Survival Gear

The name Semyon Dimenstein may not mean very much to today’s Jews, but to their forebears in the Soviet Union, the first head of the Yevsektsiya was a fearsome enemy.

His story encapsulates the tragedy-within-a-tragedy of the Russian Revolution, in which Jews were persecuted with messianic zeal by their own brothers.

Born Shimon Dimenstein, he was a talmid of Telz, Slabodka, and Lubavitch, and received semichah from Rav Shlomo HaKohein, the Cheshek Shlomo of Vilna; and Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzenski.

It was Dimenstein’s monster that the Rayatz faced when he became the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1920, at 40 years old.

Two institutions enabled Chabad under the Rayatz’s leadership to survive the Soviet inquisition. The first developed in 1897, when Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn got married. For a wedding gift, he asked his father for a yeshivah, which until then, didn’t exist in the Lubavitch educational structure.

The Rashab’s initial response, says Rabbi Eliezrie, was that such an institution was a “misnagdishe shtick,” but he then swung behind the idea. The reason was that Lubavitch itself — a bastion of Chabad chassidus for a century — was under the assault of modernity and secularism. Branches of a Maskilic school network and a Marxist-Zionist organization were making headway among the young people.

It was against that background that the Rayatz’s idea took root. Tomchei Temimim, as the first yeshivah was called, eventually expanded into a network that spread across the USSR and outlived the Communist regime itself.

As the Soviets cracked down on Jewish life throughout the 1920s and 1930s, yeshivos went from large institutions to small, ad-hoc groups of talmidim gathering in secret with a rebbi.

Records — both from Chabad and Soviet documents — show that there were yeshivos active at different stages in dozens of cities all across the USSR. “They could be just a few people learning with a rebbi,” says Rabbi Eliezrie, “but the crucial thing was that a chain of transmission — however fragile — continued unbroken throughout the Communist years.”

Its products included key figures who went on to rebuild Chabad outside Russia, such as Rabbi Mendel Futerfas, a chassid whose defiance of Stalinist oppression has been immortalized in well-known stories, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s secretary.

Secret Society

“The second institution that allowed Lubavitch to defy the Soviets was a krisas bris, a secret covenant, between the Rayatz and a very small group of chassidim,” says Rabbi Eliezrie. “That pact — whose contents were never divulged — gave the Rayatz generals a secret army that was fielded across the breadth of Russia.”

The pact took place in Moscow in 1924. By that time, teaching Torah was punishable by death and classes had gone underground, in some cases literally so.

The participants in the covenant were responsible for coordinating a clandestine network of elementary schools, yeshivos, shuls, and mikvaos. Evidence of the network’s existence is found in a report sent to the Joint, the American Jewish relief organization. In 1926, the Joint was told that some 15,000 children were being educated in secret by Chabad’s schools.

“In Moscow alone, we have three hundred children studying in small groups of three,” the report said. “They hide in cellars and in summertime they go out to the woods. If a teacher is arrested, thirty rubles are needed to support his family. Though the teachers and children know the danger, they heroically take all risks for their education.”

The decision of the Rayatz to stay and fight on in Russia was pivotal for Russian Jewry as a whole.

Other gedolim stayed on to lead their communities as well. Rav Moshe Feinstein was rabbi of Lyuban, near Minsk in White Russia, until 1937 when he moved to the United States. “I can’t stay in a place where — like a bathroom — it’s forbidden to mention G-d’s Name,” he said.

Rav Yechezkel Abramsky was another holdout staying in his post as the rabbi of Slutzk — also Belarus — until he was arrested in 1929 and sentenced to five years in Siberia.

But after the Revolution, as major litvish yeshivos such as Radin, Kletzk, and Novardok fled Russia, although individual rabbanim stayed on to lead their communities, Chabad was the only institution to develop an infrastructure to sustain Jewish life on a large scale.

Facing the brutal might of the Yevsektsiya, the Rayatz developed a strategy that involved utilizing Soviet law. In their fanatic zeal, Jewish Communists often went far beyond the letter of the law, and in some instances, it was possible to appeal to the authorities to rein in the Jewish Communists.

