Rabbi Shneur Kopcik - Delhi, India - Part 1

00:18 Speaker 1 What we’re trying to do is tell the stories of the Rebbe’s shluchim for two reasons. One is so the shluchim themselves can get to know one another. As you’ve probably felt yourself, you don’t really know one another’s stories in depth—your own story, your family’s, the stories of the people you work with. You don’t know what another shliach does or what he’s been through. Usually, each person is immersed in his own shlichus, with so many challenges, struggles of one kind or another, and steps forward. It takes all his attention, and he doesn’t really know what’s happening with another shliach. Sometimes you can even learn from one another. One person has faced a particular challenge that brought him to a certain point, and someone else may face the same challenge. If he knew the solution in advance, he might approach it very differently. So there are several aims here. First, to get to know one another, and to know that you’re part of something much, much bigger. It isn’t just about meeting once a year and seeing each other; you can stay aware of what’s happening all the time. That’s one thing. Second, one of our major stated aims is for people throughout the world to know about it. People usually know this enormous shlichus from walking into a Chabad House and meeting the people there, but they don’t know the story behind it. What brought this shliach here? Where did he come from? What is a young Israeli fellow doing in Delhi, India? Sure, coming for a trip is wonderful—even a long trip, as they say.

02:28 Speaker 1 But to settle in a place, build something there, and see our lives woven into its reality—sometimes it’s hard to understand why. It’s very important for people around the world to know these things, because this may truly be the greatest backbone of the world right now. The shluchim of the Lubavitcher Rebbe are the ones shaping reality in the world.

02:58 Speaker 2 Mm-hmm.

03:00 Speaker 1 So that’s the point. Now, I think the best place to start is for you to tell us about yourself. Your family—where it all comes from. You were born and raised, of course, and went through quite a few things long before you went on shlichus. So let us get to know this person called Schneur—Schneur Zalman Kupchik. I assume it isn’t just Schneur.

03:23 Speaker 2 Right.

03:25 Speaker 1 Go ahead, go ahead. We’re with you.

03:30 Speaker 2 I was born in 5743 in Tzfas. Both my parents were involved in educational shlichus at the time. My father worked at an institution called Beis Levi Yitzchak, which was then an educational institution, and my mother worked at Beis Chana in Tzfas. Their first shlichus running a Chabad House—and my first shlichus—was when, if I’m not mistaken, my father opened a Chabad House in Rosh Pina in 5747. I don’t remember exactly, but at the time the Rebbe was encouraging the opening of many Chabad Houses. Rosh Pina was a place where there was some opposition to Judaism. As part of opening the Chabad House, my father opened a kindergarten. Someone spray-painted a swastika on it, and there was a lot of commotion; it was a small town. They were short of children, so a friend and I joined. My father drove us from Tzfas to Rosh Pina every day. By our standards in India today, that’s close, but it meant traveling back and forth every day to strengthen the Chabad kindergarten there, while all the other Chabad children attended Chabad kindergartens in Tzfas. So you could say that’s where my shlichus began: as a child shliach in a kindergarten on shlichus.

04:51 Speaker 3 May I add a few words to your story for a moment, Schneur? Well, first of all—

04:59 Speaker 2 Stop for a moment, Iti.

05:01 Speaker 3 First of all, I first met your father in 5740, I think—that is, 1980—when I was with the Rebbe. I was already studying in yeshivah there, and your father was in charge of the group. I was a young fellow who had been there for two years already; I’m talking about the month of Tishrei. So, of course, I tried to help wherever I could. I got to know your father then as an exceptionally energetic young man and, in general, a very likable person. He also drew me a bit closer, and so on, and we got to know each other. After that, after he was in charge of the group in 5740, I assume he went to Tzfas and, as you said, initially worked at Beis Levi Yitzchak. If I remember correctly, that was essentially a yeshivah ketanah, right? It was the site of the first yeshivah ketanah in Tzfas.

06:13 Speaker 2 No, it wasn’t an ordinary yeshivah ketanah. It was a yeshivah you could perhaps compare to Chinuch L’Naar in Tzfas today. It was an institution where they studied computers—a sort of vocational school for boys of yeshivah ketanah age. Many of the children there came from non-Chabad homes. Most of them weren’t from Chabad homes. It was a Chabad movement institution with studies that weren’t limited to Torah subjects.

06:45 Speaker 3 Yes, I do remember him telling me he worked there.

06:50 Speaker 2 So that’s how I grew up in Tzfas, with my parents. Later, during the 5750s, my father moved between several things. One of the better-known ones was the Moshiach in Sports initiative, which my father worked on together with Gershon Fried. As a child, I joined them on all the trips—to Hapoel Galil Elyon and to the outreach activities there.

07:21 Speaker 3 By the way, I’ll add that, as far as I remember, your father was also Chabad’s spokesman on the radio—or at least for what we might call the Moshiach-oriented camp.

