah reading. And on Shabbos, we would see the Rebbe with his tallis—

1:08:54 Speaker 7 Without tefillin.

1:08:56 Speaker 2 Right. The first time I saw him with tefillin was at Hataras Nedarim, on Erev Rosh Hashanah. At Hataras Nedarim, everyone writes their notes and hands them to the Rebbe. As I said, the rabbis sat in a row, the Rebbe stood, and afterward the Rebbe went in. The Rebbe gave them his blessing, went into his room, and then each person went into the Rebbe’s room, handed over his pan, and afterward they went to the Ohel and came back. And that was on Rosh Hashanah. I remember—I think Reuven Dunin was with us. There wasn’t a platform yet. There was no platform. It was right on the floor, with just a carpet, and they put up a barrier around the Rebbe. Boruch Hashem, I was strong then. I was standing in the row, and I thought my stomach would burst from the pressure against the tables there, but Boruch Hashem I had a place. And that was—

1:10:03 Speaker 7 Do you remember [unclear]?

1:10:04 Speaker 2 I also managed to get a place near the Rebbe, and everything was new to me. They hadn’t even prepared us. We traveled to the Rebbe, and I remember that I was supposed to go into yechidus, but I didn’t really know what to do. There was no one there I had spoken to about it, so I went over to Rabbi Dovid Raskin. I told him I’d come from there. So he explained what yechidus was and gave me a bit of—

1:10:33 Speaker 7 Guidance.

1:10:33 Speaker 2 He guided me, yes. And when I went into yechidus, my birthday was that week.

1:10:41 Speaker 7 Motzaei Yom Kippur.

1:10:42 Speaker 2 My birthday is on Motzaei Yom Kippur. I went in during the Ten Days of Teshuvah, before Yom Kippur. So the Rebbe said to me, “Since your birthday is this week—right, Yom Kippur—you surely know the customs. One of the customs is to get an aliyah to the Torah, but you probably won’t be able to get an aliyah here. So go to the gabbai, Reb Yechezkel Gordon, and tell him to give you gelilah.” So afterward I went, and he gave me gelilah. The Rebbe had told me, and he gave me gelilah there.

1:11:17 Speaker 7 On Yom Kippur.

1:11:18 Speaker 2 It was on Shabbos.

1:11:20 Speaker 7 Shabbos Shuvah.

1:11:20 Speaker 2 Shabbos Shuvah.

1:11:21 Speaker 7 The week before.

1:11:21 Speaker 2 Yes, that’s when it was. And in the note I wrote, I mentioned that I’d been at a wedding of someone from a kibbutz near Beit Shemesh, Yossi Artman. All the fellows know him. The wedding was in Tel Aviv. Rabbi Segal, the father of [unclear], had an institution [unclear].

1:11:45 Speaker 7 Near me.

1:11:46 Speaker 2 Right, that was then, and I wrote that I’d attended it. So the Rebbe began asking who was there and what had happened, all sorts of questions, and I had to speak to the Rebbe. It took a few minutes. Usually a bochur goes in and comes out very quickly. I also had the matter of Rabbeinu Tam and the shlichus to—

1:12:08 Speaker 7 Denver.

1:12:08 Speaker 2 Denver, and something else I don’t remember right now.

1:12:11 Speaker 7 Did you also write about Jerusalem?

1:12:14 Speaker 2 No.

1:12:15 Speaker 7 About your father, about [unclear]—no, you didn’t write that.

1:12:18 Speaker 2 Anyway, the following year—

1:12:22 Speaker 7 Wait, and then you came back—right after Denver, did you travel to Eretz Yisroel?

1:12:27 Speaker 2 After Denver—

1:12:28 Speaker 7 Because at first you’d only come on your own for Tishrei.

1:12:29 Speaker 2 Yes. I then had a second yechidus, and I wanted to—

1:12:33 Speaker 7 So the second one was—

1:12:34 Speaker 2 Before traveling.

1:12:35 Speaker 7 Oh. So when did you travel?

1:12:37 Speaker 2 Also after Simchas Torah.

1:12:39 Speaker 7 After you came back from—

1:12:40 Speaker 2 After, after Parshas Bereishis.

1:12:42 Speaker 7 You returned to Denver on Shabbos Bereishis.

1:12:44 Speaker 2 When I returned, yes. And I wrote there about what had happened at—

1:12:49 Speaker 7 At Rabbi Shapiro’s.

1:12:50 Speaker 2 Yes. And—

1:12:51 Speaker 7 Did you also write that you’d been at the school?

1:12:52 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:12:53 Speaker 7 Yes.

1:12:54 Speaker 2 And afterward, I asked the Rebbe if I could stay. There were a few bochurim who wanted to stay at least until Chanukah. So the Rebbe said, “You’re starting in yeshivah, and they need you in yeshivah. Go back to yeshivah.” And the Rebbe said that someone who teaches [unclear] to others is like his own children—there’s a—

1:13:20 Speaker 7 “One who teaches another’s son...” or as though they were his own children.