For instance, Soviet law in the 1920s permitted up to six children to study religion privately with a teacher, but the Yevsektsiya tried to stamp that out as well.

Overseeing the battle across the giant country was the Rayatz, though he was hounded by his Jewish foes, who saw in him someone capable of rallying widespread resistance.

What kept the Lubavitcher Rebbe going during those years of underground struggle was the memory of his father’s vision that the all-out Soviet offensive wouldn’t last forever. “Whenever I feel disheartened,” he wrote in a 1926 diary entry while in Moscow, “I recall that Friday when the Rebbe spoke terrifying words to me.”

Facing the Worst

Constantly hounded by the secret police, there was plenty to dishearten even a giant of spirit. He was arrested multiple times, showing incredible bravery and faith as he faced down the fearsome secret machinery that was the terror of Soviet citizens.

In 1926, the Rayatz opposed the convening of a state-sponsored national Jewish conference that was intended to weaken traditionalist elements within the country’s Jewish community.

The very need for the conference showed that a decade after the Revolution, the future of the country’s 2.6 million-strong Jewish community was still undecided.

In fury at the Rayatz’s brazen opposition, the Soviet secret police decided to act.

In June 1927, with “Schneersohn,” as the Soviets called him, living in Leningrad, the Rayatz was arrested by a squad of armed agents who broke down the front door in a midnight raid.

In what must have been a horrific blow for the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the arresting officers were sons of his own chassidim.

One was Mikhail Nachmanson, who joined the Bolsheviks at age 16 and rose to a high rank within the NKVD. The other, Grigory Lulov from Riga, similarly attained distinction within the secret police.

As the Rayatz took leave of his ashen-faced wife and family, Lulov chose to taunt the captive with a cruel mockery of chassidic custom.

Gesturing to the small bag containing the Rebbe’s tallis, tefillin, and a few essentials, the renegade offered to carry it.

“My grandfather once carried your grandfather’s bag,” he said. “Chassidim remain chassidim, and I, too, will carry your belongings.”

Unbowed by the officer’s brazenness, the Lubavitcher Rebbe spurned the offer and handed the bag to a guard.

The devastating behavior exhibited by the two secret policemen was just one small episode among countless acts of treachery that abounded as Jewish youth in Communist Russia turned their backs on tradition, to worship at the altar of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

The fates of the pair exemplified the double tragedy of Jews who sold their souls to the Bolshevik devil: having served the killing machine, they thought their loyalty made them immune until they were themselves devoured by it.

In the great Stalinist purges of the late 1930s in which millions of supposed enemies of the state were killed, Lulov was arrested and shot. Nachmanson was lucky to survive and was merely sentenced to years of exile in Siberia. But in an example of the messianism that had led these renegades astray in the first place, he died in the 1990s a true Communist believer, never repenting his role in hunting his father’s rebbe.

Unbowed, Unbroken

Arrested by his Jewish persecutors, the Rayatz was taken to Leningrad’s Sparlerno prison, a notorious NKVD facility for political prisoners who were subjected to brutal interrogations. He was to remain there for 19 days in what he later termed “Maseches Gehinnom.” The first chapter in his personal tractate of suffering began immediately.

Within a few hours of arrival, the Lubavitcher Rebbe was told that he’d been arrested in an anticlerical sweep. The majority of the ministers — including a Lutheran and a Muslim — were immediately shot by firing squad.

Incredibly, in the depths of a place that generated uncontrollable terror among even the hardiest souls, the Rayatz managed to wrench back his mental equilibrium by holding onto his faith. As he later wrote:

“Like a flash of lightning, there gleamed within my mind: ‘And what of G-d? Who has done this? Who generated this entire sequence of events?’ Everything has its source in G-d. At that moment I emerged from the constraints of my situation with thoughts beyond the confines of our finite, physical existence. I was bolstered by absolute trust in the living G-d.”