07:33 Speaker 2 Yes. You’re talking about a period of about three years—5751, 5752, 5753, 5754, 5755, those years. Several things happened. I mention them not to tell his story, but from my perspective as a child, as a teenager, and how we experienced them. I started with Moshiach in basketball, Moshiach in Sports, in 5753, at the sports arenas. We would go to Kfar Blum, to a kibbutz crowd, and do Moshiach outreach there. We arrived with a tefillin stand, “Moshiach, Moshiach” music, signs, and all sorts of things, and went home when the game started. At the end of the game, Hapoel Galil Elyon won. Somehow, the radio or a newspaper said it was thanks to the Chabad chassidim who had come to give them support. That’s how it began. Hapoel Galil Elyon really connected with the Moshiach message. They wrote to the Rebbe, received a blessing from the Rebbe, and spread the Moshiach message at all their games. Then came the historic upset: they took the championship from Maccabi Tel Aviv after decades. I don’t remember if it was nearly forty consecutive years. Suddenly, some little-known team from the north won the championship, and that brought tremendous publicity to Moshiach around the world. I think the reason every Israeli today—and you could say every Jew in the world—knows “Moshiach, Moshiach, Moshiach” isn’t simply because of the tune. It’s because of how that song took over the arenas back then. People on kibbutzim didn’t know the singer Mordechai Ben David; people around the country didn’t know him, and no one would have just played that song on the radio if not for Moshiach in Basketball, Moshiach in Sports. It then spread to other teams, which wrote to the Rebbe, made good resolutions, and publicized the Moshiach message. Of course, not all the Chabad chassidim at the time were comfortable with the publicity and with the connection

09:39 Speaker 2 between Moshiach and Chabad—between sports and Chabad. But it’s worth noting that my father made a special video, about twenty-five minutes long, of clips from the games and brought it in to the Rebbe. The Rebbe sat and watched with satisfaction for twenty-five minutes—clips from basketball games in Eretz Yisroel where you could constantly hear and see the Moshiach message. So that was one childhood experience of shlichus. Around that time—I don’t remember the exact years—my father became deputy chairman of the Reshet.

10:20 Speaker 4 Ah.

10:21 Speaker 2 The chairman of the network at the time was Rabbi Meir Freiman, a"h. The network, the Oholei Yosef Yitzchak network of the Rebbe’s schools throughout the country, was on the verge of collapse, and my father was brought in to, well, try to save it. I don’t remember exactly, but for about a year we saw my father only on weekends. At best, he would leave home after Shabbos. Sometimes he even got stuck on the way to Tzfas for Shabbos and couldn’t make it home. But usually he would arrive home exhausted on Friday, go to sleep, get up after Shabbos, and head back out. At the time, many of the network’s schools were facing closure. The teachers hadn’t been paid for a long time and needed encouragement; the parents needed encouragement, and enrollment needed to increase. So for a while, I grew up with my father away from home. And I remember that he still wanted to spend time with the children. So the reward, or—I don’t know what to call it—was that each time he would take a different child along on those trips. I remember the network meetings: I’d sit there as a little boy and hear my father speaking with tremendous passion to the network’s teachers and principals. I’d travel with him, with phone calls along the way and then more calls and meetings with the teachers. The teachers wanted to leave because they hadn’t been paid, and my father would speak very forcefully about how anyone could even think of leaving one of the Rebbe’s institutions because they hadn’t received a salary for six months or a year. And somehow, school by school, he managed to save them. I especially remember a close neighbor and family friend, Rabbi Yaakov Oknin of Tzfas. I’m sure you know

12:15 Speaker 2 him.

12:16 Speaker 4 Yes.

12:16 Speaker 2 At the time, the Chabad school in Lod—the network school; there are two schools there—had no principal. They urgently needed to find one, but where could you find a principal who met the Ministry of Education’s requirements? My father knew Yaakov Oknin from Tzfas, and he came to him and said, “I need you to run the school in Lod until things stabilize and they bring in a new principal.” Just for a year or something like that. It sounded absurd. You’re going to take someone from Tzfas to run a school in Lod? But Yaakov saw how my father himself was operating, so he took it on. For a year, if I’m not mistaken, he flew to central Israel every Sunday, ran the school in Lod with a firm hand, and returned to Tzfas, until the school stabilized and they could bring in another principal. Those are the kinds of things that stayed with me. And during that same period, there were also issues concerning the integrity of the Land of Israel and matters of Moshiach, and my father spoke a great deal in the media. There’s another little episode that stayed with me. I was only a child, and I was often near him when he was interviewed. In the middle of a family outing, he would go sit in the car for an interview and then come back to us. When he spoke, it seemed so spontaneous and natural. But I remember that before one interview—I think it was with Razi Barkai or someone like that—he sat down to write to the Rebbe, asking for a bracha that the interview should go well. That really struck me. You know, when someone is self-confident, speaks well, and has already been interviewed again and again, why get worked up about one more interview? Big deal. But when it was something with a wide audience that could bring about a kiddush Hashem, or, G-d forbid, the opposite, he took every interview very seriously and sat down to write to the Rebbe beforehand, asking that it be successful. He also founded the Moshiach Headquarters in the Holy Land, so that gave him many reasons to appear in the media. And then, I think, that stopped—as you said—when the whole family left for India.

14:10 Speaker 2 What suddenly prompted that? I mean, India didn’t spring up yesterday. Suddenly you had to go to India—what brought that about?

14:35 Speaker 4 What suddenly prompted—what, India didn’t spring up yesterday. Suddenly, suddenly we need to go to India. What prompted that?