Not long after moving to Miami to become the principal of the Oholei Torah school, in 1970, I began teaching a Tuesday night Torah class.

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One person who would attend and sometimes host this class was a local tennis champion named David Lifshultz. One day, David mentioned that he played a regular game with the owner of Kennedy and Cohen, a major regional retailer of large appliances. His name was Mel Landow.

“I would like to see if I could put on tefillin with him,” I told David.

David had his doubts over whether that could happen, but he told me when and where to catch Mel. I came to the tennis court and, between games, I interjected: “How about tefillin?”

Mel declined at first, but I proposed a bet: “If David wins the game, you put on tefillin.”

Along with being one of the great entrepreneurs of South Florida, Mel was an excellent tennis player, so he accepted.

“Dave, give us your best,” I cheered, and of course David beat him. Right after the game, Mel went with me to my car, where he put on tefillin. (more…)

In the summer of 1985, the Rebbe summoned the board of Agudas Chassidei Chabad, the Chabad movement’s umbrella organization, to his office. Among other matters, he had a request: The establishment of a new building in Kfar Chabad, Israel, to be named for the Previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. It was to serve as a center for prayer, Torah study, and the spreading of chasidic teachings.

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A couple of weeks later, during a public farbrengen for the 12th of Tammuz – the anniversary of the Previous Rebbe’s liberation from Soviet prison – the Rebbe spoke, for the first time in public, about a theft that had taken place at the Agudas Chassidei Chabad library, the central archive of the Lubavitch movement. Over a period of time, hundreds of  priceless books and other items had begun disappearing – taken, it later emerged, by the Previous Rebbe’s grandson.

The attempt by a private individual to lay claim to the Previous Rebbe’s library was a source of great pain to the Rebbe, who saw it as a spiritual attack on himself and the Chabad movement. And so over the next few years, alongside the legal response, he launched a spiritual campaign to avert this Heavenly decree. Practically, this meant expanding Chabad’s work of promoting Torah and mitzvot. Two days after that address, during an audience with a group of visitors, the Rebbe once again spoke about making a new building in Kfar Chabad. He even asked that a “property for the Previous Rebbe” be found that very day – as a rental, until construction could begin – in order to house the local Kollel, or advanced Torah institute, as well as a Torah library. It seemed that this building was part of the same spiritual campaign.

The Kfar Chabad village committee quickly convened to allocate a building, while they searched for a permanent site. Eventually, a suitable parcel of land was found on a hill near the village’s entrance that was still officially classified as agricultural land. Although rezoning normally takes years, the Rebbe insisted that no part of the construction could begin before the building permits were in place, so with the help of the relevant government offices, the entire process was completed within six months. The search for an architect, however, was already well underway – which is where I came into the picture.

For a chasidic architect, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Both excited and anxious about the responsibility, I submitted my candidacy, along with many other architects. Eventually, only two candidates remained: Myself and another Chabad chasid, Aryeh Yakont. (more…)

I grew up in a religious home, very distant from Chabad. But while studying at Jerusalem’s Kol Torah yeshivah in the 1960s, I began attending a secret class on chasidic thought, and as those teachings sank in, I started to get involved.

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From time to time, I would visit the yeshivah in Kfar Chabad to take part in farbrengens led by the renowned chasidic mentor Rabbi Shlomo Chaim Kesselman. Those gatherings made a strong impression on me, as did the yeshivah students themselves, who showed such love for their fellow Jews, especially in the way they welcomed us guests from other yeshivot.

Eventually, I began thinking about transferring to the Chabad yeshivah in Kfar Chabad. Aghast, my father sent several rabbis to dissuade me, which made me doubt whether it was the right decision. I decided to ask the Rebbe.

I wrote a detailed letter recounting all of this, and in his response, the Rebbe circled the part where I mentioned my doubts and wrote: “Based on this – stay and do not change.”

It was precisely those words that ultimately prompted me to transfer. I realized – contrary to what others had claimed – that the Rebbe wasn’t bent on bringing people into Chabad at any cost. He actually cared and thought about me. If I had doubts, regardless of their origin or validity, he preferred that I not make the move. So I stayed, until eventually, I felt confident that transferring was right for me. When I wrote to the Rebbe to say that my doubts had disappeared, I received his blessing to go to Kfar Chabad.

A few years later, I went to study in the Rebbe’s presence, in New York. I arrived in 770 one afternoon before Passover of 1973, shortly before the Mincha prayers. A few months earlier, my mother had passed (more…)

We were a typical American Jewish family. My father was an attorney, and my mother a teacher, and they had a daughter, a son, and a dog. We were members of our Conservative synagogue in Pittsburgh, where my father sang in the choir.

