Mrs. Chana Sharfstein: The Story of The Trailblazing Shliach To Russia, Latvia, Sweden and Boston

00:00 Speaker 1 Chana Sharfstein lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn

00:03 Speaker 2 My maiden name was Zuber, and you can just address me as Chana Sharfstein. That's fine

00:08 Speaker 1 Sharfstein is at the nexus of more than a few stories involving Chabad emissaries, so when I considered her for a possible Lamplighters episode, the toughest part was figuring out whether to focus on her work as an author, an historian, or former president of a tour company specializing in Jewish Scandinavia. I got her phone number and gave her a call. We talked about her work and her many interests. They were all very interesting, but the conversation would always turn back to one person.

00:39 Speaker 2 His name was Yaakov Yisroel Zuber. To me, he was the bravest man possible

00:45 Speaker 1 Zuber was Chana Sharfstein's father and a rabbi. His life as a Chabad emissary in several countries before his tragic and untimely passing would have been fascinating enough on its own, but his willingness to undertake a dangerous mission during the Bolshevik Revolution is still having an impact on Jewish communities all around the globe. I'm Gary Wolak, and this is Lamplighters, stories from Chabad emissaries on the Jewish frontier. Life as a Chabad emissary is often joyous, but it can be unpredictable and even dangerous. Chabad has become a ubiquitous presence in every corner of the world, but behind every Chabad house are emissaries, regular people striving to transcend their circumstances, and a community that supports and relies on them. These are their stories. Yaakov Yisroel Zuber was born in 1895 in a Jewish farming village in Russia's Pale of Settlement.

01:56 Speaker 3 My grandfather was born in a city that was called Shedrin

01:59 Speaker 1 That's Rabbi Sruli Eidelman. Chana Sharfstein is his aunt. He's a grandson of Rabbi Zuber, for whom he is named.

02:07 Speaker 3 Shedrin was a town that was founded by the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Lubavitcher Rebbe.

02:13 Speaker 2 And it became the Shedriner settlement, which was the first really Jewish village in all of Russia

02:21 Speaker 3 And it was populated by many Hasidim, and, uh, it was sort of like your, your own little shtetl

02:27 Speaker 1 That brought the family into the ever-widening circles of Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, the fifth Chabad Rebbe, also known as the Rebbe Rashab. At that time, Tsar Nicholas I was attempting so-called Russification of the country's many ethnic groups into a homogenous Russian people.

02:48 Speaker 2 And one of the things that really was a bone in his throat were the Jews, because they were different cultural, religious, and it bothered him

02:56 Speaker 1 The tsar had Jewish boys over the age of 12 kidnapped and forced into the military. The young soldiers would be conscripted and away from their families for 25 years

03:08 Speaker 2 And he hoped by that time he had taken all their understanding of what Judaism and being Jewish was all about

03:16 Speaker 1 But like the rebbes before him, the Rebbe Rashab was countering attempts of the Russian government to force assimilation upon that country's Jews. The Zubers kept young Yaakov safe by sending him away

03:30 Speaker 2 When my father was a very young boy, he was already sent away to Lubavitch to learn, and, uh, that's where he stayed and that's where he got all of his education

03:39 Speaker 1 Zuber was just 10 when he went to study in the town of Lubavitch at the central Chabad yeshiva

03:46 Speaker 3 Which was unusual because you usually did not have kids there who were that young before bar mitzvah. But he was, Baruch Hashem, a gifted student with a, an incredible memory

03:55 Speaker 1 It was hard having such little contact with the family, which was about 200 miles away. But Sharfstein says Zuber loved learning, which helped him and his schoolmates keep their minds off the near-constant hunger

04:09 Speaker 2 During the week, they had very meager amount of food, so they used to drink a lot of tea, and they smoked endlessly. They smoked to still the hunger. They had so little to eat that the only time that they really had a decent meal was on Shabbos when they were invited to balabatim, to people in the neighborhood that gave them a good Shabbos meal

04:33 Speaker 1 Even so, Zuber excelled in his studies. So in 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Rebbe Rashab sent him on a mission to connect with Jews who were in a very tough spot

04:46 Speaker 3 The Rebbe Rashab told him that nearby there's an army base of Russian soldiers

04:52 Speaker 1 That's one of Zuber's great-grandsons, Rabbi Sruli Deitsch of Chabad of Bronxville, New York. Chana Sharfstein is his great-aunt

05:01 Speaker 3 "And now it's a few days before Purim. I would like you to take a bottle of vodka and a megillah and go and try to bring simcha and joy to the Jewish soldiers that are there."

