28 of Sivan - The Rebbi and Rebbetzin arrived in the USA - בשנת תש"א הרבי והרבנית הגיעו לארצות הברית

00:00 Speaker 1 This is Yemei Chabad, uh, the twenty-eighth day of Sivan in the year Taf Shin Alef. That is in, um, in 1941. Uh, that is the day that the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin, uh, they came to the United States, United States of America. During World War II, the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin, they were in, uh, France. France was under the German, the Nazi occupation. The Vichy government. The... What, I'm sorry? Vichy government. The Vichy government. The previous Rebbe worked tirelessly, uh, and put in tremendous amount of effort to extract them from, uh, from France and bring them to the United States. And, um, they have here a copy of the Rebbe's petition for naturalization, uh, which the, uh, Rebbe received, uh, you know, as he went into the government. Uh, after receiving-- After a great deal of effort, they received a visa for the Rebbe to come to the country. Uh, there was still a big problem. Okay, now he can come to America, but how do you get out of France? How do you leave France? The only possibility that they saw was to go to Portugal, and from Portugal to go to Spain. So after, uh, many and great deal of efforts, uh, the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin went onto the boat that traveled to Portugal, and from Portugal they had to, uh, slide through sort of the border with Spain, and they came to Barcelona. Uh, that journey from Barcelona, from Spain, was a very dangerous one. The, uh, Nazis, yimach shemam, they

02:21 Speaker 1 would shoot on all the boats, all the boats that were carrying passengers, any boat. And they also shot on the boat that the Rebbe was on several times. On the twenty-eighth day of Sivan in Taf Shin Alef in 1941, uh, the Rebbe, together with his wife, the Rebbetzin, they, uh, um, were on the, uh, boat. It's called the Serpa Pinto. Is that it? That's the name of the boat. And they come to the, um, shores of the United States. The previous Rebbe, because of his physical situation, his father-in-law, was not able to come and meet them personally. Uh, he appointed a, uh, delegation of four of the important rabbis to go ahead and greet his son-in-law, the Rebbe. Uh, it was Rabbi Shol Jacobson, Rabbi Shmuel Evitin, Elio-- Rabbi Elio Simpson, and Rabbi Shlomo Ahrn Kazinoski. Uh, the night before the boat arrived, the previous Rebbe called this delegation. He told them, "I am appointing you as my agent, that you should go ahead, and you should greet the-- my oncoming, my son-in-law, who is going to come the next day. I am going to tell you who he is." The Rebbe was-- The previous Rebbe was telling about his, uh, son-in-law because the Rebbe was a very, very modest and very obscure. He did not show any of his greatness to the people. Nobody really knew the extent of the Rebbe's holiness, the extent of the Rebbe's brilliance, the extent of the Rebbe's knowledge, his, uh, in all areas. So the Rebbe said, "I'm

04:23 Speaker 1 gonna tell you, he is somebody," bless you, "who does tikkun chatzos every night." Now, you know there is a, a special prayer that is done at midnight in which the people mourn the destruction of the temple. Uh, but it's not done by everybody, but he has done-- does it every night. And the Rebbe says he knows orally proficient, he's an expert in the entire Babylonian Talmud. You know, the Babylonian Talmud, you know, if you sit and study, you know, uh, day and day, it's, uh, to be an expert, to know it, uh, together with the Ram, the Rosh, and the Rift, those are the main earlier commentators, the Rishonim. He knows all the Jerusalem Talmud and all those, uh, Sekelim. He knows all the Rambams, all the Maimonides. These are huge works. Huge, huge works. And he knows also in the Hasidic Likutey Torah with the Ayins, with all the references over there, which, you know, I mean, you have to know a lot to even know how to enumerate all these different things. So the Rebbe says, "Go ahead and greet him." You get what I'm saying? Are you describing the former Rebbe or- Former Rebbe telling about his son-in-law, about the Rebbe. He's asking him to go out and meet him, so he's telling him what a great person he is. Uh- There is the, the, the meeting between the Rebbe and his father-in-law that took place over three days. Uh, the Rebbe related at some point, he said like this: "On the

