Lehisraanen Episode 17: Rabbi Avraham Salomon (Rishon LeZion)

00:00 Speaker 1 Shalom aleichem, and welcome to another episode of the Lehisra’anein podcast, where chassidim share memories and bring to life the times they spent in the Rebbe’s presence—the Rebbe, who is the source of our life. In this way, we chassidim renew our connection to the Rebbe, relive the atmosphere of those days, and make good resolutions to strengthen our study of the Rebbe’s Torah and follow in his ways. With Hashem’s help, we will see him again very soon. This week, we’ll renew our connection to the Rebbe together with the chossid Rabbi Avraham Solomon. He’ll share special experiences and stories he witnessed personally or heard firsthand from the Rebbe. Rabbi Avraham came to the Rebbe with the group of [unclear], but his story—and his first connection with the Rebbe—begins with something he heard as a young teenager in Bnei Brak in the late 1950s. Over the years, through his various positions and work, he personally experienced special instructions and stories from the Rebbe and heard stories firsthand. He’ll share them with us, and together with Rabbi Avraham Solomon we’ll renew our connection to the Rebbe. This week’s episode is dedicated to the elevation of the soul of the chossid Rabbi Tuvia ben Rabbi Baruch Yehuda Blau, a"h. He was connected and devoted to the Rebbe with heart and soul, cared deeply about the Rebbe’s honor, and worked extensively to disseminate the Rebbe’s Torah. He was the rabbi of the Chabad community in Neve Yaakov, director of Keren Chabad, and a leading communal activist in the Holy Land generally and Jerusalem in particular. The episode is also dedicated to the elevation of the soul of his wife, a woman of valor and the crown of her husband, who stood by his side for decades with extraordinary devotion: Mrs. Chana Frumet bas Rabbi Chaim Uri. As Rabbi Blau’s shiva and Rebbetzin Blau’s shloshim come to an end, may this episode be for the elevation of their souls and to strengthen our connection to the Rebbe. Shalom aleichem, Rabbi Solomon.

01:55 Speaker 2 Shalom uverachah.

01:57 Speaker 1 Let’s start with the question we ask everyone: Fun vanet shtamt ir—where do you come from?

02:02 Speaker 2 Where did you come from? Well, we’re originally a Hungarian family. I was a child in Budapest, in a religious family—religious, of course, but modern-religious, like Hungarian Jewry. There were people like that, of course: modern people who were always interested in getting out, in escaping from there. But it wasn’t possible until the opportunity came.

02:26 Speaker 1 What years are we talking about?

02:27 Speaker 2 We arrived in 5717, during the great uprising—1957. Here there was the Sinai Campaign; there, it was the great uprising, when the Hungarians rebelled against the Russians. In the end it was crushed, and they bombed all of Budapest. Baruch Hashem, somehow we managed to escape. We became refugees and somehow made it to Austria. We were there for about a year as refugees, and of course eventually we came to Israel. We were a deeply Zionist family. Our family was very involved in the Zionist leadership there in Hungary. My uncle was chairman of the Zionist Organization of Hungarian Jewry. So of course we came to Israel, baruch Hashem, and like any child, you begin to find your place. A religious child, you start going here and there.

03:21 Speaker 1 Where in Israel did you settle?

03:23 Speaker 2 Eventually, here. We were in an immigrants’ home here until we got to Pardes Katz, a neighborhood of Bnei Brak. Of course, it wasn’t what it is today.

03:34 Speaker 1 Back then, they called it “across the black road.”

03:36 Speaker 2 Across the black road, and beyond that, the transit camp was still right opposite us. When I started going to school in Bnei Brak, it was about a fifteen-minute walk. As a religious child, I was a little afraid to walk there until you got almost to Rabbi Akiva Street. That whole road was a place where young people would [unclear]. But that’s how it was then. Of course, we didn’t know Chabad and hadn’t heard of it. Hungarians didn’t know about it at all. We’d heard there was a movement called Chabad and that it had a Rebbe. I remember we used to discuss it at home. My father would always say, “There’s something strange here. There’s a Rebbe in America, but he’s a Rebbe without a shtreimel—with a creased hat and a tie.” So what does it matter? If he’s a Rebbe, why doesn’t he wear a shtreimel? And if he doesn’t wear a shtreimel, then he’s a rabbi or something, but... it just didn’t—

04:41 Speaker 8 It didn’t fit the—

04:42 Speaker 2 It didn’t fit at all. A Rebbe was... But we knew Chabad existed. As a child, what did I know about Chabad? We knew they helped people do mitzvos at the Talmud Torah. People said they helped everyone do mitzvos. On Erev Yom Kippur, they’d take an airplane, tie a chicken to it, and fly it around all of Tel Aviv to do kapparos for everyone from above. Beyond that, we really knew nothing at all. The first Chabadnik I met—the first real Chabadnik I actually knew—was Rabbi Engelsman.

05:25 Speaker 8 Mordechai Engelsman.

05:25 Speaker 2 Mordechai, the director of the Talmud Torah. Well, he was still a young man then, and a shidduch was arranged between him and the granddaughter of a neighbor’s brother. In short, the Hungarian community was very close-knit. Whatever happened to anyone was always discussed. So, baruch Hashem, there was a shidduch, and wonder of wonders: he was a chassidic young man, but he also wore a—

05:55 Speaker 8 A normal hat.

05:56 Speaker 2 A normal hat, and he even spoke to his wife. His aunt came in: “Please, sit down. Can I get you something to drink?” In short, they were very, very—

06:04 Speaker 8 Down-to-earth.

06:05 Speaker 2 Very down-to-earth. That’s when I met a young man who was actually a Chabadnik. Baruch Hashem, they got married. It was really the first Chabad wedding I’d seen. It was a little after my bar mitzvah, [unclear]. The Hungarians who had arrived together were always very close there in the neighborhood. And that’s where the first incident happened—the first mofes, you might say, that we saw from the Rebbe. A few months after the young couple’s wedding, they suddenly discovered a problem with the groom’s spine. A serious problem. They went to doctors and more doctors. Baruch Hashem, his father-in-law was a man of means, from the well-known Schlesinger family in Bnei Brak, and he started spending money on it. They went to one doctor after another, to Tel Hashomer. In short, there was a serious problem. They said several vertebrae in his spine needed to be replaced, and it was a very experimental procedure. We’re talking about sixty years ago—perhaps they would use something made of plastic. Well, [unclear], and his father-in-law had already scheduled the procedure. But the young groom said, “Wait. I have a Rebbe. I’m not having surgery without asking my Rebbe.” Everyone was very fond of him, of course—a chossid. What was a Rebbe? They understood that the Rebbe would give a blessing. But what about what the doctors had said? Fine. So he wrote to the Rebbe. About a week later, a reply arrived. It was a very interesting reply: proceed according to the unanimous opinion of three doctors. Over all these decades, I haven’t often come across a unanimous opinion—

07:48 Speaker 8 Unanimous—not just two doctors.

07:49 Speaker 2 Three doctors. Unanimous. Three doctors. Whatever all three said. In other words, if two said one thing, a majority opinion wasn’t enough. That was the answer. Well, his father-in-law said, “We’ve already asked five doctors. What more do you need?” But now the Rebbe had said it, so fine. They went to another doctor, a professor, and brought in the X-rays. He said, “I don’t understand what you’re asking. Don’t you see it here? Here—this part is missing. Don’t worry, Hashem will help.” Was that good enough? The father-in-law asked, “Yes, but—”

08:18 Speaker 8 That’s only one doctor.

08:19 Speaker 2 The Rebbe said three doctors. They’d already been to five, but all right, they went to another one. That doctor laughed at them too. “There it is,” he said. By then the father-in-law was upset. “Listen, enough. There’s a limit to everything...” But what could he do? The young man wouldn’t have surgery without three doctors agreeing. If he needed one more doctor, [unclear]. So he went to his health fund doctor—the one who would write him a prescription when he had a headache or something.

08:44 Speaker 8 A familiar family doctor.

08:45 Speaker 2 A family doctor. Of course, he was nowhere near a specialist. But the Rebbe hadn’t said “specialist”; he’d said “doctor.” So he went in. “Yes, what is it?” The doctor looked at the X-rays and said, “Listen, you have no choice. You must show these X-rays to someone.” The young man said, “No, I’m asking you what you think.” The doctor said, “Look, I—I don’t know. My heart won’t let me recommend something like this. Sometimes you come to me and I give you an Acamol tablet or something—we don’t know. But for me to recommend something like this... You don’t look to me like... I know you. This is...” “But the X-rays are right here.” “So I’m telling you to have the surgery, because you have no choice. That’s what the X-rays say.” He asked him again: “But what do you say?” “I can’t recommend something like this. I can’t recommend something like this.” Well, he came out and told his father-in-law: “No surgery.” Then it caused an uproar throughout the Hungarian community, throughout the neighborhood. [Unclear]—this young man, this young groom, was stubborn, and he was going to get himself killed rather than have surgery in America, and—

09:47 Speaker 8 He hadn’t seen the X-rays.

09:47 Speaker 2 He hadn’t seen the X-rays, hadn’t seen anything, and on and on. In short, there was a huge commotion for a whole week. Then, about a week later, they got an urgent telegram from Tel Hashomer telling them to come in: the X-rays had been switched by mistake. He didn’t have anything serious at all—just some inflammation there. They had given him someone else’s X-ray. So they had nearly operated on him and ruined him for life, if he would even have survived. The whole Hungarian community was caught up in it. And that was really my first encounter with the Rebbe, in the form of a story. That was it. Afterward we learned in Talmud Torah, and then in a yeshiva ketanah in Bnei Brak. They had opened a yeshiva ketanah called Karlin. They took two or three of the better boys from each eighth-grade class in the Talmud Torah schools and made a yeshiva eighth-grade class out of them. In short, it was sort of—

10:45 Speaker 8 There’s still a Karlin-Stolin yeshiva there today, though it isn’t Karlin-Stolin; it’s called Karlin.

10:48 Speaker 2 It wasn’t Karlin-Stolin then either, but the principal, Koritz, was a Karliner. Yes, so...

10:54 Speaker 8 Koritz.

10:55 Speaker 2 Yes.

10:56 Speaker 8 Most of them are in Pinsk-Karlin today.

10:59 Speaker 2 That’s how it was. And we learned there, baruch Hashem. Still nothing to do with Chabad. By then, though, people had started talking about Chabad, and we knew Chabad existed. What did we know about Chabad? I remember that toward the end of the third year, everyone started asking, “Which yeshiva are you going to? He’s going to Mir, he’s going to this yeshiva gedolah. Where are you taking an entrance exam?” So someone jokingly threw out, “I’m going to Chabad.” And the mashgiach wrinkled his nose like this: “Ah.” As if, of course, nobody was seriously talking about going to Chabad, but... That stirred something in me a little. What was that about? What was it?

11:38 Speaker 8 He didn’t react that way to any other yeshiva—only Chabad.

11:40 Speaker 2 Nothing was wrong; everything was fine, excellent. I understand it wasn’t his approach, but... I have a bit of a contrary streak, and it only made me dig deeper. I also went to a yeshiva called Ohel Yaakov, where Rabbi Chaim Brin was the rosh yeshiva. But all the while, I was beginning... From there we started going now and then to Reb Shlomo Chaim’s farbrengens in Kfar Chabad.

12:07 Speaker 8 Once you were in yeshiva gedolah.

12:08 Speaker 2 Yes, I’d already been learning in yeshiva gedolah for half a year.

12:09 Speaker 8 On your own or with someone?

12:10 Speaker 2 No, a few fellows went. But again, whatever drew me closer was more on a makif level. I can’t tell you that I studied what Shlomo Chaim said at the farbrengens, or the deep maamarim, or... I saw the unity in Chabad, and I saw that there was something inward here, something real. Unfortunately, when I sat with the Litvishe fellows there, they learned Torah, they certainly learned, but you felt... I don’t know, it’s a feeling; it’s hard to explain. You felt they were more immersed in nigleh. They weren’t immersed in... They learned well; everything was fine. But what really tipped the scales before that was Simchas Torah. I think you sent me that story—you’d seen what I wrote about that Simchas Torah in Netanya. That was really the makif[?]—the hammer blow for me.

13:13 Speaker 8 Nu, tell us.

13:14 Speaker 2 We lived in Pardes Katz, and the usual routine on Simchas Torah night was to dance for two or three minutes for each hakafah, go home and have the meal. Afterward, I had a friend, and we would always go into Bnei Brak. And Bnei Brak was—

13:28 Speaker 8 [unclear].

13:28 Speaker 2 [unclear]. How should I put it? The best show was at Ponevezh. The hakafos started there at twelve-thirty at night, and everyone would go there to dance. It was lively. By then I was already getting close to Chabad, so I said to my friend, “Listen, we’ve finished the meal, and we have until twelve-thirty. Let’s go to Chabad first.” I was already a bit of a Chabadnik, and we had time anyway, so why not do hakafos at Chabad too? Now, of course, at Chabad they would sit there after Maariv until eleven or twelve; they didn’t go home.

14:00 Speaker 8 At the shul on Rabbi Kook Street, as it was known.

14:02 Speaker 2 Yes, Avraham Street, Rabbi Kook Street. I don’t think the shul on Rashi Street existed yet. It was founded around then. Later we’d go to Rashi Street, but on the busy days of Yom Tov, Simchas Torah, we’d come—

14:15 Speaker 8 To Avraham Street.

14:16 Speaker 2 Later, during the day, we’d come to hear your grandfather lead Tefillas Geshem.

14:24 Speaker 8 Rabbi Nachum, yes. It was worth coming for.

14:26 Speaker 2 It was worth coming for. He wasn’t a great chazzan, but it was worth it. You felt something. We’d come especially for Musaf. Anyway, we were heading for the shul after the meal, coming up toward Avraham Street. And it was [unclear]; they had those lamps there, and the inside walls weren’t even plastered yet. It must have been early on. And I see, at the window—

14:51 Speaker 8 Those lamps—we should explain. They were, uh—

14:53 Speaker 2 Lamps, kerosene or something. I don’t know what they ran on. Maybe they were already electric, but they were those glowing lamps. It wasn’t really lighting. As we got closer, I saw a Gerer chossid standing at the window with his wife and a baby carriage. They were eating sunflower seeds, out for a stroll, and had stopped to watch through the window. As I came closer, I heard him say to his wife, “Ah, they’re crazy.” Yes, crazy. Oy, this isn’t for us.

15:26 Speaker 8 That piqued your interest.

15:27 Speaker 2 “Crazy.” Well, we went in, and the scene wasn’t far from that description. It was a typical Simchas Torah scene: one person lying over there, half a tablecloth here, two overturned bottles there, and it was the middle of the hakafos. A young avreich, Reb Yankel Katz, was standing up by the aron kodesh, jumping about with no particular pattern. We were still standing there, our heads spinning. What a sight for Simchas Torah! Even at our shul, among the Hungarians, people would join hands and dance. But here you were just bewildered. Vos iz dos? What kind of nonsense is this? Somehow, little by little, you began to sense that there was something inside it. There was no showiness here. That was the point. As I stood there staring and wondering, watching this one and that one—I recognized a few faces—my eyes suddenly fell on a group of three going around. They were doing a sort of Lag BaOmer dance too, the three of them with their arms around each other, running along. They were Rabbi Nachum Goldschmidt, whom I already knew and respected; Zalman [unclear], the shochet—

16:42 Speaker 9 Reb Leibel.