1:13:24 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. So the Rebbe told me to go back and said, “Have a farbrengen with everyone who returned.” I remember [unclear], Rabbi Katz also returned, Rabbi Gurevitch was there too, Reb Leizer returned—to have a farbrengen with everyone at the yeshivah in Lod. I remember that when I got back, I said that the Rebbe had told us to be enthusiastic. The Rebbe said that words from the heart enter the heart. Well, I’m sitting there, and Reb Sholom Chaim is there, Reb Akiva Katz is there, all the great men, and—

1:14:02 Speaker 7 Leizer.

1:14:02 Speaker 2 Reb Leizer. What could I say? I was just a bochur. It was hard for me to speak, and they gave me more mashke, and more mashke. I think Dovid Katz said to me, “You finished a bottle—a bottle of that horse stuff,” whatever it was called.

1:14:20 Speaker 7 The horse one.

1:14:21 Speaker 2 Riesling, or something.

1:14:22 Speaker 7 Yes.

1:14:22 Speaker 2 Riesling, and it was six—six, something like that.

1:14:27 Speaker 7 Kleva.

1:14:27 Speaker 2 Yes. So after I finished it, [unclear] said, “You fulfilled what the Rebbe told you. You spoke from the heart; you didn’t speak with airs. You spoke from the heart.” That was afterward. Well, once you get a taste of it, you want to go again. So the second time, I had already collected the money for it. Rabbi Ephraim again arranged my ticket, with a little from here and a little from there. A ticket cost a lot of money. And on that second trip, there was another story. There was Ezra Lifsh, Ezra Lifsh, and someone asked us—I don’t remember, [unclear] Klein or someone—to go... No, it was, what was his name? The shliach [unclear]; his father had a bookstore in Tel Aviv.

1:15:28 Speaker 7 Shmotkin.

1:15:29 Speaker 2 Shmotkin.

1:15:29 Speaker 7 Reb Yisroel Shmotkin.

1:15:30 Speaker 2 So his son, Srulik.

1:15:32 Speaker 7 Srulik is the son.

1:15:33 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:15:33 Speaker 7 The father was—

1:15:33 Speaker 2 So I was with the son.

1:15:34 Speaker 7 Yehudah Shmotkin.

1:15:35 Speaker 2 With his son. So—

1:15:37 Speaker 7 With Sruli.

1:15:38 Speaker 2 Yes. So they called us to go to the Rebbe’s house. It was on Chol Hamoed.

1:15:43 Speaker 7 You traveled during Chol Hamoed Sukkos?

1:15:44 Speaker 2 Yes. They needed us to put schach on the Rebbe’s sukkah upstairs. When you go up the stairs, there’s a kitchen on the right, and when you go out of the kitchen, there’s a sukkah. On the left was the Rebbe’s room; it was closed, but it was there. So we came there, brought the schach from behind the house, and carried it up. They told us to put on as much schach as possible. After we finished, Rebbetzin Barer wanted to give us something to drink. We thought the Rebbe might arrive at any moment, so we hurried out of the—this was at the Rebbe’s house. Afterward, there was a rotation of bochurim who would escort the Rebbe. That was on Motzaei Yom Kippur 5724.

1:16:42 Speaker 8 There was a farbrengen.

1:16:43 Speaker 2 ’24.

1:16:44 Speaker 8 There was [unclear].

1:16:46 Speaker 2 Yes. So they asked me and Ezra Lifsh. They told us, “You have to be ready in the small zal when the Rebbe finishes the meal.”

1:17:00 Speaker 8 The meal upstairs.

1:17:01 Speaker 2 Yes. He goes into his room and then comes out, and you follow. One [unclear] walks with the Rebbe, and you walk about ten meters behind. Once you see the Rebbe enter his house, you come back.

1:17:14 Speaker 8 So one [unclear] walked with the Rebbe then?

1:17:16 Speaker 2 Not then.

1:17:17 Speaker 8 No, not then.

1:17:18 Speaker 2 That came later. Anyway, every Motzaei Yom Kippur, after they did Kiddush Levanah, the place emptied out, and upstairs there were about seven bochurim left, walking around—that’s how it always was. I don’t remember; I think Melech Zweibel was there, and another one, Rayport.

1:17:39 Speaker 8 Michel Rayport.

1:17:39 Speaker 2 Michel, yes. There were several others.

1:17:42 Speaker 8 And Tuvia Katz.

1:17:43 Speaker 2 Huh?

1:17:43 Speaker 8 And Tuvia Katz.

1:17:44 Speaker 2 Could be. I really don’t remember. I said to myself, “Until the Rebbe finishes the meal...” So I went and lay down on the bench next to the room with the seforim, where the Rebbe would daven Minchah.

1:18:01 Speaker 8 Next to the small room.

1:18:03 Speaker 2 Yes, where the Rebbe would sit for Minchah on Erev Shabbos. So I lay down there.