Refusing to be cowed, he stared down his interrogators and demanded that they return his tefillin and personal possessions. The officers scoffed until the Rayatz burst out:

“During the two hours that I have been here, I have heard it repeated dozens of times that I am a prisoner. I do not know if I alone am a prisoner, or if all the officials here are also prisoners. Stop your abusive diatribes regarding religious matters that are holy to me. The law authorizes me to request my belongings, and it says that you must permit me to pray.”

That fortitude continued over the weeks that followed. Under interrogation, he was offered a bargain: Rescind his opposition to the Jewish conference, or face death. Incredibly, this great Jewish leader refused to bow.

The arrest of the Lubavitcher Rebbe made global headlines, and the Rebbe’s followers successfully persuaded prominent figures such as Justice Louis Brandeis — one of America’s most influential Jews — to speak up on the Rayatz’s behalf.

With the USSR eager to secure formal recognition from the US government, the level of negative attention that the arrest generated eventually persuaded the Soviets to commute the death sentence to one of Siberian exile.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe wasn’t the only figure whose global stature made him both a target of the regime’s fire, and simultaneously too prominent a personality for the Soviets to dispatch with ease.

A parallel case was that of Rav Yechezkel Abramsky whose arrest and imprisonment generated pushback from German politicians and led to his eventual release.

That pattern foreshadowed the treatment of well-known refuseniks decades later, when the international fame of certain Jewish dissidents provided a measure of protection from the Soviet authorities who were anxious to squeeze concessions from the West.

Eventually, the campaign for the Rayatz’s release — which had drafted Madam Peshkova, wife of famous Soviet writer Maxim Gorky — was successful. But as the Rebbe made his way back to his family, it was clear that his days in Russia were numbered.

If he attempted to rally his followers in the country, he would simply disappear inside the Gulag once again.

The Rayatz was forced to say goodbye to his beleaguered followers inside the Soviet police state. But when he departed Leningrad for Riga, Latvia in 1927, he left behind a vast, albeit fragile Jewish underground. “The clandestine system endured, despite the harassment, imprisonment, and even execution of many key activists,” says Rabbi Eliezrie.

Going Underground

A few significant episodes allow us to sense the scale of the underground network’s activity.

One hint as to the network’s clout appeared in Moscow on Rosh Hashanah of 1948, when Israel’s new ambassador Golda Meir visited the capital’s main shul to show support for the country’s Jewish community.

While most shuls across the USSR had long been shuttered, with Yiddish instruction forbidden to prevent young Jews learning about their religion from their elders, Moscow’s Choral Synagogue was left open as window-dressing. It was there to show foreign diplomats that the Soviet regime practiced freedom of worship — just that only a few old people were interested in such retrograde ideas in the Worker’s Paradise.

But that Rosh Hashanah, instead of the mere few hundred old people who normally showed up for shul, tens of thousands appeared. The delirious scenes of Jewish identity shocked Stalin, who was just a few miles away in the Kremlin.

“Who do you think brought out the crowds?” asks Rabbi Eliezrie. “I heard from Israeli ambassador Yehuda Avner what he heard from Golda Meir herself: It was Chabad.”

And then there were the bochurim from Uzbekistan’s Samarkand and Tashkent. Deep in the Soviet interior, where Stalin’s writ was fainter, there were yeshivos — heirs to the Tomchei Temimim movement that the Rayatz had founded.

“I remember them coming to yeshivah in Kfar Chabad during the 1970s,” remembers Rabbi Eliezrie. “They could learn already, because they’d already been to yeshivah back in the USSR.”

Then there were Chabad’s Russian elders who were the movement’s backbone in the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1946 and 1947, a thousand Chabad families were able to escape Russia to Poland, at a time when the internal borders of the postwar Soviet bloc hadn’t yet hardened.

Some of these chassidim — hardened by the struggle in Russia — became the foot soldiers of the postwar Chabad rebuilding. But not all.

“Having suffered so much under Stalin, it was a struggle to motivate them to leave Crown Heights and Kfar Chabad for shlichus, as the Rebbe wanted,” says Rabbi Eliezrie.