05:15 Speaker 1 Zuber went with a few yeshiva students to the base, which was not far from the town of Lubavitch

05:21 Speaker 3 He said l'chaim with them, and he read the megillah for them, and afterwards he farbrenged with them And they really had a very good time farbrenging with the soldiers and talking to them about Judaism and drinking vodka and celebrating Purim. But what's even more interesting in the story is when he came back to Lubavitch

05:41 Speaker 1 Because the mission on which the Rebbe Rashab had sent Yaakov Yisroel Zuber was also a fact-finding mission. The Rebbe wanted to know if sending young yeshiva students to do outreach in Jewish communities would be effective and sustainable

05:57 Speaker 3 So the Rebbe Rashab called him in, and he asked him how it was

06:02 Speaker 2 He was very, very concerned with exact details.

06:05 Speaker 3 Who was there? How many of them were there? Were they interested? Did they ask questions? Were they engaged in everything you were teaching them? If they accepted you.

06:16 Speaker 1 Zuber answered all of the Rebbe's questions.

06:19 Speaker 3 And when he was done, the Rebbe leaned back in his chair and smiled. The Rebbe Rashab was very satisfied with that experience.

06:26 Speaker 4 In the days of old, they sent these accomplished Hasidim and they would inspire communities, and here literally he was sending a yeshiva bachur out in the field. This was the first time it was done in this kind of a fashion.

06:39 Speaker 3 And from then, this continued happening much more regularly and on a much wider scale.

06:45 Speaker 1 In 1921, Zuber married Zlata Goldman. He became a rabbi the following year. When he was 25 years old, the Rebbe Rashab sent him on another very challenging mission, this time to Jews living in the mountains of Soviet Georgia, or Gruzia.

07:02 Speaker 2 And they were separated from the rest of society physically. They had their own language and everything. And when my father was newly wed, he went there in the position of a rabbi.

07:13 Speaker 4 So my grandfather was sent there, and he was in the area called Kavkaz. And he was a, a shochet, he was a mohel. He could do everything.

07:23 Speaker 2 He was the teacher. He was the lecturer. He gave classes. He learned their language, and he educated them, and he inspired them.

07:32 Speaker 1 Rabbi Zuber served there for several years. In 1929, as antisemitism was growing in communist Russia, he came to Riga, Latvia. There, he was close to Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, also known as the Previous or Friediker Rebbe. From there, Zuber awaited passage to America, but the stock market crash delayed his move. In 1931, with Stalinism and Nazism growing in mainland Europe, the Previous Rebbe sent Zuber across the Baltic to Stockholm, Sweden, where there were Yiddish-speaking refugees from Russia, Poland, and Germany who needed his help and support.

08:13 Speaker 2 He was the chief rabbi of the entire Orthodox community in Sweden, and, uh, it was just a homey kind of place, and he was really, really happy with the community there.

08:30 Speaker 1 But when the war broke out in the late '30s, more and more Jewish refugees streamed into Sweden. The Zubers housed and fed many children who arrived via the German Kindertransport.

08:42 Speaker 4 And at the shipyards, at the dock, my grandfather would come and see who was coming off of the boat, and if there was somebody who looked like either a yeshiva bachur or just some Jewish person, he would make sure that they would be taken care of and help them, whatever they would need. And he was a tremendous activist for those refugees who were coming through.

09:04 Speaker 1 Helping the refugees was a tremendous amount of work, and living in Sweden required a lot of adjustment for the Zubers, including learning a new language. But they were more than up to the task of helping their fellow Jews. In 1940, the Zubers were paid a visit by the Previous Rebbe and his entourage, who were stopping in Stockholm on their way to the United States.

09:27 Speaker 2 And my father arranged for him to stay at the Grand Hotel, which is across from the Royal Palace in Stockholm, and my mother prepared food for them.

09:37 Speaker 1 The Zuber family went to the Rebbe for a private audience.

09:40 Speaker 2 My father, he brought us up in front of the Rebbe for a bracha, and then he spoke to me. So of course he spoke to me, "What is thy nomen? What's your name?" And I said, "Chana." And he said, "Das is seyr a gute nomen un dos zolst alemol halten teyer." "It's a very good name, and you should always treasure it."