1:18:07 Speaker 8 To rest a little in the afternoon.

1:18:08 Speaker 2 To rest. I’d eaten something there, [unclear], and I was lying there resting. Suddenly I heard a noise. I saw the Rebbe come out of the room and walk over to where I was lying. I got up, the Rebbe sat down, and I went around and stood here. Without any preparation, the Rebbe began saying a maamar. There was a black telephone there, and it started ringing. One of the bochurim ran over, said, “There’s a maamar,” and took it off the hook so it wouldn’t ring. And the Rebbe said the maamar. I don’t even remember which one; afterward I looked up which maamar it was.

1:18:45 Speaker 8 How many people were in the zal?

1:18:46 Speaker 2 At the beginning there was barely a minyan. By the time the Rebbe finished the maamar, it was packed to the ceiling—completely full. And Berke, Berke Wolf, was there too.

1:18:58 Speaker 8 Shmuel Zohar was there too, [unclear].

1:19:00 Speaker 2 Could be. Anyway, after the Rebbe finished the maamar, Ezra Lifsh and I went and waited until the Rebbe—

1:19:12 Speaker 8 Was there also a farbrengen, or only a maamar?

1:19:14 Speaker 2 No, only a maamar. Then the Rebbe came out, and we followed him until he reached his house. Boruch told the story afterward: he’d knocked at the secretariat, where Shlomo Danchik was sitting with Reb Chadakov, and they were discussing various matters. Boruch said, “The Rebbe is saying a maamar now in the small zal.” So Shlomo said to Reb Chadakov, “You don’t know the latest?”—with that excitement—and they closed the door. They stayed there until after the maamar, and only afterward did we find out. So that was a very special encounter I had with the Rebbe, one that to this day is—

1:20:00 Speaker 8 Special.

1:20:00 Speaker 2 Special. Shabbos Bereishis was the Shabbos before my father’s yahrzeit. I think Shabbos Bereishis was the 24th or the 23rd—I think the 24th. I don’t remember anymore; I’d have to check. So I went upstairs to daven, hoping to get Maftir, or at least some aliyah. I don’t think I got Maftir.

1:20:26 Speaker 8 Upstairs, at the minyan in the small zal—the regular minyan that the Rebbe... What do I mean? The previous Rebbe’s minyan, which the Rebbe made sure would continue.

1:20:32 Speaker 2 So I think I didn’t even daven with that minyan. They held a minyan by the elevator, with Torah reading and everything, and I davened there. Then I ran to get my place at the farbrengen.

1:20:48 Speaker 8 Shabbos Bereishis.

1:20:49 Speaker 2 Shabbos Bereishis, and the Rebbe had just finished davening. The Rebbe was coming up those curved stairs, and I was running like a wild bochur. Suddenly, there was the Rebbe coming up with his tallis.

1:21:02 Speaker 8 Wow.

1:21:03 Speaker 2 I was standing right in front of the Rebbe and didn’t know what to do. Like that story with Rashi—I wanted to disappear into the wall, to squeeze myself into some tiny space. The Rebbe smiled and said, “Gut Shabbos.” It was like a yechidus, an encounter with the Rebbe. It was something special.

1:21:22 Speaker 8 On that visit in 5724, did you also go in for yechidus?

1:21:25 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:21:25 Speaker 8 What happened?

1:21:27 Speaker 2 One of the things the Rebbe said was, “Since you’re from Jerusalem, at your age you already need to see to a shidduch.”

1:21:37 Speaker 8 At that age you were twenty-one yourself.

1:21:38 Speaker 2 Twenty-one, yes.

1:21:40 Speaker 8 5705.

1:21:40 Speaker 2 5705. So, all right, I left there and said, “Now I’ll come back to Eretz Yisroel.” Moishe Hillel was a counselor, and we continued working together. He knew me, and he knew the Eizi family. Now her brother, Shai Weiss—

1:22:06 Speaker 8 [unclear].

1:22:07 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:22:07 Speaker 8 He was married into the family—

1:22:08 Speaker 2 He was married to Rina Weiss, Rina, and they were teachers in Kiryat Gat. This was some years later, and when they got married, their sheva brachos—he and Rina were married on 18 Adar, and their sheva brachos was here in Lod, at Rabbi David Teizi’s home. David Teizi. So Moishe Hillel said to me, “Dress nicely and come to the sheva brachos.” All right. He said, “The groom has a sister. I suggested you to her, and she wants to see you.” So I came, she saw me, and she said she agreed. Then the shidduch began moving along. We met again and again, until I came to their home, and then we wrote letters. She wrote a letter to the Rebbe, and I wrote a letter to the Rebbe. It took seven weeks, almost until Shavuos. Only on Shavuos did we receive the Rebbe’s approval. Then we held the vort, and the wedding was on 18 Elul of that year.

1:23:21 Speaker 8 18 Elul 5724.

1:23:21 Speaker 2 Yes, 18 Elul 5724. So the Rebbe had already blessed me—

1:23:25 Speaker 8 In 5705.