06:16 Speaker 1 road, as I was going on the traveling, I was thinking, should I go into my father-in-law, to the Rebbe, immediately before I go and immerse myself in the mikvah?" Before he goes up. "But on the other hand, I'm going to a Rebbe." And as I said many times, the Rebbe's, uh, appreciation and the Rebbe's humility for the, uh, for his father-in-law as a Rebbe was boundless, limitless. It was, m- you know, beyond anything one can expect. But when the Rebbe came, he says to Seven Seventy, "I notified the Rebbe, and I waited for him to call me, so that in the meantime, I had a chance to go to the mikvah. I davened Mincha, I davened Ma'ariv, and he still hadn't called me. And so three days passed by without being called to enter to my father-in-law, to the Rebbe. Only on the third day, in the afternoon, my father-in-law sent to call us, and he requested that I and the Rebbetzin, Rebbe's wife, should go in separately, individually. The reason for this, that we were called to go in separately and only after three days, as it's known," the Rebbe says, "that my father-in-law, my teacher, he was a very emotional person. Uh, it is, uh, possible to imagine how much he would be excited, uh, that it would affect him if we would all go in together, all together, and immediately. So Hasidism demands a person to take control of his mind, control his heart, and therefore, notwithstanding the great pain that he

08:17 Speaker 1 had to delay that visit, he waited until he saw, he saw us." So the Rebbe controlled himself basically, and he waited for three days so as not to cause him such emotional, uh, overwhelming, um, I guess excitement that would have affected his, perhaps his health or whatever, uh, negatively. So the twenty-eighth of Sivan, uh, was already, uh, has been set as a day, a special day of a festival, and, uh, this is the miracle of the Rebbe being saved from the, from the Germans and coming to the United States. In, uh, uh... With the Rebbe's coming to the United States, a whole new, uh, energy in the spreading of the Wellsprings Hasidism and, and Judaism started off. That time they founded the three main institutions of Chabad, which is Machneh Israel, uh, Kehos, and Merkaz Yafe Hachinuch. These are the three major institutions that were given over by the previous Rebbe to the Rebbe to, uh, sort of lead. The Rebbe was the one in charge of them. Uh, they dealt, they dealt basically with various different things, but, uh, all was-- One was called the education arm, was mainly for education. One is the publication, was, uh, for all the publications. And the other one, Machneh Israel, is for the general, uh, Chabad activities, uh, all over the world. And you know, the rest is history. Uh, the landscape of, uh, uh, American Jewry as well as the whole world has changed. Now, the Rebbe has been asked, you know, many times why he

10:27 Speaker 1 doesn't move to Israel. Um, and the Rebbe's basic response was, uh, many times that the most effective place to impact the world in a positive way to do the Rebbe's work is from the United States. The abilities and the possibilities that, uh, that the Rebbe had to go ahead and change the world was from the United States more so than in Israel. And, um, I just read a, uh, article by, uh, the Lord Rabbi Chief-

11:06 Speaker 2 Jonathan

11:06 Speaker 1 ... former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, Sachs from, from England. Uh, now he lives in Yeshivat-- He lectures in Yeshiva University. Uh, he, uh, he said basically, he says that, he said the expression that, uh, "Good leaders create followers, but great leaders create leaders, create others leaders." He says that, uh, many times people would, uh, when you come to them, when you visit their shul, you visit their organization, they try to get you to connect you to their organization, to increase their, uh, membership, to increase their following, to increase their, um, uh, basis, to broaden their basis. But the Rebbe, he said, when he came to the Rebbe The Rebbe actually empowered him to go out and become a leader elsewhere. So he says while he came to the Rebbe to interview the Rebbe, he was a graduate student in Cambridge, in, in England, and he came to the Rebbe to... He was a philosophy student and he came to the Rebbe to find out how does the Jewish religious leadership, uh, reconcile sort of, uh, problematic seemingly between the sciences and religion and, and philosophy and how to work things out. He found himself, instead of the Rebbe being interviewed by him, the Rebbe was sort of interviewing him and giving him a job and telling him, "What are you doing for the Jewish students in Cambridge? What are you doing? What is your leadership role?" So the Rebbe swapped the tables around, and the Rebbe sort of said to him, "You need to become