16:43 Speaker 2 Leibel, who was one of the distinguished figures of Bnei Brak—and another young avreich, Schneur Zalman Gafni. And there the three of them were—

16:54 Speaker 9 With their arms around each other.

16:54 Speaker 2 With their arms around each other, running. [unclear]. I kept my eyes on them, and they weren’t really there. I could see they were somewhere else. I noticed that Reb Leib Zalmanov’s sirtuk was practically white—maybe he’d fallen, or rubbed against a wall, or... And Gafni’s sirtuk was torn right along the seam in back. One of them had been holding on to him, apparently a bit too enthusiastically, and kept holding on. So one sirtuk was torn, the other was white, and they kept going around, with someone lying here and someone else there. I watched those three; I knew who they were. Slowly, I was drawn in. You could see that this was an inward Simchas Torah, not a ceremony or... In short, I was drawn in.

17:48 Speaker 9 Less orderly and less organized.

17:50 Speaker 2 Not orderly, not organized—organized chaos. The whole place had this atmosphere, with those lamps and walls that still weren’t smooth or white. In short, we were drawn in very quickly. We started dancing, and... In short, that was really my first Simchas Torah—

18:10 Speaker 9 In a Chabad atmosphere.

18:11 Speaker 2 In that genuine Chabad atmosphere. Well, after a while the others started going home. They’d been there since five, after all; they hadn’t gone home after Maariv. Then we said, “Okay, let’s go to Ponevezh.” That was our usual route. And you arrived at Ponevezh to find the exact opposite of what you’d just seen. A huge hall, fluorescent lights, everything brightly lit. An aron kodesh with a red—

18:41 Speaker 9 Paroches.

18:41 Speaker 2 A red paroches, yes. And everyone was dancing. This was how it worked: under the women’s gallery stood all the people in their jackets—the spectators, the householders who’d come to watch the Lag BaOmer show. Inside, the bochurim danced. Every bochur who arrived first ran into the next room, took off his jacket and hat, kept his tie neatly fastened, and then joined that traditional dance of theirs.

19:09 Speaker 9 In orderly fashion, each one holding the next fellow’s hand.

19:12 Speaker 2 Yes, side by side, dancing, while everyone watched. Nobody dancing in the middle wore a jacket; they were all in white shirts. I looked and looked, thinking how completely opposite it was to where we’d just come from. Look how orderly this simchah was. Hundreds of bochurim dancing, happy. But I don’t know. I watched one bochur, and suddenly something about his appearance wasn’t quite right. He let go of the other fellow’s hand and straightened his—

19:38 Speaker 9 Straightened his appearance.

19:39 Speaker 2 The sight. Another one’s tie had shifted a little, so he let go of the other fellow’s hand to get it exactly in the middle—right in the middle of the dance—and I was coming from there. Then somehow my eyes settled on a bochur who was dancing, and the fellow next to him lifted his leg a little too high and apparently gave him, by accident, some kind of—

19:58 Speaker 9 By accident.

19:59 Speaker 2 A little kick to the lower part of his trousers, yes. And while dancing, the fellow looks down and sees a streak—

20:06 Speaker 9 A little bit of dirt on his trousers.

20:08 Speaker 2 A streak, a gray streak, a streak of dust. He had a streak of dust because the other fellow had touched his... He keeps dancing. Slowly he lets go of the other fellow’s hand, and I happen to see the whole thing.

20:18 Speaker 9 You’re watching him.

20:18 Speaker 2 He lets go, puts his hand in his pocket, takes out a handkerchief, and while dancing, in rhythm, he cleans his trousers. One, two, one, two—and keeps dancing. I put my hand on my friend Dovid and said, “Dovid, we’re leaving. This isn’t our place.” That was, as they say, a slap. Again, it wasn’t the farbrengens, it wasn’t the Rebbe Maharash’s deep maamarim, it wasn’t the— You could see the inner quality even from the outside. And that was it. Afterward we were in—of course, we went to the yeshiva, studied in the yeshiva, boruch Hashem.

20:56 Speaker 9 So you moved to Kfar Chabad?

20:57 Speaker 2 I moved to Kfar Chabad, yes.

20:58 Speaker 9 What year was that?

21:00 Speaker 2 That was 5727, just before the war, actually. 5727, so I dug—

21:05 Speaker 9 Had you already written anything to the Rebbe before that?

21:07 Speaker 2 When I moved, I didn’t write.

21:10 Speaker 9 You hadn’t had any contact before that?

21:12 Speaker 2 No. No, actually, I did write, yes, yes. I wrote to the Rebbe, and what he wrote back was—to have my tefillin checked. Of course, my father, a simple Hungarian Jew, had gone to a sofer for my bar mitzvah and asked him, “Are these kosher? Are they kosher?” Because... they were kosher. Of course, they were the simple kind of tefillin. So boruch Hashem, I bought another pair of tefillin later. Rabbi Natan Kori[?] came later, with the group.

21:46 Speaker 9 So the Rebbe had already answered you before, even before...

21:49 Speaker 2 First of all, he told me to check the tefillin. That was the encounter, yes.

21:53 Speaker 9 And then you entered the yeshiva in 5727?

21:56 Speaker 2 I entered the yeshiva in 5727. That was right during the war, so we dug the trenches outside. It was a very, very challenging time, and I remember a telegram arrived from the Rebbe, or something like that, and everyone gathered around. That was new to me, too, you know? But the famous telegram arrived: “Certainly, certainly, the Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps; Hashem is your shade at your right hand.” Everyone gathered around the telegram, and you could see them all come alive.

22:29 Speaker 9 Farbrenging.

22:30 Speaker 2 Farbrenging. Now, wait—I know, every rabbi gives a blessing, every rabbi says, “All right, may it be...” But they lived it. They lived the connection with the Rebbe, and lived the... And that was it. Then a few years passed before the group went, of course. Well, if we jump ahead to the group, the group was—

22:49 Speaker 9 We’ll get to the group in a second. Before that, how did your parents take it when you moved to Chabad?

22:53 Speaker 2 Ah, of course there was some discussion about it. I promised my mother I wouldn’t have a full beard, just a French-style goatee. Only that. And... my father didn’t mind so much, but they were modern people, you understand; they had come from Hungary. They wanted their son to go on to become a doctor—and be a Jew, of course, put on tefillin. It was a shock, it was... a bit of a shock to everyone around us.

23:23 Speaker 9 On Shabbos, would you go to Avraham Street in Bnei Brak?

23:26 Speaker 2 On Shabbos I would go—

23:27 Speaker 9 When you were at home.

23:28 Speaker 2 No, when I was at home I was already going to Rashi Street.

23:30 Speaker 9 Okay.

23:31 Speaker 2 Sometimes I’d go to Avraham Street, but by then we were already going to Rashi Street, where that little villa was.

23:37 Speaker 9 Kowalski’s, right?

23:38 Speaker 2 Kowalski’s, yes. That was where the older fellows, the older members of Anash, were. Actually, the real elders were on Avraham Street. It was also a little farther away, and here there were young people too, and...

23:51 Speaker 9 The young ones were Yonatan Yeshua Loifer, Shmuel Hefer...

23:54 Speaker 2 Shmuel Hefer, yes. Yes, all the... Gavriel...

23:59 Speaker 9 And when you arrived—when you entered—did you have any sort of personal connection with Shlomo Chaim?

24:04 Speaker 2 Not a personal one. Sometimes he’d give me a bit of a talking-to, but...

24:08 Speaker 9 The way he knows how. It comes pouring out.

24:10 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes. But you can’t say... [unclear]. That alone was something. And then getting permission to go with the group meant going through seven levels of Gehinnom. For Shlomo Chaim, going with the group was out of the question. “What are you doing? What do you have to look for there?” That’s what he’d say. He would even say, “You’ll see the Rebbe sitting and davening from a siddur. Every Jew davens from a siddur.” To that extent. Not like today, when people just travel and travel, just to see the Rebbe. No, he was very, very inwardly focused. And the truth is, no one who listened to him regretted it, even among our fellows who didn’t go. You wanted to go to the Rebbe? Then you would spend six months preparing for it. Six months before... I remember studying with a chavrusa before that, a year earlier. After the Yomim Tovim we arrived, and during the third study session he wanted to go for Pesach. Well, he wanted to go in half a year.

25:13 Speaker 9 The third study session is what you called evening Chassidus.

25:15 Speaker 2 Evening Chassidus. Yes, yes. Not everyone studied Chassidus then. Some studied Nigleh.

25:19 Speaker 9 Yes.

25:20 Speaker 2 Yes, the first-year class still studied Nigleh in the senior yeshiva. Anyway, he left me and went to speak with him for a whole hour. I stayed at the lectern. He talked and talked. He wanted a little leeway so he could travel with the group for Pesach. He came back after an hour. “Well, what did he say?” “Shlomo Chaim said I’m not ready to go for Pesach yet. Another year and a half.”

25:41 Speaker 9 Wow.

25:42 Speaker 2 The following Pesach—and he stayed.

25:44 Speaker 9 He accepted it.

25:45 Speaker 2 He accepted it and stayed. It’s remarkable. Which of us would...?

25:53 Speaker 9 And when the letter came out, it turned out that some of the restrictions he had imposed were actually instructions from the Rebbe. The bochurim didn’t know that. They thought—

26:00 Speaker 2 Certainly, certainly. They blamed him for everything. They thought he didn’t go to the Rebbe because he wasn’t... That’s what they thought.

26:08 Speaker 9 So then you arrived with the group.

26:10 Speaker 2 Then we arrived with the group.

26:11 Speaker 9 Was there preparation before going with the group?

26:13 Speaker 2 Again, I wasn’t so closely connected with Shlomo Chaim. So there wasn’t much until we got there; there was more once we were there. Yes, that’s right, and yechidus and... But before that, it was more about the journey. And first of all, don’t forget that everything surrounding it was a very big undertaking. Going to America, tickets, and finding a way to manage it—and who had money? It was completely out of the question. How would we travel? It wasn’t even possible for me to discuss it with my father and mother, you know? When I wanted to buy shoes for Pesach, I went to work from Purim until Pesach, and then I bought shoes. I remember going to Ephraim, who arranged the tickets. “Yes, that’s all well and good. Now what?” “Write promissory notes.” So we wrote promissory notes; there weren’t checks. “Six notes—I’ll pay.” “And who’s guaranteeing them?” How should I know who the guarantor is? “I need a guarantor who works here.” Well, I had no guarantor. Where was I supposed to find one? No guarantor, no ticket. “Well, I’m not just handing out tickets.” Ephraim wouldn’t budge.

27:17 Speaker 9 An organized man.

27:18 Speaker 2 Very organized, a real Yekke. Well, I left and went to the train station. I was going back to Kfar Chabad. What could I do? I had no money. Just then Itche Yangplovsky came along; he was also traveling to Kfar Chabad by train. “How are you?” I didn’t really know him. “Oh, you were at Ephraim’s? Are you going with the group too?” I told him, “No, apparently I’m not going.” “Why?” “I don’t know. I need money, guarantors. Who’ll sign for me?” “I’ll sign as your guarantor. What’s the problem?” I looked at him—I hardly knew him; we spoke maybe once a year. “Yes, I’ll sign for you, no problem.” Really. I immediately ran back to Ephraim. I told him, “Ephraim, I have a guarantor who works for you.” He started laughing. He said, “He’s already signed for half the group...” But boruch Hashem, in the end we went. Well, the time with the group was certainly...

28:16 Speaker 9 Wait, when did you arrive?

28:17 Speaker 2 We arrived on Erev Pesach.

28:18 Speaker 9 Nissan, Erev Pesach 5730.

28:20 Speaker 2 [unclear]

28:20 Speaker 9 [unclear]

28:21 Speaker 2 Yes, straight to the Seder night, straight to Mrs. Mussi’s scrubbing[?]. Straight to the Seder night, and again, you still—

28:30 Speaker 9 Was that the first time you saw the Rebbe?

28:31 Speaker 2 I had already seen the Rebbe when he came in on Shabbos. It really was a shock, because in those days there weren’t pictures or films. There was just one picture of the Rebbe sitting like this with a black beard, with a wall behind him, and then you see a rabbi with a white beard. It just didn’t match at all. There was no...

28:54 Speaker 9 How many bochurim came with the group then?

28:56 Speaker 2 Forty-something. It was a very large group. Relatively speaking, it was very large then; until that point there had been twenty-something in each group. And within two days you haven’t even had time to take it in. You go to the Rebbe’s Seder night, and you haven’t even had time to understand what you’re supposed to see. There you are, standing behind the Rebbe’s chair. Of course we watched, and before that the Rebbe had come in to us for—

29:20 Speaker 9 The second Seder night.

29:20 Speaker 2 Yes, so because of that we worked and worked for two days. Mussi said we had to work not because we needed to get rid of the chametz for Pesach, but because the Rebbe was coming. So the place had to be ready. And we sat there, each of us with his own seder set up.

29:36 Speaker 9 With the seder plate.

29:36 Speaker 2 With the seder plate. We put down a carpet, and the Rebbe really did come in. That was Mussi’s day, because then he would bless her. [unclear]. He went past each person’s seder.

29:50 Speaker 9 Was that still on [unclear]? Where was it?

29:52 Speaker 2 [unclear], across the way, yes.

29:53 Speaker 9 Mm-hmm.

29:54 Speaker 2 He looked at every, every, every seder plate. A look, another look, another look, another look. You could see he didn’t miss anyone. I was sitting here, and Chaim Ashkenazi was sitting next to me; he was also in the group. So the Rebbe looked at the—

30:12 Speaker 9 Your seder plate.

30:13 Speaker 2 At the... No, he was sitting next to me here. First the Rebbe looked at Chaim’s seder plate.

30:19 Speaker 9 Chaim Ashkenazi first.

30:20 Speaker 2 He looked at it, then he came to me and looked at mine. Instead of moving on, he went back—

30:25 Speaker 9 To Chaim Ashkenazi’s seder plate.

30:27 Speaker 2 To Chaim’s seder plate, and then he continued, uh—

30:30 Speaker 9 To the next people in line.

30:31 Speaker 2 Yes. And afterward he went out, having given the blessing, “As in the days of your exodus from the land of Egypt, I will show him wonders.” After he left, we opened it up, and Chaim’s matzos were broken.

30:41 Speaker 9 That was the only seder plate the Rebbe went back to look at.

30:43 Speaker 2 Went back, yes.

30:44 Speaker 9 And the matzos were broken.

30:46 Speaker 2 Broken. He didn’t have whole matzos.