1:23:26 Speaker 2 And I had already been in yechidus with the Rebbe. Back then, people didn’t often travel to the Rebbe before their wedding, but I had already been to the Rebbe that year. The Rebbe had prepared everything for me, boruch Hashem.

1:23:40 Speaker 8 And then you continued working at the yeshivah?

1:23:42 Speaker 2 Yes, it was one continuous stretch.

1:23:45 Speaker 8 Did you travel to the Rebbe again after the wedding?

1:23:47 Speaker 2 After the wedding it was already difficult, difficult. The next time I traveled was, I think, in 5731. That was the year with what the Rebbe did concerning the UN, Egypt, and all that—

1:24:08 Speaker 8 During the lockdown.

1:24:09 Speaker 2 Yes, that whole story.

1:24:11 Speaker 8 [unclear].

1:24:12 Speaker 2 Yes. I traveled again after that.

1:24:14 Speaker 8 Rabbi—

1:24:16 Speaker 2 Yitzchak Yadgar.

1:24:16 Speaker 8 Yitzchak Yadgar, [unclear].

1:24:18 Speaker 2 Yes. After that I traveled several more times. Once I was there for Yud Shvat, I think in 5739, and I was at the Rebbe’s Ohel together with the rabbi. I saw how the Rebbe tore up the panim. Some panim the Rebbe would tear up and scatter on the Ohel; others the Rebbe would tear up and put back inside the envelope. Everything happened quickly. We were standing there with [unclear], and snow was falling. It was cold. I was there without socks, without proper shoes, and the Rebbe stood there as though nothing was happening.

1:25:05 Speaker 8 Which room?

1:25:06 Speaker 2 There wasn’t a room yet, but there was a sort of canopy. A canopy. And afterward, I was there a few more times. I didn’t keep track.

1:25:16 Speaker 8 Did you have any contact with the Rebbe about the yeshivah? About your work as a counselor?

1:25:20 Speaker 2 No. Only what—

1:25:23 Speaker 8 Sometimes you would write.

1:25:24 Speaker 2 Yes. Later I would write—

1:25:28 Speaker 8 We won’t forget how you used to call us together for those group talks. You should know that it had an effect.

1:25:33 Speaker 2 Look, let’s go back to the [unclear] shiur. I tried to take every good thing from that shiur and bring it here too. The older bochurim would take the younger bochurim every Thursday night. One or two older bochurim would take three or four younger ones to a shul in Mishorim, or Diskin, or somewhere else. They would give them a little guidance and encouragement, give them something to eat, sing with them. It was that kind of group.

1:26:13 Speaker 8 They called it “mitzvah.”

1:26:14 Speaker 2 Yes. So when I was here in Lod, I said, “Why shouldn’t I do that?” I arranged for the third-year shiur to take groups from the first-year shiur. There was a school here, and I took its classrooms and divided everyone up. Several bochurim took a group of first-year bochurim. The first-year shiur wasn’t then what it is today. They would sing the Rebbe’s songs, share a sicha, sing niggunim—something like that. I would go to Mrs. Diskin, who was in charge. She would bake a special cake. That cake was really something; they would stand in line for a piece. I would give each of the group leaders a little juice and something to go with it, and it created a—

1:27:13 Speaker 8 An atmosphere.

1:27:14 Speaker 2 Yes. Even before I started with the small groups, I used to tell them stories about Lubavitch on Shabbos, [unclear]. We would sit together in one of the huts. It was a different time then, nothing like today. Today is Gan Eden, the highest Gan Eden, compared with what it was like there. There was the Youth Aliyah program. Through Youth Aliyah, the children would be given sandals and shoes, and every winter a vest or something like that. I remember there was a building for the dormitory, and up above it was the hut. Only the better bochurim slept in the hut. And remembering the hut reminds me of something. Once, when I came to the Rebbe—I don’t remember which year, perhaps 5739—I met Chaim Boruch, a friend of his. He grabbed me, hugged me and kissed me, and said, “You’re the reason I have the privilege of being here in Lubavitch.” I said, “What do you mean? Why?” He said, “I’ll never forget it. My father brought me to Lod and left me there. They took me up to sleep in the hut on the roof. Five children slept in one room: one, two, three, four, and another bed in the middle. You came later, and they put you in that middle bed. Anyone who needed to get into bed had to climb over your bed. You were in the middle, and you were tall, and you didn’t like it. After a few days of sleeping there, you got up and said to me, ‘I’m going home. That’s it. I don’t want to sleep here.’”

1:29:10 Speaker 9 Chaim Boruch Merler.

1:29:11 Speaker 2 “I don’t want to sleep here.” So I told him, “After I’ve gotten everyone to sleep, I’ll talk to you.” Then you spoke to me up on the roof. You explained things to me and promised that, in a few days, you would move me to the first bed that became available in the dormitory. You promised, and you kept your word. And you should know that’s why I stayed in Lod. I’m here because of you.” That was also when we were at Yeshivas [unclear]. I’ll show you the list in a moment. To this day, there’s a list of the children who studied there. Yossel [unclear] also studied at—

1:29:51 Speaker 9 All the children in the yeshivah were Chabad?