13:12 Speaker 1 a leader." So the Rebbe, instead of looking for more followers, was looking for more people to go out and do something for Yiddishkeit, for Judaism, to make a difference in the world. And, you know, as we know that there is, uh, not enough manpower out there really to stem some of the tide because the tide is going against religion, it's going against Yiddishkeit, it's going against, you know... It's a very, very difficult task to try to hold on to Yiddishkeit. So the Rebbe's, um, uh, efforts were to go ahead and have everybody become a leader. And Rebbe said, "Even if you only know," let's say two letters of the Alef Bet. You know Alef Bet, that's all you know. And there's somebody out there that knows only an Alef, go teach him the Bet. You don't need to know the entire Alef Bet. You don't need to know all the twenty two letters. If you know two letters, and now we're gonna what? Teach him the second letter. The Rebbe said... In the Talmud, there is an interesting debate. There were two rabbis in the Talmud. The Talmud says they were debating who is greater. You know, it's a funny kind of a debate, it would seem. Uh, and, uh, you know, who, who's a greater from the other one. So the other one said, you know, he says, "I am greater because I am so brilliant," he said, "that God forbid, if everybody forgets all the Torah, and they don't know the Torah anymore,

14:50 Speaker 1 they forgot it, I could bring it all back out of my memory. That's how great I am." And the other one responded, he says, he says, "I am great because I will make sure that the Torah shall not be forgotten." And he says what he's going to do is he's going to see to it that he's going to take a deers and he's gonna slaughter it, and he's gonna distribute the meat to the poor, and he's gonna take the parchment, and he's gonna write the Torah, and he's gonna teach five different children. Each one is gonna teach the other one, and he's gonna make sure the Torah was not forgotten. The Gemara says, "Kav ha geviri meitzatif." The Gemara says the Talmud rules that the actions of he are greater. More than being able to bring the Torah back, to make sure that it's not forgotten, that is the most important, that it's lived. And, um, you know, there's just... I'll finish with this, with this story about the... You know, before the holi- before the high holidays, uh, there is a tradition by many, they go to a great rabbi to get a blessing for the new year. And there was once a story that some of the other Hasidic rabbis, a Hasidic sect in Brooklyn, they lost their rabbi right before the high holidays, and the grand rabbi passed away. So they didn't have a rabbi to go get the blessing, but they felt it, uh, important that they need to go to

16:22 Speaker 1 a rabbi, get a blessing before the new year. That's what they always did. That's-- It was very important to them. So they live in Brooklyn, you know, about fifteen, twenty minutes away from Crown Heights, where the Rebbe was. So they figured if they don't have their own Rebbe over there, they're going to go to the Lubavitcher Rebbe and ask him for his blessing. He's a grand rabbi. And as you know, when people would go in before, uh, the holidays to the Rebbe, it would be like a long line stretching along the long blocks of Eastern Parkway, everybody waiting in line. So he figures he comes in, he comes in, he gets in line. He sees right in front of him, he sees this character. He has a ponytail down to his ankles, and he has tattoos all over his hands with rings pierced in every part of his body. And the guy is standing in line to go to the Rebbe . So he says to him, he says to him, to that fellow, he says, "What are you doing here?" So he says, "I'm standing, I went to my Rebbe to ask a blessing before the holidays." The guy with the, with the long hair tells him. So the guy says to himself, he says, "How could this guy... If, if that rabbi, the Lubavitch rabbi, is a rabbi for this guy with this, for this bum, how could he be my rabbi?" He says, "I can't." Uh, and it was okay, but he

17:48 Speaker 1 was there already. So he goes in, that guy goes first. The Rebbe gives him a big smile and gives him a, a blessing and wished him well. And then he goes in, it's his turn. And when he comes in, he saw-- the Rebbe could see that he was a little disturbed, the fact that, "What is this guy doing over here?" You know, "What is, what is this bum doing over here?" So the Rebbe told him, he says, "You know the book of your rabbi," his rabbi. The Rebbe was more knowledgeable in what it says than this guy who claimed to be a follower of the other rabbi. The Rebbe says, "Do you know what it says in the introduction to your rabbi's book?" And he says that there was once, um, a judgment about a rabbi, and they tried to figure out what was his greatest merit. Some said his greatest merit is that he prayed in more intense than anybody else. Other one said he would study Torah more than anyone else. He knew more Torah. Some said he was charitable more than anybody else. He was kind more than anybody else. He says, "No, no, no. That wasn't his special quality." What was his special quality? That he brought back God's lost children to their father, that he brought them back to Hashem, he brought them back to the Torah. He says that is the greatest and the most important task that we have to do. And it's interesting to see that the

19:17 Speaker 1 Rebbe had all this. The Rebbe had all of this. He was righteous, he was brilliant, he was knowledgeable, and he was... In all cases, he was-- he had everything that it took. And but most important is he brought back children to their Father in heaven. That was the Rebbe.

19:39 Speaker 3 Beautiful