30:52 Speaker 9 You did the seder quickly and then ran—

30:53 Speaker 2 We did the seder quickly and then ran. Of course, as usual, your head is muddled from those four cups, and, uh... One poor fellow there even threw up behind the Rebbe. But we squeezed in; we knew we had to hear what was going on. Yes, you were there for the Rashag’s questions and the... all the customs. But what was astonishing was that we had only been seeing the Rebbe for two days, and already you could see how he sat with such bittul. Yankel Katz’s son was reading the Haggadah, and the Rebbe sat with bittul and listened to the Haggadah. The Rebbe could have... after all, the Rebbe... And the Frierdiker Rebbe’s chair was at the head of the table, and the Rebbe sat with bittul, like a servant before his master. You could feel that, for the Rebbe, his shver—his father-in-law—was there. It wasn’t make-believe. You could feel it. And every time, before doing something, he would sort of glance over. You know, like children sitting with their father, looking over... like a little child.

31:55 Speaker 9 Before each thing, he would look at—

31:56 Speaker 2 He would sort of glance over, not turn and look. He didn’t move, but you could see that he kept glancing over. Why glance over? You know that chair will be exactly the same from the beginning of the seder to the end; nothing there is going to change. But he lived it. You could feel that bittul in the Rebbe. It was something astonishing. And of course, the entire way the seder was conducted. You’ve probably seen and heard about it from all sorts of—

32:25 Speaker 9 We can go back and tell every detail. That’s the beauty of it for us.

32:28 Speaker 2 That’s the beauty of it for us, yes.

32:29 Speaker 9 You can always tell it again.

32:31 Speaker 2 Yes, with the Rashag’s questions, and the fish with all the salt that the Rebbe would eat, and the fish the Rebbe would pick up with his hand.

32:43 Speaker 9 The Rebbe picked up the fish with his hand?

32:44 Speaker 2 With his hand. So the Rashag asked him whether that was the custom, whether it was... The Rebbe answered that his father, Rabbi Levik, used to eat with his hand. So for him it was a matter of honoring his father, but it was not a practice for others to follow; they shouldn’t start doing it. More or less, our group’s experience was like everyone else’s, of course. I don’t think anything unusual happened to me. The unusual stories all came later, after the wedding, after the—

33:21 Speaker 9 Beyond that—what was it like simply being a bochur, being at home in [unclear]? The Rebbe came in for every Minchah. What was—

33:28 Speaker 2 Every Minchah, every Minchah, and every maamar. We ran back from Manhattan, because I remember that on Lag BaOmer we were in Manhattan, and—

33:38 Speaker 9 [unclear], you mean?

33:40 Speaker 2 No, I don’t remember what it was. And I said to the person I’d traveled with, “Come on, let’s go; it’ll be Minchah soon.” “No, it’s all right. Missing one Minchah—it isn’t so terrible.” “No, really, you can’t. You really can’t.” Anyway, we went. Right after Minchah, the Rebbe sat down to say a maamar, and I was sitting right by the Rebbe’s table for it.

34:05 Speaker 9 In the upstairs zal?

34:06 Speaker 2 In the upstairs zal, the small zal. It was so unexpected. Except that he came in for Minchah wearing silk, so that was a sign. Yes, we understood something was going to happen, but we had no idea there would be a maamar. It was so crowded. I remember the one time I heard the Rebbe stop in the middle of a maamar and say that if there wasn’t order, we would continue the maamar at another time and in another place. In the middle of a maamar. To stop a maamar like that was not... Well, he would also sometimes speak with a microphone. This time there was no microphone.

34:39 Speaker 9 When did you go in for yechidus?

34:41 Speaker 2 Well, we only went in for yechidus toward the winter.

34:46 Speaker 9 But your birthday was earlier. When was it?

34:49 Speaker 2 My birthday was right after I arrived. You didn’t know anything yet. It was a week later, and I remember going up to [unclear] Gordon. I told him—he was in charge of the minyan. I understood afterward that it was the Rebbe’s minyan, but all the bochurim ran it. [unclear] assigned the aliyos, but it was essentially the bochurim’s Minchah. So I said to him, “It’s my birthday. I want an aliyah in the Rebbe’s minyan.” He said, “Oh, an aliyah?” He thought for a moment. “Good, you want to get shishi.” He had these sayings of his... Yes, yechidus was something, something wonderful. And something interesting happened. You know, your mind is working, you write things down, and you try to pin the Rebbe down with all sorts of questions. When I came out, I found that on quite a few of the questions I’d asked, the Rebbe had answered the exact opposite of what I had expected. All of that stayed with me.

35:55 Speaker 9 Can you give an example?

36:00 Speaker 2 We had started learning to be a sofer STaM. We studied it here in Kfar Chabad, in yeshiva. Again, it wasn’t the accepted thing for a bochur to do. Besides, you understand, I wasn’t some great servant of Hashem for whom it would particularly suit me. I was a bochur like everyone else. But I understood that being a sofer was... Since we had studied STaM, I wrote about it. Later I regretted writing it, but I had written it. The Rebbe dwelled on the matter of STaM. What had I written? “The study and the involvement”—and, as if to correct himself, “the involvement and the study. It is certainly worthwhile to continue with this.” I spoke Hebrew with the Rebbe in my first and second yechidus. “Certainly, certainly you should.” I had thought the Rebbe would ignore it. Instead, he focused on it and went into it thoroughly, and for sixty years since then I haven’t been able to leave it. And it wasn’t just a passing remark: “the study and the involvement,” “the involvement.” Since then I’ve been involved in it as well. In other words, the Rebbe didn’t say those words twice for no reason—twice, “involvement,” and “study,” and... Yes, it was very... Later I would come with a Gemara, and with actual tefillin and mezuzos. Yes, one time something very, very interesting happened. We would write to the Rebbe when we arrived. I came with tefillin and mezuzos. At the time I was at home with Rabbi Wosner [?]; I went to him often with questions. There was one person—I won’t mention his name—about whom Rabbi Wosner [?] told me, “He’s qualified, an expert. He’s the only one to whom I gave a certificate as a proofreader.” Fine. So everything would go to him. I gave him these items to check, and then I came. I wrote to the Rebbe that I had come with tefillin and mezuzos. The Rebbe passed over that and wrote, “Surely they were checked by an expert.” “Surely” means surely checked. Now, you might think, “Checked by an expert—wonderful, the Rebbe says...” You understand that it—

38:00 Speaker 2 Of course. The Rebbe didn’t write to me, “It’s definitely been checked.” He could have said nothing and moved on. And I’m sitting in my room, thinking: What did the Rebbe actually mean? After all, I’d gone, and Rabbi Wosner himself had told me this was the best proofreader. As I’m sitting there, I’m holding a bundle, and I look at the... the first mezuzah: letters are missing. You can see for yourself that they’re missing. It happened by chance, while I was thinking; I hadn’t gone to check the mezuzah. I leaf through them, take another look—I’ve started looking now. There’s an extra letter, a vav at the end there. That’s it; this is getting to be too much. I took another one, and there was some disqualifying error. Say there was a shin instead of an ayin, three heads—a disqualifying error that shouldn’t have been there at all. Well, I understood the hint by then. So I went to the dealers and wrote to them that none of it had been proofread. There it went. I couldn’t sell it as proofread. And then I remember, I came back to Israel and took a sample of that mezuzah, the invalid one, and went to Rabbi Wosner. I asked him about it. He looked at it. Usually I came with normal questions; suddenly, “What are you asking me? Don’t you understand that this is...” So I showed him: “Look, this is the mark of the proofreader you sent me to a few months ago.” [unclear]. I took the sheet from him. He said, “You can’t rely on him.” Just a few months earlier he’d told me he was the only one. So I told him, “Listen, the Lubavitcher Rebbe told me that a month ago.” He was very impressed. Before you came back to Israel, let’s go back for a moment. Tishrei—good. What do you remember from Tishrei? Tekios, Yom Kippur, Simchas Torah. Yes, yes. You can tell us even the familiar things. Certainly, certainly. Well, it’s... the tekios, first of all, that’s—how do you put it—the things...

40:05 Speaker 2 With the Polish Rebbes they call them “shtick,” you know, things Rebbes do. With our Rebbe there’s nothing like that, apart from the tekios. That handkerchief—and not only the handkerchief, the red handkerchief and that shofar—and it’s an entire order of avodah for the Rebbe. Yes, and with the Rebbe, everything is always so prepared, everything. To see something so out of the ordinary...

40:33 Speaker 10 On Rosh Hashanah the Rebbe didn’t hide it.

40:35 Speaker 2 He really didn’t hide it. I remember, at one point I used to travel afterward with [unclear], and I traveled a lot in Menachem Av too. There were a few periods when I’d go in Menachem Av; it was quiet then. A Jew named Rothenberg used to travel with me. He was a Ger chossid, one of the founders of the town of Emanuel, and they had once lived on Eastern Parkway, opposite 770.

40:59 Speaker 10 They used to live in New York—in Israel.

41:01 Speaker 2 Yes, and I think—I think that when [unclear] asked for the shadchanus gelt, for the Rebbe to say it, the Rebbe said he couldn’t because there was a bris. Then they checked and said the bris would be early, so the Rebbe could farbreng, because they held the bris early. I think it was his bris, or he was there, or something like that.

41:24 Speaker 10 In other words, there was a bris in their family that day.

41:25 Speaker 2 There was a bris in their family.

41:27 Speaker 10 On 14 Kislev—the second 14 Kislev.

41:29 Speaker 2 Yes. He asked for shadchanus gelt, and the Rebbe said, “I won’t do the shadchanus gelt, because you’ll disrupt...”

41:34 Speaker 10 He asked for the farbrengen.

41:35 Speaker 2 Yes, so the Rebbe said, “I’ll disrupt the bris here.” They said the bris wouldn’t be disrupted because... In any case, he was a staunch Ger chossid, [unclear], but he thought very highly of the Rebbe. He said that once a year he would come to the Rebbe for a week. Sometimes we stayed together in the same room at the Shlosberg house [?]. He would get up, daven Shacharis with the Rebbe, and sit there learning. So I said to him, “If you’re coming anyway, why don’t you come for a Yom Tov or something? You’re here for a supposedly uneventful week. You see, okay, the Rebbe goes up to lead the davening...” He said, “Look, you have no idea how impressed I am by the simplicity of the way the Rebbe goes up. First, a chazzan goes up and leads the davening, and the Rebbe follows along with his finger in the siddur. Then the Rebbe goes up to lead—just like that. You know, when any other Rebbe goes up, you can see how stirred he is. Here, nothing. And this Rebbe surely knows all the kabbalistic intentions that they know.” Then he reminded me of the teaching about Aharon HaKohen: “And Aharon did so”—he lit the menorah—“this teaches that he did not deviate.” What’s the point of saying that? Hashem commanded him; of course he didn’t deviate. He said that if any ordinary person, even the greatest tzaddik, received an instruction from Hashem to light the menorah in the Beis Hamikdash, the excitement would be so great you’d expect him to spill the oil. But he didn’t deviate. Those are two things: he’s stirred, deeply stirred, but he has that... In other words, that’s what I see in the Rebbe all the time. He was something special.

43:09 Speaker 10 Interesting.

43:09 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. Three or four times I came with him during that period. “You have to see the Rebbe here,” I’d say, “how he comes in to daven Minchah and Maariv without any fuss.” There are many people who are struck specifically by that simplicity. You know, sometimes you go to all sorts of places... I remember Rabbi Wenger once visited the Rebbe. Well, we’re already straying past the group, but you can sort it out afterward.

43:37 Speaker 10 Rabbi Wenger visited the Rebbe?

43:38 Speaker 2 Rabbi Wenger visited the Rebbe once.

43:40 Speaker 10 Really? Rabbi Wenger was my neighbor in Bnei Brak.

43:42 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, the Hungarian one, from the Chasam Sofer.

43:44 Speaker 10 Chasam Sofer.

43:46 Speaker 2 He’s one of us.

43:47 Speaker 10 A whole family from Hungary.

43:47 Speaker 2 Yes, he was a friend of ours from Hungary; we knew him there.

43:50 Speaker 10 So he visited the Rebbe?

43:51 Speaker 2 He visited the Rebbe many years ago, and he told me about it. He’d gone in—remind me, what farbrengen was it? Out of courtesy, he wanted to go in for half an hour or so to see the farbrengen. Of course, as soon as he came in, they seated him at the back with all the older men. Anyway, he stayed there for the entire farbrengen, until three in the morning. He couldn’t leave. When he came back, the young men from Chasam Sofer sat down with him. “What’s in America? What’s Lubavitch like?” So he said, “Look, the brilliance and the sharp reasoning—the Rebbe made a siyum. Well, of course, he did that at every farbrengen. It’s something else...” And a Jew who was with us, a friend of Wenger’s [?], understood the siyum. “And the voice—I can’t describe it. It’s a shame. Usually, when any speaker talks for an hour, then a second hour, he gets weaker. With him there was no such thing. By the third hour, he was even stronger.” But he said something that had impressed him: “Such a great person, such a sharp mind—he’s no simpleton; he’s a genius with a sharp mind. And when he talks about Moshiach, he says Moshiach will come now, before the farbrengen ends. You see the simple, wholehearted faith of a five-year-old child.” That’s what he said: “The wholehearted faith of a five-year-old child. He draws you into it. You understand that he believes Moshiach will come before the farbrengen ends. After all, every great rabbi, every speaker, says, ‘May Moshiach Tzidkeinu come speedily in our days.’ But he says Moshiach will come. He makes you feel that Moshiach will come—”

45:30 Speaker 11 Not just for appearances.

45:31 Speaker 2 Not just for appearances or anything like that. Exactly. He draws you into it. Now, if it were just some rabbi, fine, but a person who’s such a genius—don’t be naive; what, Moshiach is going to come now, before...? In other words, that sharpness and that combination—

45:47 Speaker 11 The sharpness and the wholehearted faith go together.

45:48 Speaker 2 Wholehearted faith. The wholehearted faith of a five-year-old child—that’s how he put it. He has that childlike quality alongside all his sharpness. I’ve met many people who noticed that combination, that combination. Who once told me about it? There was someone—Simcha Raz. He was a writer of children’s books.

46:08 Speaker 11 Not only children’s books; books for adults too.

46:09 Speaker 2 He wrote for adults too, about—

46:11 Speaker 11 Rabbi Aryeh Levin. He was a writer.

46:12 Speaker 2 Yes, but mainly children’s literature. So he visited... He once told me about a yechidus. Before that, he’d been in Manhattan at some publishing house and signed a contract for something. In short, the secretary came, and someone else came; he sat in the waiting room, and then they brought him in. The CEO was sitting in a big office, and he had this basket of pens. A pen he’d used to sign a particular contract had a certain importance, so it went in there. And this wasn’t just anybody; he was an executive at a publishing company. That was the experience he’d just had. Then he came to the Rebbe’s secretariat. He arrives at the secretariat—the Rebbe’s secretariat, which handles matters all over the world, and everything else—and there’s this old telephone, and...

47:00 Speaker 11 It’s simple—

47:01 Speaker 2 Terrible, just terrible. It was chaos there, and there was simply nowhere to sit, and—anyway, he had already gone in to the Rebbe. So he says, what struck him about the Rebbe? Usually, when they handed the Rebbe a note, sometimes he would put on glasses and sometimes he wouldn’t. The guys had already made all sorts of connections out of it: what it meant if he put on glasses, and what it meant if he didn’t. In any case, he would put on his glasses and read the page. Actually, the way he read it—I don’t know if you’ve heard about this—it was like feeding a page into a printer and it goes zh-zh-zh. He would hold it like this between two fingers.