1:29:53 Speaker 2 Yes. There was a group, and some of them later came to Chabad. They had all come from non-Chabad homes. There wasn’t a Chabad youth movement or anything like that then.

1:30:05 Speaker 9 I also distinctly remember you teaching us the niggun with [unclear].

1:30:12 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:30:13 Speaker 9 And the one with the Yiddish words. I was a child from Bnei Brak. I remember it, and that was thirty years ago.

1:30:19 Speaker 2 Right.

1:30:20 Speaker 9 You read to us from Sefer Hazichronos—no, not Sefer Hazichronos, Likkutei Dibburim.

1:30:23 Speaker 2 Likkutei Dibburim.

1:30:24 Speaker 9 It got into our bones, you should know that.

1:30:27 Speaker 2 There was—my brother, whom I helped—

1:30:30 Speaker 9 That’s what I wanted to ask: How did your brothers come to Chabad? Was it because of you?

1:30:33 Speaker 2 From the time I came to Chabad, the entire Reinitz family—

1:30:38 Speaker 9 They all came because of you.

1:30:39 Speaker 2 All of them, starting with the oldest, Boruch Tzvi.

1:30:42 Speaker 9 Yes.

1:30:42 Speaker 2 Boruch Tzvi has a son, Yonasan. He’s in [unclear].

1:30:48 Speaker 9 As a mashpia.

1:30:49 Speaker 2 A mashpia. He has a son in Canada. And most importantly, he himself became Chabad, as did his wife—the whole family. Then there’s the second brother, Yossel. He has a son in Tzfas, Moishe, and other sons, and eventually they all came to Chabad. I brought that into the family. My mother used to write letters to the Rebbe and receive answers. That strengthened me.

1:31:19 Speaker 9 How long did she stay in Denver?

1:31:20 Speaker 2 Now let’s go back to 5724.

1:31:23 Speaker 9 Yes.

1:31:24 Speaker 2 When I was with the Rebbe in 5724, I wrote to my mother that this time, if they wanted to see me, they should come to Brooklyn, to New York. She agreed and spoke to the rabbi, and they arranged to come after the Yomim Tovim, after Simchas Torah. So they came to see me, and then something happened. I have a cousin they stayed with; they were Bobover chassidim, and there were many Bobover chassidim there. I told him what time davening started so they could come and daven. I waited, and it was very cold, and he arrived at 770.

1:32:14 Speaker 9 Rabbi Shapiro.

1:32:14 Speaker 2 Rabbi Shapira came on Shabbos Parshas Noach, and I met him at the entrance to 770. I was a young man—what did I know? I wanted to daven with the Rebbe, so I told him, “This is 770, right here.” I came back from davening and went looking for him. Where had he disappeared to? He was standing exactly where I’d left him, still in his coat, with a tallis on, upset. He said, “Is this how you honor rabbis? I’m the rabbi from Denver, Colorado.” I told him, “Here everyone is a rabbi, everyone has [unclear]. It’s not just one rabbi—it’s everyone.” He wanted to go home. He didn’t want to stay there anymore. Eventually I persuaded him and brought him downstairs. “The Rebbe will be coming down soon; there’ll be a farbrengen. Stay as long as you can.” I brought him downstairs and went over to Reb Yisroel Jacobson. I said, “This is the rabbi from Denver, Colorado, and we need to honor him.” Well, Reb Yisroel Jacobson’s voice was completely hoarse. “Sholom aleichem, Rabbi. Where are you from?” “Colorado.” “Where were you from before Colorado? You must have come from somewhere.” So he said, “Russia.” He told him where he’d come from, and what the family name had been.

1:33:44 Speaker 9 “What was your family name?”

1:33:45 Speaker 2 So he said, “Elefant.” “Elefant? We had a friend named Elefant here—Berl Elefant.” “Berl Elefant? He’s my brother.”

1:33:55 Speaker 9 Wow! Reb Yisroel Jacobson said he’d known his brother.

1:33:57 Speaker 2 Yes. So Rabbi Shapira—his name was Zalman, Zalman Shmuel. Zalman after the Alter Rebbe, and Shmuel after the Rebbe Maharash.

1:34:09 Speaker 9 A Chabad family.

1:34:09 Speaker 2 Yes. He had left earlier—I’m talking about 5724, so he’d left some fifty years before that, as a young man, and come to America. So he said that Berl was his brother. Reb Yisroel Jacobson, Reb Perel Cohen and a few other older men were there; I don’t remember their names. “This is Berl Elefant’s brother.”

1:34:35 Speaker 9 Berl Elefant’s brother.

1:34:36 Speaker 2 They hugged him, and suddenly he began to—

1:34:38 Speaker 9 His eyes lit up.