These escapees, who had survived decades of Communist Russia, were a presence everywhere in Chabad of the 1970s — and were in fact the trigger for Rabbi Eliezrie to take up the pen.

“I grew up surrounded by these Russian chassidim. There were many in Kfar Chabad where I arrived as a teenager in 1968 and where I remained until a few months before the Yom Kippur War. The yeshivah’s two mashpiim — responsible for the study of chassidus in Chabad yeshivahs — were graduates of Stalin’s school of mesirus nefesh.

One was Rabbi Shlomo Chaim Kesselman, a talmid of the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Rashab back in the town of Lubavitch, who served as a mashpia for half a century in Russia and Kfar Chabad.

The second was Rabbi Mendel Futerfas, a Chabad legend. He was one of the prime organizers of the great escape of Chabad chassidim in 1946 and 1947, in which 1,000 families fled the Soviet Union. As the operation ended, he was caught and sentenced to nine years of hard labor in Siberia.

“To understand who Reb Mendel was,” says Rabbi Eliezrie, “the story is that when he was released from Siberia, he went to Moscow where he approached a small group of chassidim for a loan to start a business.

“You always worked for the Rebbe’s causes,” one wondered, “and now you want to go into business?”

“No, my business is starting a cheder,” he replied.

“When you look at a man who was in Siberia for nine years, and that was his ‘business,’ it changes you,” Rabbi Eliezrie says. “I saw that he had been inspired to live as he did and so I started trying to learn about the man who inspired him. The Rayatz created a culture of mesirus nefesh, as well as fearlessness and individualism, which are hallmarks of Chabad to this day.”

Later, while on shlichus in Florida as a campus rabbi, the head shaliach to whom a young Rabbi Eliezrie answered was another role model: Rabbi Avraham Korf had been a talmid in the Chabad underground institutions in Uzbekistan’s Tashkent and Samarkand.

“Being surrounded by these giants made me want to understand who had molded them to stand up for Yiddishkeit as a group in such an unparalleled way. That led to the Rayatz.”

Outside of Chabad, at least, Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn’s transformative role is largely unknown. The reason for that is not just the passage of time, but the great glare of the last Lubavitcher Rebbe’s own legend — whose work was in many ways to implement his father-in-law’s approach.

“I was helped in the process of learning about the Rayatz by the fact that — unusually among gedolim — he recorded everything in great detail in his diary,” says Rabbi Eliezrie. “He was a poetic writer, who managed to convey great emotion in his entries.”

Besides the sixth Rebbe’s own writing, the research process was assisted by the Chabad tradition of writing family histories, as well as archival material in America, Israel, and Russia about the wider contexts of the Chabad-Soviet clash.

New World

For an indication of how famous the Rayatz was, look no further than the picture of his visit to President Herbert Hoover’s White House in July 1930, where he thanked the administration for its part in his release.

In an era where Orthodoxy struggled for access at the top table, the Rebbe’s global renown gave him entrée to halls of power normally reserved for Reform Jews only.

On that visit to the United States, the Lubavitcher Rebbe visited the Midwest, where he was greeted by crowds who numbered in the thousands in different cities. He came as the tzaddik and hero who had faced down the Soviets.

The numbers were misleading; although he had many admirers, there were only a handful of his own chassidim in the country at the time. But the Rayatz worked with whatever he had.

And above all, he was forward looking — as unafraid of the new world as he’d been of the old.

“What struck me when reading his diary entries is his flexibility,” says Rabbi Eliezrie. “He knew Russia and Eastern Europe, yet was able to adapt himself to the new dynamics of America.”

A decade later, the Lubavitcher Rebbe would move to America when the curtain came down on Europe. But it was on this trip that he came to see America not just as a land of freedom, but also a land of spiritual possibility.

“He had a great sense of optimism about Yiddishkeit in America,” says Rabbi Eliezrie, “because he saw a certain purity of spirit among young people. In Philadelphia, he met a group of youth and told them, ‘You are making me the happiest I’ve been since arriving here.’ ”

When the Rayatz finally arrived in America in 1940, having built a yeshivah and following in chassidic Warsaw that was then caught up in the Nazi onslaught, it was to begin over again once more.