47:37 Speaker 11 Folding it as he went through it.

47:38 Speaker 2 Folding it, sort of. How could he read it so—

47:41 Speaker 11 Quickly. It looked like he was just glancing over it.

47:42 Speaker 2 Like he was just glancing over it, yes. Then he would take his glasses, take the pencil, and—

47:47 Speaker 11 Mark things.

47:47 Speaker 2 Mark something here, mark something there. I don’t know what he was marking—whether it was what he wanted to answer or not. In any case, he would take the pencil, and he had a pencil about this big—

47:56 Speaker 11 Very small.

47:58 Speaker 2 Sharpened at both ends. That I remember, the pencil. It was so short, but he could still use it because the other end was sharpened too. Put a basket of pencils there—it costs two dollars. But the Rebbe never... So he says that, of all things, what struck him was that simplicity: the pencil sharpened at both ends.

48:18 Speaker 11 That day he saw the contrast—the money being spent—

48:21 Speaker 2 Yes.

48:21 Speaker 11 And, by contrast, the Rebbe.

48:22 Speaker 2 Exactly. That’s where you see the Rebbe’s greatness, how great he was in that simplicity, and...

48:30 Speaker 11 What else do you remember from that Tishrei?

48:34 Speaker 2 Ah.

48:37 Speaker 11 Was there a large crowd? Do you remember? Did people come—

48:39 Speaker 2 No, a group did come then. Of course they were treated with great respect, that group, but it was relatively [unclear]. They knew exactly who the group was, and Zusha Vilimovsky made sure of it. That was that Tishrei. I remember another Tishrei when I came. I don’t know if it was the Tishrei when everything was very confused. I came on Olympic during Chol Hamoed, and the plane landed partway through—it didn’t seem to want to take off, and... Anyway—

49:06 Speaker 11 What’s Olympic? Olympic is—

49:07 Speaker 2 Olympic was the Greek airline. Anyway, in the end it did take off. I thought I’d be stuck there in Greece for Sukkos. That was something. Anyway, I arrived right in the middle of a sicha from the Rebbe. This was years later, and the first words I heard were “[unclear].” That’s what I walked into. And I didn’t see the Rebbe. He was standing on a platform, but... Then he went into his room, and I went outside. My bag was outside, and I stood there waiting. Someone came up to me. He was still a bochur then. “Oh, sholom aleichem! Where are you staying?” Honestly, I didn’t know yet. I had a bag, but I didn’t know where I was sleeping. “Excellent,” he told me. “Someone in my room has just gone out on mivtzoim. I happen to have a little room with a free bed.” Anyway. Later I realized he had given me his own bed and gone to find somewhere else to sleep.

50:00 Speaker 11 Wow.

50:01 Speaker 2 Yes. Turn that off and I’ll tell you what happened.

50:04 Speaker 11 Oh, these are stories about students?

50:05 Speaker 2 No, it’s unbelievable, unbelievable. He explained that someone had gone out on mivtzoim until after Simchas Torah, so the bed had just become free. Fine, I let him pull one over on me. So I told him, “All right, let’s wait for the Rebbe to come out, and then I’ll...” “No, no, no. It’ll be at least an hour and a half before the Rebbe comes out after Maariv. Come, put down your bag. I’ll give you a key, and you can come back.” “All right.” I went up—it was right across the way—put down my bag and came back with the key. By the time I got back, the Rebbe had already left. You understand? I hadn’t seen the Rebbe at all. Fine. I got up early the next morning; the Rebbe wasn’t there yet. I ran off, [unclear], and when I came back the Rebbe was already in the sukkah. Then he came in with the esrog and lulav, and... I don’t know how long he was there. Then he would open the door and give Meir Harlig the—

50:54 Speaker 11 The lulav and esrog.

50:54 Speaker 2 The lulav and esrog, to give to everyone. Fine. So I took up a position on the steps at the entrance, right opposite the door of the sukkah, on the steps of 770. I stood there waiting for the Rebbe to open the door. That was why I’d come—to see the Rebbe. Suddenly Moishe Yaroslavsky came by—you know him too if you’re in Bnei Brak. He was going around, and he looked at me, grabbed my hand and said, “Come, come, come—the Rebbe...”

52:17 Speaker 11 Bring the coffee, and you’ll be able to see the Rebbe.

52:19 Speaker 2 Yes, [unclear]. Well, I won’t say he persuaded me; I simply couldn’t resist. He just pulled me along, and okay, so—

52:28 Speaker 11 He didn’t persuade you. He made it happen.

52:30 Speaker 2 He made it happen. He pulled me upstairs, [unclear], where the kollel was.

52:34 Speaker 11 Yes.

52:35 Speaker 2 All those stairs.

52:35 Speaker 11 [unclear].

52:36 Speaker 2 Yes. Then you come down with someone else. They give you a few towels, and you walk one step at a time. If you take a step too fast, boom, it spills—and it’s boiling hot. We went down to Kingston, crossed over, and you enter opposite the gate. Now, when you reach the big sukkah, there’s a narrow path. The Rebbe’s sukkah is here, 770 is here. The two of us were walking along: I was in front and he was behind. Just as I reached the Rebbe’s door, suddenly the door—

53:00 Speaker 11 Of the sukkah.

53:00 Speaker 2 Of the Rebbe’s sukkah—the door opened wide.

53:03 Speaker 11 While you were carrying the pot.

53:04 Speaker 2 I was carrying the pot, and the Rebbe had the lulav in his hand. And he didn’t just open the door a crack—he opened it wide. I was only a few centimeters from the Rebbe, and I had come because I wanted to see him. There I was with the pot in my hands, and the Rebbe opened the door and stood right in front of me. I must have gotten a little flustered or something. I shifted a bit, and suddenly there was a splash of coffee on the floor.

53:30 Speaker 11 It spilled.

53:31 Speaker 2 You could feel the heat, and the smell and the steam rose from it. The Rebbe smiled. I don’t remember what happened after that. I was flustered. But Moishe went around in the sukkah saying, “[unclear].” I bow to you.

53:50 Speaker 11 Wow.

53:52 Speaker 2 I bow to you.

53:54 Speaker 11 When did you go back to the Rebbe the next time? Only after your wedding?

53:58 Speaker 2 No. The next time I came as a chosson, which was very unusual.

54:01 Speaker 11 Mm-hmm.

54:02 Speaker 2 Because people didn’t go then. Chassanim didn’t travel then.

54:03 Speaker 11 That wasn’t done yet.

54:06 Speaker 2 And having your aliyah to the Torah there—there was no such thing.

54:09 Speaker 11 Mm-hmm.

54:10 Speaker 2 I mean, even if someone did travel, the aufruf would be... My aufruf was on Rashi Street, with all the guys. Then a group of bochurim came from Kfar Chabad. They really celebrated and danced there. Nachshon Ezra Schochet was there. But afterward I did come, just before the wedding, and then I had yechidus, and then there was...

54:33 Speaker 11 So how long before the wedding did you arrive?

54:36 Speaker 2 Well, there’s a story there too. I had actually started working with Moshe Slonim. We had begun setting up schools.

54:42 Speaker 11 Then tell us—we don’t know about that.

54:45 Speaker 2 Actually, I set up the... I was Moishe’s shliach for the school in Upper Nazareth.

54:51 Speaker 11 Just a second—let’s get the order straight. So you came to Israel as a bochur—

54:55 Speaker 2 I had already started while I was a bochur.

54:55 Speaker 11 You came as a bochur studying at Tomchei Temimim, and then you started working with Moshe Slonim.

54:59 Speaker 2 Yes. And then—

55:01 Speaker 11 Moishe was in charge of the school network then.

55:03 Speaker 2 Moishe ran the network, yes. He brought me in, and I brought along a team of two more bochurim, and we started setting up schools. There was a large wave of immigrants then, from Georgia and from... So I spent about two or three months going around Upper Nazareth, boruch Hashem. We opened a school in an apartment with about three classrooms, on the fourth floor. Later we opened four apartments on one floor. Then things grew gradually, until Itche Ginsburg came to take over from me. I wasn’t the principal; I was just an activist. And we opened a school in Or Yehuda. I don’t know what became of it afterward. Then I traveled while I was still a bochur. Now, here was the situation: Moshe Slonim was telling me, “We need you here.” But on the other hand, I wanted to stay with the Rebbe for a while. So I asked the Rebbe whether to accept that offer, which would mean I had no choice but to come right back after Yud Shvat. This was Yud Shvat.

56:00 Speaker 11 You traveled for Yud Shvat.

56:01 Speaker 2 I left for Yud Shvat, and I wanted to stay until Adar, until the wedding.

56:05 Speaker 11 Mm-hmm.

56:05 Speaker 2 That was when the wedding would be. So why should I rush? But on the other hand, if Moshe was saying, “You traveled for Yud Shvat; now come back. You’re working, we need you”—so I asked the Rebbe whether to accept the offer. And it’s interesting, because on 19 Shvat, throughout all the sichos, I was standing directly in front of the Rebbe, and everything was about helping the immigrants who were arriving, and saving lives, and—

56:29 Speaker 11 Was that in 5742 or 5743?

56:31 Speaker 2 It was 5743, 19 Shvat, and that was exactly what I was involved in. I felt the Rebbe was speaking to me: Come on, get going—what are you looking for here? Then the Rebbe wrote to me, “At present, friends understand that in the Holy Land...” And that completely undid me.

56:47 Speaker 11 You sent the Rebbe your question in a letter, not in yechidus.

56:49 Speaker 2 Yes, in a letter. No, because if the answer is yes, I’ll go into yechidus and travel; if not, I’ll go into yechidus before the wedding. I remember that whole Shabbos farbrengen on 19 Shvat. The Rebbe was speaking as though he was talking to me, looking at me: go, get moving, get to work. And he said, “Now friends from the Holy Land should come and advise you.” So I also spoke with Chadakov. Chadakov told me, “Listen, you don’t need to travel to the Holy Land for that, to consult with them or send a message. If you sent tickets to three friends so they could come here, that would be fine too. It isn’t the Holy Land itself; it’s the friends from the Holy Land.” There were a lot of guests here from the Holy Land. Friends. Right, so Klimansky was there, Reuven Dunin, and a few teachers from the network, and so on.

57:34 Speaker 11 Who had come for 19 Shvat.

57:35 Speaker 2 They came for Yud Shvat. Yes, they were unanimous: go, fly out immediately. Certainly. What’s the question? I went into yechidus, saying I was going. Because Moshe Slonim had sent telegrams to the secretariat: “Come.” So Chadakov had told me to consult the Israelis here. After all, this was something they understood... Then in yechidus, the Rebbe began like this: “Not that way. [unclear] Not that way. This isn’t something that can be decided from here. Travel across the ocean, see what they offer you, and see whether you’re suited to it.” I had written all about how I was suited to it, and Moshe Slonim was waiting for me, and everything was fine. That left me... I don’t know. I was confused throughout the flight, really. Why was I going if the Rebbe didn’t think I was suited to it? In short, I arrived and I understood. There had been complete confusion in the network, the whole plan fell through, and they simply didn’t offer me the position anymore. The Rebbe had already seen that, so—

58:37 Speaker 11 In other words, the Rebbe had actually said that this wasn’t something that could be decided from here.

58:41 Speaker 2 Yes.

58:41 Speaker 11 And it turned out that when you got there, it really couldn’t.

58:42 Speaker 2 That’s true. Chadakov may also have been right: bring three people from the Holy Land to consult with them. But in this particular case—

58:50 Speaker 11 Not the people who were there themselves.

58:51 Speaker 2 Yes, yes.

58:54 Speaker 11 What else did the Rebbe say about the wedding in yechidus?

58:57 Speaker 2 Blessings, blessings. The Rebbe went on at such length with the blessings. He said I should advance to a better level—a better level before the wedding, a better level after the wedding, a better level in my personal life, a better level in communal work. The length of the blessings, in such a—

59:17 Speaker 11 Personal way.

59:18 Speaker 2 Very personal, and so heartfelt. You felt as though he was accompanying you, he was...

59:27 Speaker 11 You arrived, got married in the Holy Land, and—

59:29 Speaker 2 I got married in the Holy Land.

59:29 Speaker 11 The job didn’t work out.

59:30 Speaker 2 No, and then I started working here in Rishon.

59:33 Speaker 11 At the yeshiva.

59:33 Speaker 2 At the yeshiva. Yes, yes, yes. And of course, when I started working in Rishon, Rabbi Yechezkel Lipsker had been here before me, and Yechiel Milo arrived, and every Chabadnik was a shliach. We sat down and, thank G-d, did things. There was a period when I gave bar mitzvah classes to seventh-graders in every public school in Rishon. I took Maimon Nachmo, [unclear], who would come with the pictures. He photographed all the classes. All the seventh-graders—the girls and the boys—received tefillin. Afterward they went to the Kosel. Once a week I brought in speakers and paid for it. That whole organization didn’t exist yet. And of course, when the Rebbe began the Shabbos-candle campaign, I immediately brought girls from the seminary and distributed Shabbos candles to all the schools—

1:00:29 Speaker 11 Shabbos candles to—

1:00:30 Speaker 2 They went into all the schools, yes. They went in, spoke, and distributed candles. I remember Shavuos was our holiday. I would bring fifty bochurim from the yeshiva, put mattresses upstairs in the yeshiva and provide food for them, and they would go out and—

1:00:45 Speaker 11 At the yeshiva here in Rishon—

1:00:46 Speaker 2 At the yeshiva in Rishon, yes. We would make a procession; back then we had a Shavuos procession. The yeshiva bochurim, some of the others, and them. On Friday night I would send them out to Ramat Eliyahu, and they would spread out among all the shuls. On Shabbos day they were here—

1:01:03 Speaker 11 In the city center.

1:01:04 Speaker 2 In the city center in the afternoon, yes. The next day they even went to Shikun Hamizrach. And once Shavuos and Shabbos came together, and the whole group went to shuls in Ness Ziona too. It was something. I remember those days. Yossel Segal was a bochur who came; Rali Alperin [unclear] came still wearing his uniform, before he... This was at the beginning of the 5730s [unclear]. Everyone here felt he had to do something, because you’d been sent here, and until you created—

1:01:36 Speaker 11 There was already a Chabad shul?

1:01:38 Speaker 2 The Chabad shul was here long before us. The Chabad shul was—

1:01:41 Speaker 11 Rabbi Yeshuai, but—

1:01:41 Speaker 2 Rabbi Yeshuai, yes.

1:01:42 Speaker 11 No, but now that you young married men had arrived, did you have a Chabad minyan too?

1:01:46 Speaker 2 No, that wasn’t an option at all. We joined the one there. After all, we were only three or four young married men.

1:01:52 Speaker 11 No, there were other older Chabadniks.

1:01:53 Speaker 2 No, no, not then. Yankel Yosef Raskin was there, and Reb Moishe Tzvi Alperin—he was the son-in-law of... yes, the yeshiva. There was a yeshiva here with a minyan, and there was the shul. So we tried, you know, to bring a bit of Chabad into the shul. After all, the congregation weren’t all Lubavitchers; they were all—

1:02:11 Speaker 11 It was already called Chabad, but they couldn’t—

1:02:13 Speaker 2 It was called Chabad; there was a Chabad sign. They would always say to [unclear], “If we leave, you won’t have a minyan here.” And Yankel Yosef would shout, “The walls are Chabad!” The walls here are Chabad. We were very careful about that, until little by little we introduced the—

1:02:30 Speaker 11 Customs and everything.