1:34:40 Speaker 2 This is what had happened to his brother: the Rebbe Rashab had sent him to serve as a rabbi or mashpia in some town, and there were—what were they called? Not Communists. The non-Jews who carried out pogroms. They took him, wrapped him in a Torah scroll and burned him. That was his brother, and everyone remembered his brother. Reb Perel Cohen was there. Yes. Anyway, Reb Yisroel Jacobson took him over to the Rebbe’s platform and seated him right above the Rebbe’s chair. Reb Jacobson was one of those in charge, so he seated him there. At that farbrengen—

1:35:24 Speaker 9 Shabbos Parshas Noach.

1:35:25 Speaker 2 Shabbos Parshas Noach, 5724. The Rebbe told a story about how Rabbi Yosef Kolbo became a chossid. He told the whole story of how the Alter Rebbe—

1:35:37 Speaker 9 Rabbi Yosef Kolbo.

1:35:38 Speaker 2 Yes. How the Alter Rebbe came to a certain shul where Rabbi Yosef Kolbo was giving a lesson, and the Alter Rebbe asked a question. So he asked him, “Where does this young man come from?” They talked, and when the Alter Rebbe came in, it was cold, and he stood by the stove to warm his hands. The stove was set into the wall, but he didn’t put his hands behind his back; he held them at his sides. I remember Reuven Dunin [?]—whenever someone walked with his hands behind his back, he’d say, “You [unclear], didn’t you hear what the Rebbe said?”

1:36:19 Speaker 9 Keep your hands at your sides.

1:36:21 Speaker 2 You don’t walk with your hands behind your back. Anyway, he sat there and heard the whole farbrengen. The Rebbe even asked, “Who remembers the story in Likkutei Dibburim?” It was this story. Someone said, “Yes, it’s in Likkutei Dibburim.” After telling the story, the Rebbe turned to him and told him to say l’chaim. He said l’chaim. After the farbrengen, when I brought him out, he said that in Denver, when they have a farbrengen, they make kiddush and everyone is already waiting to run home. Here he had sat behind the Rebbe and seen everyone facing the Rebbe for hours, with such awe, such reverence, such bittul.

1:37:10 Speaker 9 [unclear], where...

1:37:12 Speaker 2 It completely overwhelmed him.

1:37:14 Speaker 9 It caught hold of him.

1:37:14 Speaker 2 It caught hold of him for the first time. He would say that back home he was the rabbi, he was the rabbi there. Oh, it was just—

1:37:21 Speaker 9 Kiddush, and then everyone runs home.

1:37:23 Speaker 2 Anyway, afterward I traveled to Eretz Yisroel, and my brother Shloime arranged for my mother and the rabbi to go into yechidus. Later my brother told me what had happened. The rabbi had a question that had been on his mind, a question in the Gemara or the Rambam—I don’t remember exactly which. He’d asked the Satmar Rebbe, Reb Yoel; he’d asked Rabbi Soloveitchik and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, all the great scholars, and none of them could answer him. He’d been carrying it around with him. He was a scholar, and it was as though...

1:38:03 Speaker 9 It bothered him.

1:38:03 Speaker 2 It bothered him. He said that once, when he heard the Lubavitcher Rebbe had arrived, he saw the beard and thought—

1:38:15 Speaker 9 A little beard.

1:38:16 Speaker 2 “Another Twersky has arrived. Noch Twersky is here.” That was how he looked at him. But now that he’d heard the Rebbe speak and seen everything, he felt such reverence that he said he would ask the Rebbe this question in yechidus. So he asked the Rebbe. First, the Rebbe spoke with them, with my mother, and gave my mother blessings. After my mother went out, he stayed to speak with the Rebbe. The Rebbe got up and took out—

1:38:47 Speaker 9 He was sitting, and then what?

1:38:48 Speaker 2 I don’t know. Yes, he was sitting. The Rebbe took out the Rambam or the Gemara; I don’t remember exactly which. The Rebbe opened it and told him, “You learn up to here, from here to here. You put a full stop here, and then you keep learning—and there’s no question.”

1:39:07 Speaker 9 Say that in Hebrew, will you?

1:39:08 Speaker 2 He said that you read from here to here and stop, put a full stop, and then continue. Then there’s no question, no question at all; everything fits. He looked at it and was so, so moved. How had he not seen it? How had none of the great scholars noticed? The Lubavitcher Rebbe had come and taught him how to learn.

1:39:32 Speaker 9 How to read.

1:39:33 Speaker 2 How to read. My brother said he came out red in the face and terribly emotional. My brother was afraid to speak to him until he’d calmed down. Then he told him what had happened. Afterward they went back to Denver. A few months later, in Cheshvan—I don’t remember the date—he passed away.

1:39:56 Speaker 9 Just a few weeks later.

1:39:57 Speaker 2 Yes, a few. So my mother told me that the whole reason she’d come to America and married him was to bring him back to Lubavitch. It had all been to bring him back to Lubavitch.