10:00 Speaker 1 After the Previous Rebbe had blessed all of the Zuber's children, he turned to Rabbi Zuber.

10:06 Speaker 2 The Friediker Rebbe gave him a big bracha to assure him that everything would be okay, that the house should be strong.

10:17 Speaker 1 The Zubers would need that strength over the next few years because as casualties mounted in Europe, especially toward the end of the war, more and more of the refugees arriving in Sweden were agunot, whose husbands had been killed or had gone missing.

10:34 Speaker 2 There were so many of these women who were young, 22, 23, 25 years old, who were agunot. They were chained.

10:42 Speaker 3 Husbands went missing. They ran away. They were killed. There was no record of their death.

10:47 Speaker 1 According to Jewish law, in that sort of situation, a woman can't get remarried unless she has proof of her husband's death.

10:55 Speaker 2 Obviously, Hitler did not issue any death certificates, and so they came to my father to be able to be free to marry because they wanted to start a new life. My father spent endless hours, hours and hours and hours, night and day and day and night, our house was filled with young women who came for his help from 1945 till we left in 1947. They were always in the house constantly, constantly. They came from all the different displaced persons camps.

11:27 Speaker 3 For him, it wasn't just trying to figure out a Halachic loophole to get this woman remarried. He really felt her pain.

11:37 Speaker 2 When they had to tell my father their experiences, they were crying and screaming, and they were hysterical. And I don't think I slept a night during those years because there was so much crying and weeping going on. And my father, I saw him actually age day by day because this was heartbreaking beyond words.

11:59 Speaker 1 Chana Sharfstein estimates that her father helped several hundred women in Sweden lose their agunot status. When the war ended...

12:07 Speaker 2 My father He was like so overwhelmed. He just felt that Europe was not a place that had a future for Jews anymore.

12:20 Speaker 1 Zuber and his family had been in Sweden for a decade and a half. Despite his lifetime appointment as the chief Orthodox rabbi of Sweden, he wanted to go to the United States. His family and Zlate's family had been killed in the Holocaust, and in 1940, the previous Rebbe had moved to Brooklyn.

12:40 Speaker 2 He wanted to be near the Rebbe. That was like his main thing.

12:43 Speaker 1 In 1947, after months of waiting for visas and permission from the previous Rebbe to relocate, Zuber and his family arrived in Crown Heights, where Zuber was to become head of the yeshiva. The man who had held that job was thought to have perished in Europe, but he showed up to reclaim his position just as Zuber was set to assume it, so-

13:05 Speaker 2 The Rebbe ended up sending him to Boston, Massachusetts, which was away from the Chabad community, 'cause there was not much of a Chabad in Boston at that time. But he took it in stride

13:17 Speaker 1 Zuber became rabbi of a small Chabad shul in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, and the dean of a yeshiva for elementary school children. After a short time, he became a member of the Boston Rabbinical Court and the rabbi of a larger synagogue in Roxbury.

13:33 Speaker 3 He would give a talk Shabbos in the afternoon, and hundreds of people would come Shabbos afternoon to listen to him, and he made sure to finish early, that people should be able to go back to their regular shuls for Mincha and Maariv.

13:47 Speaker 1 But as important as he was, Rabbi Yakov Yisroel Zuber would not get the chance to leave as deep an impact in Boston as he had in Sweden.

14:00 Speaker 2 It was my birthday, and it happened to be that my Hebrew birthday that year fell out on New Year's Eve. And some friends of mine, they said, "We'll make a little birthday party in our house, so come over to our house." And I said, "Okay."

14:14 Speaker 1 At 7:00 in the evening on December 31st, 1952, Chana Zuber put on her coat and told her parents she was leaving. Her father insisted on walking with her.

14:26 Speaker 2 He went to put on his coat, and he said to my mother, "I'm coming right back."

14:30 Speaker 1 Chana and her father walked through a little park and arrived at her friend's house.

14:35 Speaker 2 And then my father said, "I'm going back home." And he turned around, and I stood in the doorway. For some reason or other, I, I just felt very uncomfortable watching him walk back, because there was nobody around in the street except that on the way when we went there, I saw a gang on a street corner. It's like totally quiet with just the snow falling. And I watched him walk, and then I watched him like turn a bend, and then I couldn't see him, and I went inside.