1:02:31 Speaker 2 Yes. It was a very, very diverse congregation. Rabbi Yeshuai brought everyone close. Yes, they all remember Rabbi Yeshuai fondly. All the stories they used to tell about Rabbi Yeshuai... It was a very—

1:02:45 Speaker 11 He passed away much earlier, in the fifties, that’s...

1:02:47 Speaker 2 Yes, but they lived with those memories all that time...

1:02:52 Speaker 11 So when did you travel to the Rebbe after the wedding?

1:02:55 Speaker 2 After the wedding, I went again a year later, and since then I’ve kept traveling, several times a year. That was as part of the—

1:03:09 Speaker 11 Yes, but what was the response? Did you go into yechidus with your wife? Did you go in afterward—

1:03:13 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. We went into yechidus together many times, and other yechidusen too. We were there during the period when the Rebbe had the heart condition.

1:03:21 Speaker 11 In 5738 [unclear]?

1:03:21 Speaker 2 In 5738 [unclear]. And that was a tremendous shock, because it was my wife’s first visit. And then suddenly they told us... We knew... They said the Rebbe wouldn’t—

1:03:35 Speaker 11 Wouldn’t receive people for yechidus for twenty-one days.

1:03:38 Speaker 2 Fine, so we decided we would go home. We went to the East Side to buy undershirts. You could only get them on the East Side; there was nothing in the whole neighborhood. There wasn’t a single store there that closed on Shabbos; they were all open. My wife and I were in a store buying a few things, when suddenly Tzvi Lider passed by, stuck his head inside and shouted to me, “There’s yechidus tonight!” I got chills. I looked at my wife, and he was already running ahead to the bus. We left the shirts on the counter and ran. And I heard that the Rebbe had argued with the doctors. The Rebbe said, “They’re my guests.” He promised the doctors he would only say goodbye. In short, of course we ran to the mikveh, got dressed, and so on. We were in the other room, and everyone was—

1:04:32 Speaker 12 Waiting.

1:04:33 Speaker 2 Waiting tensely. And Leibel [unclear] was there with the... The Rebbe, of course, had—

1:04:38 Speaker 12 Monitoring equipment.

1:04:39 Speaker 2 Monitoring equipment attached, and the other room was where they watched the readings. They were watching to see whether, G-d forbid, anything changed—

1:04:46 Speaker 12 On screens? They could see on screens whether there was—

1:04:48 Speaker 2 Yes. If, G-d forbid, anything changed, they would stop it immediately. In the end, people went in. The organizing committee didn’t know what to tell us: write a note, don’t write one—but don’t write any requests, not even “O my G-d of abundant mercies.”

1:04:59 Speaker 12 Just names.

1:05:00 Speaker 2 Just names. So the note wouldn’t be big. I wrote a little note like this.

1:05:05 Speaker 12 How did people go in? Each person alone, or each family?

1:05:06 Speaker 2 No, the Rebbe sat by the door, and people went past in a line.

1:05:09 Speaker 12 They went past as part of that procession.

1:05:11 Speaker 2 Yes, the procession. The Rebbe sat by the door, and [unclear], the shliach, went first with his wife. Then came my wife and me.

1:05:19 Speaker 12 Both of them, [unclear], with the doctor.

1:05:19 Speaker 2 Yes, both of them. [Unclear] went in, and then my wife and I came. So the Rebbe made this gesture.

1:05:27 Speaker 12 Let’s explain it for people who can’t see: the Rebbe made a gesture—

1:05:29 Speaker 2 Yes, like this.

1:05:30 Speaker 12 With his hand.

1:05:31 Speaker 2 Yes. I went—

1:05:32 Speaker 12 Like a question mark.

1:05:33 Speaker 2 And my wife was over here. So Leibel—

1:05:36 Speaker 12 You were standing next to each other.

1:05:37 Speaker 2 So Leibel explained that we were a couple. She may have been walking near me, but not right beside me. Then the Rebbe made the gesture again.

1:05:44 Speaker 12 Again, a question-mark gesture with his hand.

1:05:45 Speaker 2 Like this. I came with my note; after all, they had told us to write only a note. So the Rebbe said, “Are they all on so little a note?” The whole family is on the note? The organizing committee had told us not to make big notes—small ones, just names.

1:05:57 Speaker 12 Mm-hmm.

1:05:58 Speaker 2 So we had even made the paper small. And he asked, “Are they all on so little a note?” Everyone is on...

1:06:03 Speaker 12 Who did he mean?

1:06:05 Speaker 2 No, such a small note, with the whole family on it. How did you fit everyone in?

1:06:08 Speaker 12 By then you already had a few children, I gather.

1:06:11 Speaker 2 We already had children, yes. And besides that, you write your parents and so on, yes.

1:06:15 Speaker 12 Oh, the extended family.

1:06:16 Speaker 2 Yes, it was as if the Rebbe was saying, “What’s this little note?” And then the Rebbe gave everyone two sentences. Yaankele was there; he went on his way. Oh, Chassidei Shaar, I think. Then the Rebbe raised his eyes and said to me, “Good news.” Nobody got three sentences, only me. It was Simchas Torah. Eight months later, the shliach to Sofia was born.

1:06:44 Speaker 12 Yossi.

1:06:45 Speaker 2 Yes. So she was in her first month. There was no way we could have known; we hadn’t written to the Rebbe about it. As soon as I came out, I told her, “We don’t need to go to a doctor, we don’t need medical tests. We have good news.” What’s interesting is that some twenty-odd years later—twenty years, no, thirteen years later—when we were also there for Tishrei, there was a bar mitzvah yechidus. It was on the same day, Rosh Cheshvan, the very same day.

1:07:14 Speaker 12 5751.

1:07:15 Speaker 2 Then he went past. Afterward I came out—he had gone out after me—and he called out after me, “Dad, what happened?” “The Rebbe told me, ‘Good news.’” It was on that very day that I received the good news of your birth. These little things.

1:07:31 Speaker 12 There are so many things and nuances we don’t know about. We only see fragments.

1:07:33 Speaker 2 Nuances—you don’t understand a thing. And also, you see, the yechidus was on Rosh Cheshvan because it was at the end of the... I was there with my wife, and I went past after she did. This was at dollars. The Rebbe gave her a dollar and said to her, “A complete recovery for the whole family.”

1:07:51 Speaker 12 At dollars.

1:07:52 Speaker 2 At dollars: “A complete recovery for the whole family.” I have it; I wrote it down. Well, G-d willing, we hadn’t asked for that. Nobody was ill, baruch Hashem. It was Cheshvan. How long afterward was it? About thirty years later, or something like that. Maybe forty years later.

1:08:12 Speaker 12 No.

1:08:12 Speaker 2 On Rosh Cheshvan, I had a kidney transplant—on that very day, Rosh Cheshvan. So maybe the Rebbe was sending a message about that too. Yes, you see, there are so many... Once I gave the Rebbe a lot of nachas when I brought him the Tanya. What happened? Tell us. The first one we printed. Tell it from the beginning. We don’t know the story. The Rebbe spoke about printing Tanyas on Chanukah 5744. Chanukah 5744. 5744. He asked for a Tanya to be printed in every place. He had spoken a little about it before that, and said that if—if possible, it should be ready by 24 Teves, or at least by Purim Katan. At least by Purim Katan. But the Rebbe very much wanted a Tanya by 24 Teves. Back then there wasn’t yet a van that could drive around and print them at the press of a button, so I went to a printing house here. In short, I gathered, I think, ten people; each one paid for fifty books. We went to the printer and brought the material to him, and it was very complicated. Then we had to take it all from there to a bindery, and... Anyway, the Tanya from Rishon LeZion was finished before 24 Teves. It was the only one in the whole country and in the whole world. In other words, at that point it was the only Tanya. After 24 Teves, all the other Tanyas started appearing like popcorn, but ours was the only one then. I remember 24 Teves was a Friday. It arrived on Wednesday. I sent Amram Malka to Nachlas Har Chabad; there was a Russian bookbinder there who bound two copies. And Stutman [?]. It was important, but there was something else going on. At the time, I had a sick child. I mean, no—nobody would have thought of traveling just for this, making a special trip to bring it to the Rebbe. That wasn’t something I could do. The Rebbe had asked for it to arrive by 24 Teves, fine. At that time—at that time I was in a difficult situation with my sick child. He was still barely

1:10:19 Speaker 2 a year old. He had heart problems. They didn’t give him much of a chance, and in fact he passed away within the year. So I said to my wife, “I have a Tanya; I have something to bring. I can go to the Rebbe.” You know what I mean? With the Tanya. I—I would be arriving with something. Thursday night, I set out. Now, I meant to go for a day or two and give it to the Rebbe. Well, I took the Tanya, but there was another problem: I couldn’t leave my wife alone even for two days. With the child, you couldn’t sleep for two hours without having to jump up. Sometimes he was hospitalized, sometimes not. Every night was—he wasn’t fully well. That entire year, he really wasn’t. Um. Well, I took my bag, bought a ticket, and went to the airport. I was standing in line. “Sir, yes, there’s a flight tonight, but you can only come back in a week,” because that was the kind of ticket it was. Otherwise, there weren’t any seats available earlier either. And I couldn’t leave them. In short, I went upstairs to see the manager—this was still the old terminal. No, that was the ticket. And besides, they told me it was a waste of time looking, because everything was booked. So there I was with my bag. We didn’t have wheeled suitcases yet. I was wandering around, and... someone from Anash was there, who had happened to come to meet a family in the middle of the night. I was about to take a taxi home. First of all, it was a little heartbreaking, you understand? But what could I do? I simply couldn’t... He didn’t know what was going on. We weren’t particularly close, but he came over. “You don’t look quite right to me.” You look lost. “You don’t look like you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, uh...” I don’t know. Suddenly I told him, “Listen, I want to go to the Rebbe. I have a sick child, and I can’t leave him.” I kept telling him the story, and he...

1:12:16 Speaker 2 He said to me, “I don’t understand. A chossid has a ticket in his hand, he’s going to the Rebbe, and he’s debating whether to go?” With such simplicity, he said, “A chossid has a ticket in his hand and his bag in his hand, he’s at the airport, and he’s debating whether to go to the Rebbe?” That moment I jumped back into line. Never mind—I didn’t sleep all night. I knew what I was going to do: I’d give it to the secretariat. What had I come for? Was I going to hand it to the Rebbe myself? How would that work? Anyway, I got up in the morning, ran to the mikveh, and came back. The Rebbe was at the mikveh just then. It was Friday, 18 Teves. The Rebbe went to—on Fridays the Rebbe didn’t usually go to the Ohel [?], but that Friday he did. It was winter, and there wasn’t a soul in the little courtyard. I stood there near the elevator. The Rebbe would come; we’d see what happened. I was there. The door closed, and the Rebbe came in, with Leibel behind him. Leibel gestured at me like this. He understood: “Does he know you’re here?” If I was standing by the elevator when the Rebbe came in and I didn’t run away—everyone used to run away. Nobody would just stand there. He gestured at me: absolutely not. He motioned with his hand. But, but, but—since you can’t see it, I’ll explain. He motioned for me not to dare approach. Like this, very sternly. Well, the truth is that even if I had wanted to run away, I couldn’t have, because the Rebbe was already there. Yes. Fine. And that wasn’t why I’d come. As the Rebbe passed, I handed him the Tanya. The Rebbe turned toward me, and I said, “This is the—this is the Tanya, the Tanya we printed in Rishon LeZion.” The Rebbe turned to me, opened his hand, and exclaimed, “Oh!” Out loud, almost a shout: “Oh! It’s arrived just in time. You really came at exactly the right time.”

1:14:14 Speaker 2 That “Oh!”—it was almost as though the Rebbe had been to the mikveh, was going into his room and would soon be leaving for the Ohel, and he wanted to take along a Tanya that had been printed, but didn’t have one—and here it arrived at that very moment. That’s how the Rebbe said, “Oh!” But it wasn’t just an ordinary “oh.” That “oh” was an “Oh!” Really, almost an “Oh!” As if to say, “I’ve been waiting for this.” “It’s arrived just in time.” Exactly on time. “You really came at exactly the right time.” So, fine, I thought, of course, uh... Then the Rebbe stood facing me and began talking. But I wasn’t there mentally; I have no idea what he said, and he spoke for minutes on end. I was, uh, uh—I was confused, and I also wanted to catch the Rebbe to ask for a bracha for the child. I was afraid the Rebbe would go into his room before I could—anyway, I don’t know, so don’t ask questions. He kept talking, standing right in front of me and talking, and it’s hard for me even to estimate how long he spoke. Well, that’s what happened. There’s nothing about it in the diaries? There was nobody there. No diaries, no cameras, nothing. I don’t even remember whether Leibel was still there. I think I couldn’t see him anymore. So you didn’t actually say anything to the Rebbe about the child? Oh, yes. Before the Rebbe left, I managed to say, “I’d like to ask for a bracha for the...” The Rebbe said, “Well, I’m on my way to the Ohel.” “I’m on my way to the Ohel. Write down his name for me, and I’ll take it with me—his name.” So I said to the Rebbe, “He doesn’t have a name yet,” because he hadn’t had a bris yet. The Rebbe said, “Then speak with your wife and decide on a name.” That was something new... And for me, you know, with my Hungarian background, it was quite a startling idea. So I began to open...

1:16:09 Speaker 2 My hand, like—can you do such a thing? The Rebbe tells you to be quiet, so what then...? I was like that. So the Rebbe said to me, “Then write it down. Here’s a child—don’t you want to listen to what you’re told? Write it down.” I... Well, the Rebbe went in, and of course I immediately ran to find a phone, to speak to my wife and agree on a name. That was a whole story in itself. You had to get nine dollars in quarters. Three minutes cost nine dollars—three dollars a minute—and you had to feed the coins in. Now, where do you get that many quarters except at the bank? The bank was closed. In short, it took me a while to get them, and I started—

1:16:46 Speaker 13 Meaning, before Shabbos began over there—on Friday.

1:16:49 Speaker 2 No, I hadn’t gone to the Ohel yet.

1:16:51 Speaker 13 No, I mean in Israel.

1:16:51 Speaker 2 In Israel, yes.

1:16:52 Speaker 13 Before Shabbos began.

1:16:53 Speaker 2 Yes, it took some time, and we didn’t even have a phone at home yet, only at the neighbor’s. Sometimes you’d call, and—sorry, I’m starting over—it simply took time to sort it out. I called and spoke to my wife. Okay, we agreed on a name, Aharon [unclear], of course. That was it. I went upstairs, and as I was going up the stairs, a bochur saw me: “Salmon, Leibel is looking for you.” I told him, “Fine, I’ll get there. What, does he want to give me a talking-to? I know he’ll give me a talking-to. I know him. We’ve been told off plenty of times already.” And I kept walking. Then, upstairs in the corridor: “Salmon, Leibel is looking for you. He needs you.” I said, “I know he needs me. I’m coming. Don’t worry. What do you want me to do, run?” I went into the secretariat, and Leibel jumped up and said, “Where have you been? The Rebbe is waiting for you. The Rebbe wants to leave for the Ohel, and he said he would take the note—”

1:17:50 Speaker 13 Wow.