1:40:07 Speaker 9 He passed away just a few weeks after the yechidus.

1:40:09 Speaker 2 After that, yes.

1:40:10 Speaker 9 Did he have children of his own too?

1:40:12 Speaker 2 Yes. He had one son. A son.

1:40:15 Speaker 9 And your brother—did your mother go back to Eretz Yisroel?

1:40:16 Speaker 2 No. After that, my mother had already started to, uh—the matter had already been settled; it was already in the marriage document. I was [unclear] about that, but it had already been arranged. So she began taking care of the visa and everything for work. Shloime arranged an apartment for her above 770—there were apartments there then—and she stayed there and worked for several years. She became very close to the Rebbe and had a very strong connection. Afterward she came back here. When Rabbi Efraim Wolf came to the Rebbe, where did he sleep? At Shloime’s place. Shmuel Chayver would come and sleep there too. Once—

1:41:06 Speaker 9 Chayver was the one who also served as an attendant for several years.

1:41:08 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Once a Knesset member named Yonah Kesseh came. He’d been in the Rebbe’s city, Yekaterinoslav, and had known the Rebbe from there. He went into yechidus and finished late, so he needed somewhere to sleep. My brother Shloime put him up. At night, Shloime saw him sitting at the table. What was he studying? Hayom Yom. He sat there looking at it and said, “You don’t know what this is. You know, the Rebbe made this. You don’t know.” My brother got up in the morning, and after all those hours he was still sitting with Hayom Yom. He asked my brother, “May I take this?” My brother said, “Take it; I’ll get another one.” He said, “You don’t know how much wisdom—those people back then, what wisdom the Rebbe put into this little booklet.”

1:42:01 Speaker 9 We’re coming now to the point about your being the Rebbe’s brother, so they also tell us that the Rebbe’s brother had such reverence for Hayom Yom.

1:42:10 Speaker 2 Yes. So, thank G-d, that’s how—

1:42:16 Speaker 9 Your mother lived many more years after that, right? If I remember correctly.

1:42:18 Speaker 2 Yes. She came back here, and Efraim Wolf found her a small apartment in Shikun Chabad. She lived many good years, until she passed away at ninety-two.

1:42:31 Speaker 9 So you should know that everything you influenced—I mean, it entered into the very depths of my Chassidic feeling.

1:42:39 Speaker 2 There was something else. My brother was already in America with the Rebbe, and he bought me a present. I had also arranged an exemption from the army for him through Be’er Sheva, as far as I recall, and helped him travel to the Rebbe. So he bought me a tape recorder, one of those big ones. Who brought it to me? Berl Borngard’s [?] son, Pinye.

1:43:07 Speaker 9 Pinye.

1:43:08 Speaker 2 He was a student here; he studied here, in Kfar Chabad. Now, anyone who brought a tape recorder through the airport—

1:43:17 Speaker 9 Taxes.

1:43:17 Speaker 2 He had to pay taxes, or sign that he was leaving, or take it back. Now he gave it to me. He asked me what to do. I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll go to the consulate and get a new visa.” The visa—the passport. My passport disappeared; it was stolen. I don’t know where. There was nothing written in the passport anymore, and that’s how it stayed with me. Now, with this tape recorder, my brother would send me all kinds of films and records of the Rebbe, the Rebbe’s davening, the Rebbe’s sichos, all sorts of things. Every Motzaei Shabbos I’d take it to the students in the yeshiva. One Motzaei Shabbos I recorded them. The boys would sing songs or tell stories. There was Gershon Levin from Kiryat Gat, and all sorts of others at the time, Lison [unclear]—today they’re all grandmothers.

1:44:18 Speaker 9 Grandfathers.

1:44:18 Speaker 2 Grandfathers. All kinds of songs, each one with his own. They’d be waiting for it. Every Motzaei Shabbos I’d gather them in the yard of that house and record them; the following week I’d play it for them. That was another one of the things I did. I always wanted to make sure they were happy.

1:44:43 Speaker 9 You brought in warmth, warmth and love. Today everyone talks about love; you brought it in like that.

1:44:47 Speaker 2 Exactly.

1:44:47 Speaker 9 There’s just one thing I wanted to ask you. Interestingly, one of the things we all remember about you is how particular you were that we enter the dining room wearing a hat.

1:44:53 Speaker 2 Yes. There was once a meeting of the administration. Veteran chassidim told us that at the Rebbe’s, in 770, they always sat all day wearing a hat and jacket. The Rebbe came in wearing a hat and jacket. Someone also showed us that it says in Shulchan Aruch that when making a blessing you need two head coverings, so they said we had to—

1:45:20 Speaker 9 So that’s what you said.

1:45:20 Speaker 2 That it meant wearing a hat. So they put the responsibility on me—

1:45:26 Speaker 9 And they came in and—

1:45:28 Speaker 2 To make sure they had a hat on. So I wouldn’t let them in without a hat.