15:08 Speaker 1 Later that night, Chana got a phone call at the party. Her father had been found unconscious in the park. He had been mugged and beaten, and robbed of the $7 he had in his pockets. He died the next day in the hospital. He was just 56 years old.

15:26 Speaker 3 It was unreal. You know, you survived so much to come here just to be murdered by kids in the park. My grandmother never really recovered from it. She took it very, very hard. The kids, everyone took it very hard.

15:40 Speaker 4 And, uh, it was a very sad end, yeah.

15:45 Speaker 1 Zuber's murder was never solved. Chana graduated from college and was married shortly after. She and her husband, Motel, raised five children. As the years went by, Chana thought about her father a lot. In 1979, she went to the Lubavitcher Rebbe for Sunday dollars. Though she had no experience in business, she was thinking of starting a tour company that would focus on Jewish Scandinavia.

16:17 Speaker 2 And I said to the Rebbe, "Ich traf machen rises to Scandinavia." And it was amazing. He was all smiles. He was so excited. And he says, "Dos is taka a gute zach." That's like a really great idea. So he gave me an extra dollar, and he encouraged me to do it.

16:35 Speaker 1 The next year, she created her company, Scandinavian Trio Tours. For 25 years, she led tours in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In 2002, just before Rabbi Yakov Yisroel Zuber's 50th yahrtzeit, she returned to Stockholm with over 40 members of her family, all descendants of her father.

17:00 Speaker 2 That was like a dream come true. We ended up going to my father's shul and davened in his shul and saw a plaque that I have there in the shul for him.

17:09 Speaker 1 Sruli Deitsch took the train from France, where he was studying in yeshiva, and joined them.

17:15 Speaker 3 And when we walked into the great synagogue where he was the rabbi, there was a big plaque on the front of the shul talking about the years when he served as the rabbi in the shul. And that hit me, like I'm sure the shul went through many rabbis, and not every rabbi at the shul has a plaque remembering that he was here.

17:37 Speaker 2 And all the people in the shul were so excited to see that Chana Zuber came back with her family, and it, it was just absolutely overwhelming.

17:49 Speaker 1 Chana Sharfstein estimates that her father has at least 400 descendants now living in the US.

17:55 Speaker 3 And many, many grandchildren are shluchim.

17:58 Speaker 1 Rabbi Sruli Deitsch is one of them. He and Rabbi Adelmen are named for their grandfather. Rabbi Adelmen, do you know how many of Rabbi Yakov Yisroel Zuber's descendants are named after him?

18:10 Speaker 4 Probably 25, I would guess, around that.

18:13 Speaker 1 It must be a special feeling to be one of those.

18:16 Speaker 4 Absolutely.

18:17 Speaker 2 And they carry on the legacy.

18:22 Speaker 1 So how would Zuber's descendants like to remember him?

18:25 Speaker 3 He was a spokesman for authentic Yiddishkeit.

18:29 Speaker 1 In fact, he still is. Zichron Yaakov is a book he wrote containing specific times for davening in Scandinavia. His Gafen Yisroel contains his commentary on the Talmud. His insights on Jewish law as it applies to Agunot are still consulted in Jewish legal circles. But the more I learn about Rabbi Yaakov Yisroel Zuber, the more it becomes clear which of his accomplishments might have made the biggest impact. His mission to the Russian Army base in 1917 helped the Rebbe Rashab realize that sending emissaries to the four corners of the world should be the cornerstone of Chabad's mission.

19:12 Speaker 3 This was sort of the pilot for Shlichus. It was something that was unprecedented. That was the first time a Shliach was sent out to a secular environment to try to bring Judaism to that environment, and we all have to be grateful to Zeide Yaakov Yisroel for breaking the ice for Shlichus.

19:34 Speaker 1 But Zuber did more than just break the ice. He helped create Chabad's model for outreach that now uplifts communities everywhere.

19:44 Speaker 2 So to me, that's so inspirational.

19:51 Speaker 1 I'm Gary Wolik. Thanks for listening to Lamplighters: Stories from Chabad Emissaries on the Jewish Frontier. We welcome your questions and comments about what you've just heard on Lamplighters. Please email us at podcast@lubavitch.com. And if you know of a great story involving Chabad emissaries or the people they inspire, please let us know about them. That's podcast at L-U-B-A-V-I-T-C-H.com. To subscribe digitally to Lubavitch International Magazine or to receive it at your doorstep, please visit lubavitch.com/subscribe. This is a Lubavitch International podcast.