1:17:50 Speaker 2 And the Rebbe is sitting there waiting for you.

1:17:51 Speaker 13 Waiting for you to bring the note.

1:17:53 Speaker 2 The Rebbe isn’t leaving. He said he’d take it with him, so he’s waiting for the note. That, that, that...

1:18:03 Speaker 13 [unclear] there with the daled.

1:18:05 Speaker 2 Nun-daled, yes.

1:18:11 Speaker 13 Did the Rebbe refer to the Tanya again afterward, for...?

1:18:14 Speaker 2 No, I—ah, about the Tanya, I don’t know. No, not yet. But you could see how much it mattered that he take the Tanya of [unclear] with him to the Ohel. Boruch Hashem, we had the privilege, once, of bringing the Rebbe joy. There are, boruch Hashem, more stories, all kinds of stories. Certainly.

1:18:38 Speaker 13 A story.

1:18:38 Speaker 2 You surely know about Rabbi Azran’s dream.

1:18:41 Speaker 13 I don’t know anything.

1:18:42 Speaker 2 You don’t?

1:18:43 Speaker 13 I don’t know anything. Tell the story.

1:18:47 Speaker 2 It’s a dream that Leibel said the Rebbe confirmed had happened. This was also many years ago, when I still didn’t have a phone at home. Rabbi Azran was—Azran had come from Kiryat, Kiryat, Kiryat Malachi.

1:19:04 Speaker 13 Rabbi Yosef Azran.

1:19:05 Speaker 2 Yosef Azran from Kiryat Malachi.

1:19:06 Speaker 13 He was my rabbi here too.

1:19:10 Speaker 2 Yes. So an hour before Shabbos, I’m at the mikveh. Rabbi Azran says, “Rabbi Avraham, where have you been? Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you since this morning.”

1:19:18 Speaker 13 Meaning, he came to the mikveh.

1:19:19 Speaker 2 He came to the mikveh at—let’s put it this way. In short, his wife had been in the delivery room for two days already, about to give birth. It was very complicated. And that night he had a dream. He told me outside the mikveh that he’d dreamed he was in a large house with many chassidim. He asked someone, “Where are we?” And the chossid said, “Don’t you know? We’re in the home of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.” There was a little balcony, and a chossid came out, some kind of attendant, and said, “Rabbi Azran has been called in to the Rebbe.” That was in the dream. He took his bag and went in. Then the Rebbe said to him, “Rabbi Azran, what about your mezuzos?” He said, “What do you mean? I bought them from an expert sofer, and I was very careful.” The Rebbe said, “Let’s see.” And in the dream he had mezuzos in his bag. You don’t ask questions in a dream. So he took out a mezuzah, and there was some defect in it. I wrote it down. It’s a shame I didn’t prepare—I could have shown you the exact defect, something involving a letter that had been partially erased. Then the Rebbe asked him, “What’s this, Rabbi Azran?” He started arguing with the Rebbe. He said, “There may still be halachic authorities who permit it.” And the Rebbe said, “Then let’s see the second one.” He took out another mezuzah, and this I remember: the lamed. In short, it had no head; there was a blot at the top. In other words, there was no vav and kaf—just a blot, not a letter at all. There was a little more of it at the bottom, but what was that? He stood there stunned. Then the Rebbe said to him, “Rabbi Azran, check your mezuzos.” He said, “What should I do? I’m in Rishon; what should I do?” The Rebbe said, “Go to Avraham Salmon. He’ll check your mezuzos for you.”

1:21:23 Speaker 14 That’s what the Rebbe told him in the dream.

1:21:24 Speaker 2 That’s what he told him in the dream. He woke up, went back to the hospital, and returned, and now it was an hour before Shabbos. I told him, “Well, we can’t do it now; it’s almost Shabbos.” He still wanted to go to the hospital for Shabbos. He said, “Okay, after Shabbos I’ll make Havdalah and come over.” On Motzaei Shabbos I got home and had barely made Havdalah. I still didn’t have a phone; I used the neighbors’ phone. Rabbi Alperin was my neighbor. There’s a knock at the door: a phone call. Rabbi Azran: “Rabbi Avraham, Rabbi Avraham, come! Come quickly, come, come!” And what rain there was. In short, I arrived, and I’d never seen him like that. He had a long house, with the living room over there and a corridor running along it. He was simply a blaze of fire, a burning torch. He ran from here to there and back again. He didn’t even look at me. “Rabbi Avraham, look.” In short, he had no patience. He began taking down the mezuzos. The first mezuzah was exactly as he had described to me at the mikveh, and the second had exactly that lamed with the blot. Exactly.

1:22:30 Speaker 14 What he had seen in the dream.

1:22:31 Speaker 2 Exactly. But it wasn’t only that he’d seen it in the dream—he’d told me about it. He’d told me at the mikveh. He had described those two things exactly. He was shaking all over. He was already afraid to go on taking them down. In short, we took them down and checked them. He nearly collapsed.

1:22:44 Speaker 14 You witnessed the story: he had the dream, and you saw that—

1:22:47 Speaker 2 He had the dream, and he told me he’d had it.

1:22:48 Speaker 14 And on Motzaei Shabbos you saw it with him.

1:22:49 Speaker 2 And I arrived on Motzaei Shabbos, and that was what was there. Well, afterward he said that apparently, when he moved house, he’d put up other mezuzos in the meantime. In short, it was astonishing. Afterward he came to me and asked, “Who is the Rebbe’s representative here in Israel?” Rabbi Futeras had just arrived then. I told him, “The Rebbe doesn’t have a representative here. There’s a prominent chossid here, one of the...”

1:23:16 Speaker 14 This story was at the beginning of 5735.

1:23:19 Speaker 2 Yes, the middle. Not the beginning.

1:23:20 Speaker 14 The middle of 5735.

1:23:21 Speaker 2 Yes. “There’s no representative here, but he’s one of the prominent chassidim, one of...” “Then come with me to Kfar Chabad. I want him to come and be the sandek, because this bris belongs to the Rebbe,” he said. Well, nebach. In the end, the child passed away, and there was no bris. He had wanted to name the child Menachem Mendel Yosef Yitzchak for the Rebbe, because Yosef Yitzchak—he had still been in Morocco, he still... Afterward he told me he couldn’t rest, so he went to three mekubalim, among them Rabbi Kaduri, and told them the story. Rabbi Kaduri told him that because the Lubavitcher Rebbe gives himself over completely—there was Mivtza Tefillin, Mivtza Mezuzah; he gives himself over to these things, including mezuzah—therefore, a rectification that must come down into the world concerning mezuzah comes down through an angel in the form of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. That’s what Kaduri told him. So I told him yes, we had to publicize it right away. A few days later he said to me, “Avraham, it should be publicized, but without my name.” I told him, “But without a name, there’s no story. It’s just...” Ah, because by then he was beginning to—before he started his work with the bnei Torah there.

1:24:40 Speaker 15 [unclear], [unclear].

1:24:41 Speaker 2 [unclear], bnei Torah. Yes, bnei Torah, and it would interfere with that. I said, “Okay.” Only after he passed away did I begin to publicize it. Ah, there are more stories. What can I tell you?

1:24:58 Speaker 15 When did you start working with STaM?

1:25:02 Speaker 2 The truth is, when I was still a bochur.

1:25:05 Speaker 15 No, that’s as you told us, but later on, in a more sustained way.

1:25:07 Speaker 2 Later it became more developed. Right after my wedding, I started traveling.

1:25:11 Speaker 15 You wrote to the Rebbe and received answers.

1:25:12 Speaker 2 I received answers from the Rebbe all the time. Yes. The Rebbe never let me move away from it. I went in this direction, I went in that direction, and all the while it was: this, this—this is your path.

1:25:31 Speaker 15 After [unclear], did you have yechidus again?

1:25:35 Speaker 2 Whenever I came, I went in for yechidus. Yes, yes, yes, every time. Sometimes, if I came, I went in three times in one year.

1:25:46 Speaker 15 When you came in the middle of the year, did you go in then too?

1:25:48 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, guests would always come in. After that, the general yechidus began. I remember there was an uproar about the general yechidus, and the Rebbe explained that it was greater than a private yechidus, because you receive all the blessings. There’s a story about one of those yechidus sessions. I had—I have a friend from my yeshiva days, a learned Jew, a very... And he’s the deputy to the Rebbe of [unclear] there. It doesn’t matter where.

1:26:22 Speaker 15 One of the Chassidic courts.

1:26:24 Speaker 2 One of the Chassidic courts, and you know the town too. And... he holds the Rebbe in high regard; he studied in 5718. I think he probably holds the Rebbe in higher regard than his own Rebbe. He says, “Listen, Rabbi, there’s something...” He had a question. He told me that he was once with the Rebbe in 5722, and the Rebbe gave a hadran at a siyum. The Rebbe brought up a point from the Alter Rebbe, and then brought the Tzemach Tzedek, who seemed, on the face of it, to disagree with the Alter Rebbe on that point. It sounds as though he doesn’t, but it doesn’t fit. Would a grandson disagree with his grandfather? So the Rebbe tries to reconcile the matter: perhaps this way, perhaps that’s what he meant. He works through it in the course of the discussion. Then the Rebbe stops and says, perhaps we could say that the Tzemach Tzedek simply hadn’t seen it; it had escaped his notice, he simply made a mistake and hadn’t seen that point. That’s why there’s a mistake here. Then the Rebbe says, “As is known, among our Rebbeim there is no such thing as a mistake.” So my friend asks me, “Does the Rebbe rank above Moshe Rabbeinu? Moshe Rabbeinu also made a mistake. So why can’t the Lubavitcher Rebbe make a mistake? He’s Moshe Rabbeinu of the generation—fine. [unclear] make a mistake.” I told him, “Listen, I don’t know how to explain it to you. I don’t have to know how to explain everything. For me, if the Rebbe says there’s no mistake, that’s enough.” But then I happened to travel to the Rebbe. It was on [unclear] Tammuz, and that’s when the yechidus began. At first it was in Gan Eden Hatachton, and later it moved to the small zal. I wouldn’t say his question—whether the Rebbe could make a mistake or not—was troubling me. But he had asked a question and I hadn’t answered it. What do I know? Anyway, we went in and waited for yechidus, those of us who were traveling home. There were two lines, one of men and one of women—twenty or thirty men, perhaps a little more, and thirty women.

1:28:24 Speaker 2 The Rebbe sat at a small table. He came in through—around, through the women’s section [?]—sat down and gave a short sicha. Everyone handed over their pan, took a dollar, and I was first in line next to the Rebbe, right at the Rebbe’s table. So while I’m standing there, I can see everything up close. I’m holding on to the table, at the corner. The first woman in the women’s line was directly opposite me. She was an older Sephardic woman who had come from Israel, and her son, poor thing, had gotten caught up in something there in America, rachmana litzlan. She was crying and didn’t know what to do. She had come to America, was working as a cleaner, and she was crying and crying before the Rebbe came in. So we told her, “Well, this is exactly the place. The Rebbe will come in and give a blessing. When you leave, ask him. The Rebbe will give a blessing. Don’t worry.” Yes, yes, that was why she had come. Well, the Rebbe came in. It was quiet; there was a short blessing, [unclear], and then people began to leave, starting with her. Then Leibel brought the green cushion and began laying out the dollars. Leibel would get the dollars from the bank in bundles, so they had to be separated carefully. He would separate them and place them there for the Rebbe, dollar by dollar, so the Rebbe wouldn’t have to separate them himself and could give each person a dollar more quickly. It’s the green cushion you see in all the pictures of the Rebbe distributing dollars. There were always separated dollars on it. So she went forward and handed over her pan, and the Rebbe took a dollar from the table and gave it to her. She still hadn’t collected herself. She was quiet and took the dollar.

1:30:04 Speaker 3 Wait, you stayed to watch after—

1:30:05 Speaker 2 I didn’t stay. I was first in line. The women went out first.

1:30:08 Speaker 3 The women were first? The women went out first.

1:30:09 Speaker 2 The women went out first, and then the men. So I’m standing there, waiting for the women to leave. I’m next to the table, and I see her hand the Rebbe her note. The Rebbe gives her a dollar, just like that. He takes a dollar and hands it to her. But as the Rebbe is holding it, I can see it splitting at the top. They’re stuck together—it’s two dollars. I can see it plainly. I can see that she’s already holding two. And then, you know, I got annoyed with Leibel. Why hadn’t he separated them properly? The Rebbe wanted to give her a dollar. Right? He gives everyone a dollar, but here two dollars came into the Rebbe’s hand. Two. She was almost out, but at the door she remembered her problem. She turned around and burst into tears. “Rebbe, my son needs a blessing! My son, my son...” Then she calmed down a little, and the Rebbe said to her very gently, “Well, I gave him one too.” The Rebbe wasn’t speaking only to her; he was speaking to the fool standing off to the side who had thought there’d been a mistake.

1:31:17 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:31:18 Speaker 2 Yes.

1:31:22 Speaker 3 Did the Rebbe give special attention to the community here in Rishon? You gradually came together as a community.

1:31:27 Speaker 2 Yes. He always sent me a bottle for a farbrengen here. Yes, there was always a note with a blessing or things like that, and there were always replies. There were answers. It was really a Chabad shul, not a community. There wasn’t a community; the congregation was very... There weren’t that many [unclear] there either, and... The old established families of Rishon davened with us. All the founders and all the wealthy people and all the—

1:32:04 Speaker 3 The Ashkenazim who founded Rishon.

1:32:06 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes.

1:32:07 Speaker 3 Those who remained from [unclear].

1:32:09 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. There was actually a split here. When they founded it, there was one person who provided the... Old Shmotkin was here; he was Chabad, and then there were a few chassidim who came. By the way, the founders of Rishon came from Kremenchuk.

1:32:25 Speaker 3 Oh, really?

1:32:25 Speaker 2 So my son represents them there now. And they had a disagreement. What was the disagreement? On Friday night, they didn’t say Veshomru.

1:32:36 Speaker 3 Because they were chassidim.

1:32:38 Speaker 2 And the chassidim wanted to say Veshomru, while Chabad didn’t say Veshomru.

1:32:41 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:32:42 Speaker 2 In the end, that’s why they opened the Chassidim shul. There’s a shul on Pinsker Street, the Freiman shul. That was, so to speak, the first split in Rishon. Yes, because in Chabad they didn’t say Veshomru. But back then, who was the congregation here? There wasn’t... On Yom Kippur, I remember, they sold the aliyos. We said that whoever got an aliyah should take off his shoes, not go up to the Torah wearing shoes. Everyone came wearing shoes. Ah...

1:33:22 Speaker 3 Did you travel to the Rebbe with the children?

1:33:24 Speaker 2 I traveled with the children several times, yes. In practice, I’ll tell you, it was stressful. I traveled with the children three times, and it was very hard. And I count that to my credit; probably in that merit they became shluchim. It was hard, almost unbearably so. There was the expense, and there was being there for two or three weeks. We were there for Tishrei twice. But I remember I even argued here with—

1:33:55 Speaker 3 You’ll see in a moment.