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But my mother didn’t like our local public school system, and she wanted to see what else was out there. She went to check out the local Lubavitch day school, which impressed her, and she ended up sending my older sister and me there.

Slowly but surely, we started learning, and then adopting, more and more of traditional Judaism. The community of families who sent their children to Lubavitch was a closely connected group, but a mixed one. Some were Chabad chasidim of course, but most came from other sects of Orthodox Judaism.

Back then, in the early 70s, there were not many families like ours in Pittsburgh who were becoming more observant. While we enjoyed the camaraderie of the community, many people weren’t sure what to make of us.

“It’s nice that you’re getting involved with Lubavitch and becoming more religious,” one of the non-Lubavitch women in the community told my mother at one point. “Really, it’s wonderful. But you should also know that you’re never going to be one of them.”

This woman wasn’t trying to be mean. She thought it was for our good that we not have unrealistic expectations about our ability to integrate and become a part of this chasidic community. Nevertheless, my mother didn’t know what to make of it: Are we accepted in this community? Are we not? Are we halfway? And so she decided to write to the Rebbe, introducing herself and asking this question. (more…)

When I married my husband, Reb Leibel Mochkin, I was living in Paris as a refugee following the Second World War. In 1952, while I was expecting our first child, we emigrated to Montreal, Canada, and almost as soon as we arrived, my husband went to New York to see the Rebbe.

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“When you have a son,” the Rebbe told him “you should name him after my father-in-law,” referring to Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the Previous Rebbe, who had passed away two years earlier. I gave birth to our daughter Rochel shortly thereafter and two years later we had a son, whom we named Yosef Yitzchak, as the Rebbe had requested.

Although I didn’t look sick after the birth, I lost a lot of blood, and I barely ate anything for the next two months. When I came home from the hospital, with two babies to care for, I felt so weak that I could barely hold a glass of water. A couple of weeks after that, I started to have terrible waves of pain in my back. After being checked out, the doctors established that I had developed gallstones during the pregnancy and I would need surgery to have my gallbladder removed. Being only twenty years old, it was quite rare to need such an operation.

The surgery was scheduled for a Tuesday morning at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The next day happened to be the Tenth of Shevat, marking the anniversary of the Previous Rebbe’s passing, and my father-in-law, Reb Peretz Mochkin, traveled from Montreal to attend the special gathering with the Rebbe in New York.

Several hours after my operation, my medical situation turned critical. My liver stopped functioning, my blood pressure dropped, I fell unconscious, and the doctors decided that I needed to have another operation – the second within 24 hours.

“I operate nearly 365 days a year, so I don’t even remember who my patients are,” my surgeon later said, “but I remember that you didn’t let me sleep for three nights.” I had entered a critical condition during that time, and every minute counted. (more…)

I had come to New York from Argentina six years earlier to study in the Chabad yeshivah in 770. By 1976, I was twenty-two years old, which made me one of the older students. I was concentrating fully on studying Torah, but on Thursday nights I would travel to other Torah institutions in the New York area – from nearby Boro Park, to upstate, in South Fallsburg – to give classes on chasidic teachings.

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Every year, I would have a private audience with the Rebbe before my birthday, but that year, as I was preparing to see the Rebbe, I was feeling bad about myself. I felt as though I wasn’t succeeding in my studies or the other activities I was involved in. Despite my efforts, there were some things that I just could not accomplish.

I included all this in the note I wrote to the Rebbe before the meeting, along with some other questions.

“In regards to what you have written,” the Rebbe answered me, “complaining that you are not successful in this or that: Our Sages have said that ‘one who puts in effort will surely succeed.’ This was said to me,” – here the Rebbe referred directly to himself – “and to you, and to every other Jew. And so what you are describing cannot be. Since you are putting in effort, it cannot be that you’re not successful.”

He went on to say that any thought that brings a person to melancholy or depression “has to be thrown away,” since “sadness leads to despair and to a lack of enthusiasm; it wastes time, and decreases one’s trust in G-d.”

A Jew is supposed to serve G-d with joy, he explained, and that doesn’t apply only when one is studying Torah or praying. We are instructed to “Know G-d in all your ways” – everything we do is part of serving G-d, and that means that a Jew must be happy all the time! (more…)

In 1908, around the time my grandfather, Rabbi Eliezer Pupko, got married, he accepted a rabbinic position in a town called Velizh in the Smolensk region of Russia. Half of the residents were Jewish, and it was an enclave of Chabad chasidim, although my grandfather himself was not a chasid. He remained the rabbi there until 1930, when he, along with my grandmother and their children who were still in Velizh, escaped to Latvia under the noses of the OGPU – as the predecessor to the KGB was known.