1:45:33 Speaker 9 Yes, I remember. It got into our bones. But your reward is great. These are things that give us life and refresh us, truly.

1:45:39 Speaker 2 I just want to show you the Rebbe’s letter from 5710 [unclear].

1:45:45 Speaker 9 Yes.

1:45:45 Speaker 2 And also the—the book that [unclear]. Then there was another moment, in 5748, when the Rebbe called for us to add more.

1:45:57 Speaker 9 And the committee for adding more.

1:45:58 Speaker 2 The committee for adding more, each person in his own way. What did I add? I brought the yeshiva boys, the students, here to the house, onto the porch, every Friday night in winter. I’d tell them stories and give them popcorn, cake and pretzels, whatever I had. They’d sing and they’d come, as I remember it.

1:46:19 Speaker 9 To create a good atmosphere.

1:46:20 Speaker 2 A good atmosphere. And the boys still remember it today.

1:46:24 Speaker 9 Yes, certainly.

1:46:25 Speaker 2 How they sat there and I told stories. Each time, whatever I could—

1:46:31 Speaker 9 You instilled so much in us, really.

1:46:33 Speaker 2 Not long ago I met an older man in Kfar Chabad. He told me, “You were my counselor during vacation. I remember sleeping in the building, and you came over to me and said, ‘Young man, that’s not how you sleep. You mustn’t sleep on your stomach or your back. When you go to sleep, you should sleep on your side.’”

1:46:54 Speaker 9 You instilled that in me. I can tell you, not out of [unclear], but out of [unclear]. You instilled it in me, and to this day I try to do it.

1:46:58 Speaker 2 And I would make sure they put on their pajamas modestly. There was a time when I’d wake them in the morning in the dormitory, too, and make sure they got dressed modestly.

1:47:13 Speaker 9 You gave us foundations, foundations of yiras Shamayim. Really, believe me. You should know, I can honestly say that I even try to pass on to my children the genuine, basic things you instilled in us so deeply. I’m not just saying that.

1:47:27 Speaker 2 And from time to time—sitting and farbrenging with the boys wasn’t officially my job, but I was always in the dining room. Another thing: when I first came here, there were Sephardim, Yemenites, Moroccans, Jerusalemites and Chabad chassidim. In the dining room, each group sang its own songs: the Yemenites, the Moroccans, the Jerusalem group, the group from Kfar Chabad. It didn’t feel like a Chabad yeshiva. And then—

1:48:04 Speaker 9 I meant to tell you earlier: I remember you and Rabbi [unclear], and Rishke [unclear]. With [unclear], you led niggunim at the seder, [unclear].

1:48:13 Speaker 2 So we decided that this was the Rebbe’s yeshiva, a Chabad yeshiva. It was very difficult to get the boys to give up the Jerusalem niggunim, or the other ones. At first the Yemenites here davened in the Sephardic nusach and wore tallisos. There were a lot of tallisos.

1:48:34 Speaker 9 That was back when—

1:48:35 Speaker 2 During Elul they would say Selichos. There was a lot of that. But little by little, with Hashem’s help—today, baruch Hashem, it’s purely Chabad: the Chabad nusach, the Rebbe’s nusach.

1:48:46 Speaker 9 Yes, a tremendous yasher koach. And with Hashem’s help, baruch Hashem, may there be many more Jews and children on shlichus.

1:48:50 Speaker 2 Amen, amen.

1:48:50 Speaker 9 May you have much nachas, good health, a rich and joyful life, and may we see each other again with the Rebbe very soon.

1:48:55 Speaker 2 Amen, so may it be.

1:48:56 Speaker 9 Yasher koach.

1:48:57 Speaker 2 With the complete niggun.

1:48:58 Speaker 9 Amen. After we finished recording the episode, Rabbi Reinitz called me with a request. By Divine providence, one of the students who had attended the yeshiva more than forty years ago recently called him to ask his forgiveness. He said he had been taking stock of himself and apparently there had been an occasion when he had behaved improperly toward Rabbi Reinitz. His former counselor told him, “I don’t remember anything, but of course I forgive you. And I know that even if someone did something, it was youthful mischief, not intentional.” So Rabbi Reinitz, with his great Ahavas Yisroel, asks me to tell all the students from 5738 through 5781—we’re talking about thousands upon thousands—that he forgives every one of them completely, with no hard feelings whatsoever. At the same time, he asks the same of them in return: over so many years, he may have done something wrong by mistake. Of course, nothing was intentional. So if any student feels that Rabbi Reinitz owes him an apology, Rabbi Reinitz asks that student to forgive him, with no hard feelings whatsoever. And with Hashem’s help, in the merit of this great Ahavas Yisroel, may we all merit to see each other again with the Rebbe, united as one, healthy and joyful, and may we all welcome Moshiach with joy. May we merit the revelation of the Rebbe, Melech HaMoshiach, and may he redeem us immediately, right now. Good news. A happy and blessed Yom Tov.