1:33:56 Speaker 2 Not when they grew up—when they were still little children. It put them right into the thick of it. They didn’t want to budge. “Come on, let’s go buy something.” “No, no. The Rebbe will be coming out to the car soon; the Rebbe will be coming out...” And at three in the morning, my daughter got up and went to claim a place on Yom Kippur so she could...

1:34:26 Speaker 3 How did the Rebbe relate to the children who came? Do you remember?

1:34:29 Speaker 2 Yes, certainly, certainly. Well, it wasn’t a separate yechidus just for the children. But in yechidus, really, and especially in everything—and in letters too—the children were the... Once I went in, you know, and I was also a yeshiva principal, with this and that and everything on my shoulders. You go into yechidus and write two pages. And, thank G-d, I know how to phrase things. I wanted to cover another point here, and another matter, and perhaps this way, and if the opposite, then perhaps that way—two pages. Then at the end there was a little space left, and I wanted to ask for the Rebbe’s blessing for the children, that we should have nachas from them, and so on. The Rebbe read the whole letter. Then the Rebbe said, “The central point—the central point of your letter—is that you and your wife should raise your children.” The last two lines at the end were the central point.

1:35:22 Speaker 3 Meaning, everything you wrote about the yeshiva and all that—but this, this is what needs emphasis.

1:35:25 Speaker 2 The central point—and the innermost, most central point, I think—was that you should raise the children with nachas. And the Rebbe gave blessing after blessing after blessing concerning those two lines. “Regarding that, it’s worth consulting knowledgeable friends”; regarding the other things, [unclear]. I’m talking to you about—

1:35:48 Speaker 3 Meaning, all the communal activities and everything are secondary to—

1:35:51 Speaker 2 Communal activities are good, and earning a living is good, and everything else you need is good, but...

1:35:57 Speaker 3 The main thing is the nachas, the nachas and—

1:35:59 Speaker 2 Yes, thank G-d, thank G-d. Yes, there was always something surrounding the trips...

1:36:07 Speaker 3 People would come to you and write to the Rebbe.

1:36:10 Speaker 2 All the opponents.

1:36:11 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:36:12 Speaker 2 All the opponents.

1:36:12 Speaker 3 The whole Litvish community here.

1:36:13 Speaker 2 The whole Litvish community came, one by one. They came one by one, and one of them had a [unclear]—a child had been born to him. They would come to me before the trip. Yes, one man was embarrassed; he didn’t have children. He arrived just as I was already downstairs. I said to him, “So come on, write to the Rebbe.” All right, he took some sheet of paper he had—not a letter, nothing—and wrote his first and last name.

1:36:46 Speaker 3 Already on the way, it starts hitting me.

1:36:47 Speaker 2 I was already downstairs in the taxi. So I told him to write. I had arrived on Chol Hamoed. And... okay, I arrive on the Friday before Shabbos Bereishis.

1:36:58 Speaker 3 You’re returning.

1:36:59 Speaker 2 No, I arrive on the Friday before Shabbos Bereishis. I was there for Simchas Torah, then Shabbos Bereishis.

1:37:02 Speaker 3 Returning to Israel, you mean.

1:37:03 Speaker 2 No, not returning yet. Friday before Shabbos Bereishis, Shabbos Bereishis.

1:37:05 Speaker 3 Oh, you arrived at the Rebbe.

1:37:06 Speaker 2 I arrived.

1:37:07 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:37:08 Speaker 2 Anyway, I bring all the letters people had sent, and I go in. Then Leibel says to me, “Listen, you understand you’re bringing letters here on the eve of Shabbos? Do you see this crowd? Do you see the...? This isn’t...” I say to him, “What can I tell you?” “Okay, give them to me. I’ll bring this one in too. If there’s an answer, I’ll tell you, and...” In short, of all the letters, of course there’s an answer on that little note.

1:37:35 Speaker 3 On that Jew’s note.

1:37:36 Speaker 2 That Jew’s note—if you had seen the paper, it had been torn out of a spiral notebook. The Rebbe wrote to him, “Be meticulous about family purity; I will mention it at the Ohel.” Well, there weren’t yet any phone calls until I got back. He said, “Listen, maybe we should be more particular about this.”

1:38:02 Speaker 3 An observant Jew.

1:38:03 Speaker 2 Yes, maybe. “Listen, it doesn’t seem to me that if the Rebbe writes ‘be meticulous,’ he means nothing by it. It means there’s something worth looking into.” Okay, so they studied it, and studied it again, and decided to study it once more. Something about [unclear]. For almost a year—maybe a year or even longer—she hadn’t been going to the mikveh at the right time. She would always go on the sixth night, not the seventh. Not on the eighth night, but on the seventh—as though after six days. Because they had simply taken that for granted, and no one had talked about it. No one had raised the issue, right? And it was so straightforward that... he got chills.

1:38:41 Speaker 3 You simply didn’t have time.

1:38:43 Speaker 2 A little note like that, sitting on top. But another time I also got a telling-off from the Rebbe.

1:38:52 Speaker 3 Oh, you did?

1:38:52 Speaker 2 About that. It happened a few times. This, too, was on a Friday, the eve of Shabbos Bereishis. We were just talking about that Friday, so it reminded me. We would come for Simchas Torah and Shabbos Bereishis. The older chassidim would, of course, go to the Frierdiker Rebbe’s Ohel, but the younger ones—not that they wouldn’t, G-d forbid, but...

1:39:15 Speaker 3 It wasn’t the first thing they did.

1:39:17 Speaker 2 Exactly. I mean, that was the way it went. So on the Friday before Shabbos Bereishis, I’m davening downstairs in the morning, and in comes Sholom Feldman, who had also just arrived. He looks at me: “You arrived on Chol Hamoed too, right?” “Yes.” “So you haven’t been to the Frierdiker Rebbe’s Ohel yet.” I say, “No.” “Well, if you want, we’ve arranged a car. It has six seats, five are taken, and there’s one left. We’re leaving at twelve, if you want to come.” So I say, “Okay, I’ll try to make it by twelve.” He caught on that my “I’ll try” might mean I wouldn’t. He raised his hand like this—in 770 there were thousands of people, dozens of minyanim, the whole place bustling on that Friday before Shabbos Bereishis. He said to me, “You see this factory, this whole operation? The Frierdiker Rebbe had a hand in it too.”

1:40:10 Speaker 3 That’s what Sholom said.

1:40:11 Speaker 2 That’s what Sholom said. No, G-d forbid, it certainly wasn’t a matter of disrespect. But you know, you’re busy, you’re always busy, always... Okay. Anyway, I said I’d try. And I had actually come to ask a very, very complicated question that I had to get an answer to. We wanted to start something in the yeshivah, and I didn’t want to start without the Rebbe’s approval, a clear answer. So [unclear], and the whole thing was simply being held up. I went to Leibel on Friday—again, that’s why the story about Friday came to mind. So he says, “Listen, it’s Friday now. Yesterday was Simchas Torah; tomorrow is Shabbos.” Then he says, “You know what? Give me the letter and leave it here. We’ll see, we’ll see.” He says, “I go in at about twelve. Come at twelve, before I go in.” In short, they’re leaving for the Ohel at twelve, and at twelve I go to Leibel Groner. Of course, I was busy, so I didn’t go with them. I handed in the note and didn’t think much of it. I didn’t believe there would be an answer on a Friday. Then I come to daven after candle-lighting, and Leibel comes running after me. They were already living on Eastern Parkway then; they had an apartment there. He’s walking fast, overtakes me, looks over—“Your answer is ready. You have an answer. Come by on Motzaei Shabbos and...” I jumped and grabbed his hand. “What do you mean, Motzaei Shabbos? You can’t tell me that—there’s no way I’m waiting until Motzaei Shabbos.” I really grabbed him. He was in a hurry, startled, frightened. “Okay, come for a second, come for a second. Leave him alone.” In short, he takes out the note for me. On the note I had asked whether to do this particular thing, and if so, I requested the Rebbe’s blessing. It was obvious that it needed to be done; there was really no question about that. I just wanted

1:42:07 Speaker 2 the rest of it. So where I’d written “whether”—the Rebbe crossed out “whether,” circled it, and wrote in the margin, “It is surprising that the question is being asked.” And it said there, “And if so, I request the blessing of the Rebbe, Melech HaMoshiach.” The Rebbe circled that whole part too, drew an arrow to the margin, and wrote to me, “Hashem’s blessing; may He have mercy, and as above.” No “I will mention it at the Ohel,” no “blessing,” no “success.” “May it be with success”—a blessing for success. So this was the one letter in decades where I got no “I will mention it at the Ohel,” no “blessing,” nothing. “Hashem’s blessing; may He have mercy, and as above.”

1:42:49 Speaker 3 Wow. And you felt what had happened on Friday.

1:42:52 Speaker 2 What do you mean, “felt”? It was such a slap in the face. So on Sunday I went to the Ohel, and I promised that on Shabbos I would come especially to make amends.

1:43:03 Speaker 3 Wow.

1:43:05 Speaker 2 To make amends.

1:43:09 Speaker 3 When was the last time you were there before 27 Adar[?]?

1:43:12 Speaker 2 I was there on 27 Adar[?] itself. I was there for the first 27 Adar[?]. Yes, I was there for the first 27 Adar[?], and I was supposed to—I was then in the year of [unclear], and I quickly arranged it. He says, “You’ll daven. The Rebbe will help; you’ll daven Minchah.” You know, a Hungarian like that, you know, [unclear] an hour later. So he says, “I’ll daven tomorrow already. Right now I’ve already...” So no, someone who hadn’t davened couldn’t... I remember it; it was something else altogether. We were walking around downstairs. The rabbi had even brought the loudspeakers. The Rebbe still came down to the shul afterward. We ate upstairs, and then that mobile hospital arrived, and we still didn’t know what was happening. Then we stood on the—

1:44:02 Speaker 3 Path.

1:44:03 Speaker 2 Not on the path. There’s that fence at 770.

1:44:06 Speaker 3 Yes.

1:44:06 Speaker 2 That kind of fence—you can’t stand on it; you wobble.

1:44:09 Speaker 3 Yes, it isn’t flat.

1:44:11 Speaker 2 Then they made a sort of passageway, and they came out through there, and the elevator took everyone upstairs. It was something terrible, really terrible. But afterward, throughout that whole period, we received answers from the Rebbe.

1:44:28 Speaker 3 Yes, he’ll be back soon.

1:44:30 Speaker 2 He’ll be back, he’ll be back. No, and from the answers you could see that when the Rebbe wants to, he knows what...

1:44:36 Speaker 3 He always knows.

1:44:37 Speaker 2 No. For example, my daughter is a shlucha in Dnipro, Meir’s wife. You see, there were periods when the Rebbe would send out shluchim. Just pick someone out: “You go here, you go there.” Then there were periods when people already wanted to go themselves. They would suggest places to the Rebbe, and the Rebbe would choose one of them. Gradually, people began proposing their plans, and the Rebbe would agree, and... But as far as someone going on the Rebbe’s own initiative, my daughter was probably the last to go that way.

1:45:08 Speaker 3 How so?

1:45:09 Speaker 2 They proposed the shidduch with Meir, and he was already there in Dnipro as a bochur.

1:45:14 Speaker 3 Meir Stambler.

1:45:14 Speaker 2 Meir Stambler had already been there as a bochur, and that was his whole life: Dnipro and shlichus, shlichus. Back then, we didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of that city, Dnipro. Dnipro was something else. And Ukraine, for that matter—what did it even mean to travel? Fine, you went to Tel Aviv, maybe as far as Be’er Yaakov, but beyond that? For him, though, it was in his blood. Shlichus. And she had no connection to it. So she wrote to the Rebbe that this shidduch had been suggested, but he wanted only to stay there, while she wasn’t considering going there at all. Should she look into the shidduch? It seemed as though it wasn’t suitable, so why start looking into it? Leibel takes the page and reads it to the Rebbe: Should she look into it even though she won’t go and he won’t leave? Should she look into the shidduch? The Rebbe says yes, look into it. Fine, he has his answer. What happened next? He puts the page down and brings another one. But the Rebbe says, “Oh, no, I’m not finished with that yet.” So Leibel puts that page down and brings the question back. Now he needs to find something to ask the Rebbe that the Rebbe can answer yes or no. The question had been whether to look into the shidduch.

1:46:36 Speaker 3 The Rebbe answered yes.

1:46:36 Speaker 2 The Rebbe answered yes—that was the answer. So what more could he ask? Then he suddenly comes up with a question: “Does that mean that if this shidduch works out, they’ll go on shlichus? Is that what the Rebbe means?” And the Rebbe says aloud, “Yes! Yes!” That’s what he meant. In other words, on his own initiative—

1:46:57 Speaker 3 He had already sent them on shlichus before they’d even met.

1:47:02 Speaker 2 Yes. And there was also this Skver chossid, a friend of ours. Anyway, this man, Logboim, used to travel to Eretz Yisroel from there.

1:47:10 Speaker 3 Your friend, the Skver chossid who comes to Eretz Yisroel—Logboim.

1:47:15 Speaker 2 Our friend Logboim would come here every year. He’d arrive on Thursday and go back the next day. He lives in Skver and volunteers with a medical-aid organization there. He doesn’t work on Sundays, so he volunteers for half the day. He drives people wherever they need to go, takes them and brings them back. If medicine has to be picked up at the airport, he does that too. Many people came from abroad, and also from Eretz Yisroel and America. They needed surgery or something, and they wanted to go to the Rebbe for a bracha. They weren’t Chabad people. They asked for help, and he helped them. He would take them to the Rebbe and—

1:47:52 Speaker 3 As part of helping the sick.

1:47:54 Speaker 2 [unclear] really wanted to go to Eretz Yisroel, to Meron, to the Holy Land. So the Rebbe told him, “Fine, give this to tzedakah in Meron. Have a successful trip.” Fine, he’s in Meron, singing and dancing there, and he remembers: I have a mission from the Rebbe. So he takes a dollar out of his pocket and gives it to someone, some needy person. The Rebbe sent it. Then he thinks for a moment: This Rebbe is already eighty-six years old. He stands for hours, giving brachos and caring for the Jewish people. Maybe this is the place to pray for him a little. So he said two kapitlech Tehillim for the Rebbe. Afterward, he looked for a Chabad chossid and asked for the name of the Rebbe’s mother. Then he made a Mi Shebeirach for the Rebbe’s health. He saw the Rebbe many times, and after a while he happened to pass by the Rebbe again. As he passed, the Rebbe gave him a dollar, and a dollar for the patient he had brought with him too. Then the Rebbe called him back and asked, “Doesn’t a person have to tell his friend when he gives him a gift?” The Rebbe asks him that. Then the Rebbe says it again: “A person has to tell his friend when he gives him a gift.” Not as a question, but as a statement. The poor man looks at Leibel. He has no idea—

1:49:34 Speaker 4 What’s going on.