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This meant that they experienced the upheaval of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the bad times that followed. Once the communists had taken control, they ruled with an iron hand.

Now, at the time, Velizh still had a large religious community, with one main synagogue and two or three smaller ones. My grandfather would spend every Shabbat in a different synagogue, but for the festivals and High Holidays, he would be in the main one. Although these synagogues were allowed to keep functioning into the 1920s, the communists had spies and infiltrators all over. As a result, it became very difficult to do anything related to religion without being spied upon, harassed, or worse. Teaching or helping others observe Judaism was even more dangerous, especially when it came to the education of children.

One of the first things the Soviets did after coming to power was to take over the schools and compel every child to attend. At school, the children would be asked to report on the activities in their own home and if, for some reason, the child said the “wrong” thing, their parents could be taken out and shot.

As a result of this kind of pressure, there were many Jewish people – members of the Velizh community included – who decided to take on the “free life” of being communists.

In the first half of 1927, when things were really bad, a group of these Jewish communists came over to my grandfather with inside information. They revealed that the then-Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, was going to be arrested on account of his “counter-revolutionary” activities in continuing to promote Judaism in the Soviet Union. These people had been Lubavitcher chasidim, and carried strong feelings of affection for the Rebbe. They couldn’t bring this information directly to the Rebbe, who was at the time in the city of Leningrad – today, as in tsarist times, S. Petersburg – and so they asked my grandfather to go to the Rebbe and pass on this message. (more…)

My father, Reb Nosson Vogel, had connected with Chabad chasidim in London in the early 60s, but it was when he traveled to visit the Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1965 that he was totally captivated by him, and became a chasid. My father subsequently founded the Lubavitch Boys’ Grammar School in London, which eventually morphed into today’s Yeshivah Gedolah.

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When I was eleven, in 1966, my father took my older brother and me to New York for the holiday of Sukkot to meet the Rebbe. For my father, the yardstick to measure how much we wanted to go to the Rebbe was whether we would come up with our own money for the ticket – and we did.

During our private audience with the Rebbe, my father told the Rebbe that our trip had been scheduled during our school break so that it wouldn’t come at the expense of learning Torah, which gave the Rebbe great satisfaction. Then, when my father mentioned that we had paid for our own tickets, the Rebbe smiled broadly and opened the drawer of his desk to give us each a fifty-dollar note. “I want to participate in paying for your trip,” he told us.

My second audience was in 1971, on my own, as a sixteen-year-old yeshivah student. Beforehand, I prepared a note with some questions for the Rebbe. One thing on my mind was my younger sister Hensha (Eliane) who was nine years younger than me. She was profoundly autistic. As an older brother, I felt that there was something I ought to be doing for her, at least spiritually. “What can I do to help my sister?” I wrote to the Rebbe.

“You are a yeshivah student,” the Rebbe answered after reading my note. “Go deep into your studies of the Talmud and Chasidut. By learning Torah, and by delving deep into it, you will reach the depth of your sister.”

The Rebbe was pointing out that my sister had a depth to her, something more than meets the eye. I could connect to that depth in her, and have a meaningful effect on her, but the way for me to access this depth was through studying Torah. (more…)

Towards the end of 1980, I traveled to New York with a group of friends, as part of the kvutza program, in which graduates of Chabad yeshivot in Israel spend a year with the Rebbe, studying at 770.

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Chabad students usually spend their Fridays on Jewish outreach, going out to help people put on tefillin or to distribute Shabbat candles, and that year I was hoping to do the same. After speaking to Rabbi Shraga Zalmanov, head of the Lubavitch Youth Organization’s Hebrew-speaking division, I found out that he would be visiting the local Israeli consulate on Sukkot – but nobody went there on a weekly basis. When I asked to come along, he happily agreed.

The following Friday, I returned on my own. I didn’t know whether I would be allowed in the building, which housed Israel’s diplomatic delegation to the United Nations, but I gave it a shot.

At the entrance, I rang the intercom.

“Who are you?” a voice inquired.

“Menashe from Chabad,” I answered. “I was here on Sukkot. Now I’ve come to offer tefillin to whoever is interested.” The door opened.

Within a month, I became a regular at the consulate. The security guards would open the door as soon as they saw me, and then come out to greet me with a warm hug. (more…)