1:49:35 Speaker 2 So the Rebbe tells him, “[unclear] that you prayed for me. Why didn’t you tell me? In any case, here’s another dollar. Yasher koach for praying for me.” He says he went out onto Parkway convinced that he was confused, or had become a fantasist like all the Chabad people. “Everyone here is a fantasist,” he thought. “Everyone here is imagining things. This can’t be real.” After all, he hadn’t told anyone about the Tehillim he’d said in Meron. He hadn’t told anyone about the Mi Shebeirach. Nobody knew except him and Hakadosh Boruch Hu. But apparently that wasn’t it. Apparently the Rebbe had asked him—or hadn’t asked him? He was still wondering if he’d imagined it. He says he couldn’t rest. The next day he didn’t go to work. He went back to [unclear] and asked, “Can I see it?” “Yes, you can. What time were you there?” “Twelve fifteen.” So they fast-forwarded to twelve fifteen. He sees on the video the Rebbe telling him, “[unclear].” There’s a video. If there’s a video, the Rebbe really said it.

1:50:30 Speaker 4 Wow.

1:50:31 Speaker 2 If there hadn’t been a video, I wouldn’t have believed the Rebbe said it.

1:50:34 Speaker 4 There’s a video of it? Have you seen it?

1:50:36 Speaker 2 I haven’t seen it, but he told me he went back the next day. He said, “Once I saw the video, I understood I wasn’t just imagining it. It really happened. Until then, I thought I was.”

1:50:45 Speaker 4 Wow.

1:50:47 Speaker 2 What can you say?

1:50:47 Speaker 4 It’s like actual ruach hakodesh.

1:50:49 Speaker 2 Absolutely, absolutely. There was another interesting Jew, a well-known lawyer in Flatbush [?], an older man. He’s probably no longer alive; this was thirty or forty years ago. His father was a great scientist, a Torah-observant Jew with a beard, and he lived in France. He’d been working on something—I don’t know exactly what it was, a doctorate, a professorship, a Nobel Prize, [unclear]—but he’d spent months on it and had to submit it at the Sorbonne. I don’t know exactly what it was for, but he had spent months on it. So he took an overnight train to Paris and reached the Sorbonne around midday. He was tired and hungry and wanted something to eat. Suddenly he sees a young man in front of him, wearing a gray hat and sporting a black beard, a refined young man. We know it was the Rebbe, but he didn’t. He said, “Sholom aleichem. Are you from here? Do you know if there’s a shop or a café around here where I could get a drink? A grocery store where I could buy something?” So the Rebbe told him, “No, there’s nothing like that here. But if you like, I’m just going home for lunch now. Come with me and we’ll have lunch.” Well, he felt awkward accepting, but he was really hungry after a whole night on the train. He told this story, and they would tell it all the time in the family. They went down to the train. By the windows there was one seat facing another, with space in between. So they each took a seat and set off. On the train he had those pages with him—his work, the thing he’d put so much into. He kept leafing through it, imagining all sorts of things—

1:52:53 Speaker 5 His research.

1:52:54 Speaker 2 His research. It’s not that he was reading it. Here he wipes away a spot, there he checks that everything’s in order. It was his baby. As he’s leafing through it—you couldn’t really read it then—the Rebbe is sitting opposite him. After he turns a page, the Rebbe lifts himself up a little and gestures to him: “It seems there’s a mistake.” I think—

1:53:13 Speaker 5 He points to something—

1:53:14 Speaker 2 He points to a particular spot on a page. Even if he’d wanted to read it, first of all, he was sitting opposite him and couldn’t see it. Second, with the pages being flipped, there was no way to read it. And it wasn’t even his field. Just like that, casually: “It seems to me there’s a mistake here.” The man was older than the Rebbe, and he was thinking, Are you making fun of me? I spent months on this. He didn’t say that, but he did say, “Young man, don’t worry. There’s no mistake here. I’ve spent—”

1:53:43 Speaker 5 That’s what he says to the Rebbe.

1:53:43 Speaker 2 That’s what he tells the Rebbe: “I’ve spent months on every detail here.” He was offended, too. How could someone sitting opposite him say there was a mistake? But the Rebbe persisted. The Rebbe said, “It seems to me it would still be worth checking.” The man had no desire to check, but he felt awkward, since he was about to be a guest in the Rebbe’s home. So out of courtesy he said, “Okay,” sat down and started reading. Suddenly his heart sank. There was half a sentence there that made the result exactly the opposite of what he’d intended. In short, those three or four words, that half-sentence, would have undermined his entire research at precisely that point. He looked at it and realized something extraordinary was happening. They continued their journey and arrived at the house. As we said earlier, sometimes it’s the simple things that— They arrive at the house. The Rebbetzin, the young lady of the house, opens the door. Everything smells wonderful. The table is beautifully set, fit for royalty, for two diners. There’s a large plate, a soup bowl, then a smaller plate, salad, a main course, a glass and cutlery. In short, it was really—

1:55:05 Speaker 5 A set table.

1:55:05 Speaker 2 A royally set table—

1:55:06 Speaker 5 The finest royal—

1:55:07 Speaker 2 Royal manners, the finest manners. The host and two diners. Well, another guest arrived. Of course, she quickly ran over and set another place exactly the same way. A large plate. The poor man’s eyes were popping out of his head; he was hungry. He wanted to eat something already. He still didn’t see any food there—not a roll, not anything. Anyway, they brought out the first course: some kind of salad. A fresh vegetable salad. Fine, it wasn’t filling, but at least it was something. They ate salad and talked a little. Then the soup arrived. He noticed that the soup had all the ingredients that had been in the salad. If there had been tomatoes, cucumber and pepper in the salad, the soup had exactly the same things. Carrots, peppers—exactly. Only there it had been a salad, and here it was soup, but with precisely the same ingredients. Fine, they ate the soup. After a while, as they were talking, she brought out the main course: a hot dish of cooked, steamed vegetables. He saw that those vegetables were exactly what had been in the soup and exactly what had been in the salad. First it was served as a salad, then as soup, and now as a cooked dish. At one point, when the Rebbe stepped out for a minute, she seemed to feel she ought to apologize. So the Rebbetzin said to him—he still had no idea who they were, that this was the Rebbe, or the Frierdiker Rebbe’s son-in-law. She said, “Since we’ve been here in Paris, my husband hasn’t eaten meat here. We haven’t had meat since we arrived in Paris. Lately there have also been questions about the fish, so we haven’t eaten fish either. And in the last few weeks and months, my husband hasn’t been comfortable with the flour here, so there’s no flour either.” So they ate vegetables, and that was it.

1:57:12 Speaker 6 His son told you that himself?

1:57:14 Speaker 2 They tell it too—he says that at family gatherings, when he would tell the story, he was more impressed by the story of the meal than by the story of how he found the—

1:57:27 Speaker 6 Mistake.

1:57:27 Speaker 2 The mistake, that zero. That was the simpler part.

1:57:33 Speaker 6 Wow. His son is a Jew who lives here in [unclear]?

1:57:36 Speaker 2 No, no, in Flatbush. He was a well-known lawyer, but he’s been gone for a long time. He was probably already elderly then. I have a short story about that too. It was a very long time ago. How do I know it was a long time ago? Because I remember what the airline ticket looked like. They still had tickets that—

1:57:56 Speaker 6 They still filled them out by hand.

1:57:58 Speaker 2 Yes, with that, and also—

1:58:00 Speaker 6 Carbon copies.

1:58:00 Speaker 2 Yes. And the terminal was still El Al’s terminal. Anyway, I was traveling. I would always fly back on Thursday. Sunday was a workday, and back then there was a rule that you had to reconfirm your flight seventy-two hours in advance. So I called El Al. “No, sir, we’re sorry, there’s no seat.” What do you mean, no seat? I have a ticket! “Look carefully at the ticket. It has all these little boxes with numbers, and there’s a small box with two letters: OK.”

1:58:35 Speaker 6 You don’t have an OK.

1:58:35 Speaker 2 The outbound flight had an OK. For the return flight, that box was blank. So I was left with nothing, you know, and it was very important. I was running the yeshiva then, and inspectors were coming on Sunday. I ran to Kuti—Kuti Rapp. We called; the manager would usually arrange things for him without a problem, but the manager wasn’t there and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Tomorrow was Thursday. Well, I said, there’s no choice. I was staying with my brother-in-law. I put my suitcase in the car and said, “Let’s go to 770. It’s about two or three in the afternoon. Kuti will sort it out, and from there we’ll go on to the airport.” My brother-in-law was driving me.

1:59:15 Speaker 6 Kuti or someone else?

1:59:16 Speaker 2 Kuti, Kuti Rapp.

1:59:18 Speaker 6 Oh, he made the arrangements with El Al. I understand.

1:59:20 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, he was the El Al man. We got there around two, two-thirty. “Well, Kuti, let’s call the manager. He’s there now.” He called him right away. The manager told him, “Rabbi Rapp, listen, I’ll always do anything for you. But this time it’s impossible. Don’t even ask. There are forty people overbooked.” Overbooked meant they couldn’t even put me on standby. There was simply no—

1:59:47 Speaker 6 A packed flight.

1:59:48 Speaker 2 Packed and then some. Apparently forty people had planned to come for something; I don’t know. My brother-in-law was getting upset because he had to go to work, and there he was, going around with me. He said, “Enough already. You’re here for Shabbos. Let’s go home. Leave me alone.” You know? I said, “Look, it’s already three. Let’s at least stay for Minchah.” Just an ordinary Minchah with the Rebbe. All right, Minchah was in another fifteen minutes, so he stayed. The Rebbe came down for Minchah. The Rebbe usually davened upstairs, but because it was Yud Shvat and there was a large crowd, he came downstairs. I was standing in the back, turning around and around. I don’t know if I davened or didn’t daven. My suitcase was in the car; I had to go. After the davening, I saw that people had formed lines and cleared a path. That meant—

2:00:41 Speaker 7 The Rebbe was—

2:00:42 Speaker 2 The Rebbe would be coming down in a moment.

2:00:44 Speaker 7 It was worth going past him.

2:00:44 Speaker 2 And I looked to the side, near the door, and saw a whole line of Frenchmen standing there—all those who were traveling that day.

2:00:49 Speaker 7 “Fohr gezunterheit” to—

2:00:50 Speaker 2 “Fohr gezunterheit.”

2:00:52 Speaker 7 Around where the rabbis’ noticeboard was.

2:00:54 Speaker 2 Near the mezuzah by the wedding area.

2:00:56 Speaker 7 Yes.

2:00:57 Speaker 2 The line began at that door and stretched as far as it stretched. First they stood by the door, and then each person joined the line. I could see the Rebbe approaching along the path, and I saw this line of travelers standing and waiting. Wait—what about me? Am I traveling or not? My suitcase was here; I had to travel. On the other hand, they’d said there was no chance. But the Rebbe was seconds away. At that moment I said to myself, “I’m traveling.” Hop! I jumped into the line. I was the last to jump in, so I became the first.

2:01:35 Speaker 7 The closest.

2:01:36 Speaker 2 The closest to the Rebbe, yes.

2:01:37 Speaker 7 As he approached you.

2:01:39 Speaker 2 Then the Rebbe came down, and [unclear] went around him. The Rebbe indicated, as was the custom, “Zei foren”—“They’re traveling today.” And I was first. The Rebbe came up to me and looked at me: “Fohr gezunterheit,” [unclear]. He said “Fohr gezunterheit” to everyone standing there.

2:01:58 Speaker 7 That the trip should go well and there should be good news.

2:02:01 Speaker 2 But I felt that look. It was something else. It wasn’t just “Fohr”—all right, what—

2:02:07 Speaker 7 Everyone felt the Rebbe was saying it to them personally.

2:02:09 Speaker 2 Everyone felt that. Fine, but I wasn’t traveling—or was I? So when the Rebbe said “Fohr gezunterheit” to me, it hit me. I jumped out of the line and said to my brother-in-law, “Come, come, quickly! I have approval. Come on, we’re going!” “But what? How did you get approval?” “Don’t ask. Come on, where’s the car?” It was tight—three hours before the flight. I remember we drove along Eastern Parkway and turned onto Atlantic. We’d already been driving for five, six, seven minutes when he said, “Tell me, what really happened? The manager himself said there was no chance.” I said, “Yes, I got approval from the Rebbe.” He looked at me while he was driving. I said, “Yes. The Rebbe said to me, ‘Fohr gezunterheit.’” I remember he let go of the steering wheel and grabbed his head with both hands. “Tell me, have you decided to drive me crazy? Let’s go home already. You’re here for Shabbos.” I said, “But the Rebbe—” “If I’d been standing there, the Rebbe would have said it to me too,” he told me. True, but he said it to me. He looked at me. Try explaining that to him. Anyway, he gave me a hard time all the way to the airport. Then I said to him, “Moti, drop me and my suitcase at the airport and go to work. You don’t have to wait there. I’m not coming back with you.” I don’t know where I got that feeling from. We went into the terminal, parked, and saw a crowd already coming out, one after another. “No chance, no chance, no chance.” All kinds of students and others. “What more do you want? They’re telling you there’s no chance.” I said, “Moti, do me a favor, go home.” I insisted. I had that look from the Rebbe. We went a little farther in and down, when suddenly a—

2:03:56 Speaker 2 Flight attendant climbed onto the luggage scale and called out, “Everyone on standby, come to me! All of you, come to me!” They started tossing suitcases on by hand and writing out boarding passes. Not one person waiting down there failed to get on the flight. What happened? I don’t know what was canceled or what wasn’t.

2:04:17 Speaker 7 He said you would travel, and you traveled.

2:04:18 Speaker 2 He didn’t just say it. He said it.

2:04:20 Speaker 7 He said it.

2:04:21 Speaker 2 You understand? He conveys that feeling to you.

2:04:24 Speaker 7 May Hakadosh Boruch Hu help that all these stories and experiences give us a lot of chayus and renew our connection to the Rebbe. It refreshes us and gives us strength, and with Hashem’s help, the Rebbe will return very soon. We’ll see each other again with the Rebbe, immediately, right now.

2:04:37 Speaker 2 Amen, amen.

2:04:38 Speaker 7 Yasher koach, Reb Avraham. The fascinating stories and personal experiences you share with us strengthen us all—our sense of connection to the Rebbe and our longing to be with the Rebbe again, immediately. Yasher koach. May Hakadosh Boruch Hu give you much strength, long life and good years to continue your holy work. And most importantly, may we all see the Rebbe immediately. This episode is dedicated to the elevation of the soul of the scholarly chossid Rabbi Tuvia, son of Reb Baruch Yehuda Blau, rabbi of the Bnei Yaakov Chabad community and director of the Chabad Fund in the Holy Land generally, and in Jerusalem in particular. He managed institutions in the neighborhood and headed the organization of Agudas Chabad in Jerusalem. He was known for being wholly devoted to the Rebbe’s honor and teachings, and to spreading the Rebbe’s teachings. He was connected to the Rebbe heart and soul. This episode is also dedicated to the elevation of the soul of his wife, Mrs. Chana Poma[?], daughter of Reb Chaim Uri, who stood by his side with extraordinary devotion for decades. This is in connection with the conclusion of the shiva for Rabbi Blau and the conclusion of the shloshim for Rebbetzin Blau. May this episode elevate their souls and strengthen their family, and may we merit the complete Geulah immediately.