Greeted by a large crowd when his ship docked, he fired the opening salvo of a campaign to transform the low ebb of Jewish practice in the country.

On the dock, a Jewish reporter approached him and asked what his plans were. “I’ve come to make America a makom Torah,” was his response.

When the man scoffed that America wasn’t the place for such ideas, the Rebbe replied with total conviction. “America iz nisht andersht — America isn’t different,” he said.

The newcomer was serious — so serious in fact, that as the Rayatz noted in his diary, some of his American followers came over to try and dissuade him from rash initiatives that had no chance of working in America.

One such initiative was the creation of day schools. Within a short time, the Rayatz began sending out rabbinical couples, part of whose mandate was to found day schools. This was a sharp departure from the norm of afternoon Talmud Torahs.

Outside of Crown Heights, early outposts were in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston.

He went on to pioneer the use of Released Time — religious programs for public school students during school hours — for Jewish students. It was a mark of self-confidence that had hitherto been lacking among American Orthodoxy that shrank from taking their beliefs into the public square.

Just how revolutionary the day school initiative was can be grasped by a significant date: In 1944 — or four years after the Lubavitcher Rebbe began his own campaign — Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz founded Torah Umesorah, the famed day school network.

The ideational link between the litvish yeshivah community and Chabad had in a sense begun decades before, back in 1897 when the Rayatz borrowed the idea of a modern yeshivah as a model for his own network.

Now, in 1940s America, came payback time. At one point, Reb Shraga Feivel’s institution ran into crippling financial trouble and was faced with foreclosure by the banks.

At the eleventh hour, the Lubavitcher Rebbe stepped in, despite the precarious financial position of his own nascent endeavors. To Reb Shraga Feivel’s astonishment, an emissary arrived bearing a check and a message. It read as follows:

The Rebbe “is pained to hear that a major yeshivah is going to be closed — not because Stalin in Russia wants to get rid of Judaism, but because the Jews in America don’t care. This the Rebbe can’t abide.”

Rising Tide

The differing approaches to saving American Jewry — outward-looking versus inward-focused — reprised the same debate that had taken place in Russia two decades before, says Rabbi Eliezrie, as rabbanim debated whether to flee and conserve the yeshivos or stay and fight for the Jewish masses.

There was another American echo from the European past. Just as in the prewar era, when Lubavitch didn’t join Agudas Yisroel, yet wasn’t part of the Hungarian rabbinic bloc that rejected the Agudah, postwar Chabad went its own path. That nonalignment mostly continues to this day, where the movement is wary of losing its independent status.

The Rayatz’s strategy was perceived by a 19-year-old yeshivah bochur, Herschel Fogelman, who was on hand to greet the Lubavitcher Rebbe when his boat docked in 1940.

“We, the students of Torah Vodaath, felt like pioneers in a wagon train on the prairie surrounded by Indians. The Rebbe’s arrival was like the cavalry had finally come to save us. But the Rebbe didn’t just want to chase off the Indians, he wanted to conquer the whole continent.”

That memorable assessment makes it clear why the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe is one of the unsung heroes of the postwar Torah renaissance. There were other great pioneers who similarly refused to compromise in imagining a full-blooded religious future in America. A year after the Lubavitcher Rebbe came, Rav Aharon Kotler arrived in America. In 1943, he founded his revolutionary yeshivah in Lakewood that is now the engine of a mighty American yeshivah world. Three years later, the Satmar Rav arrived to found his community in Williamsburg.

But their approach — unlike that of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe — was to focus on internal rebuilding without attempting to save the wider Jewish world.

In retrospect, both approaches paid off.

In terms of raw numbers, titanic figures like Rav Aharon Kotler and the Satmar Rebbe founded movements whose size dwarfs Chabad. Add to that the many great roshei yeshivah and chassidic rebbes who rebuilt their own institutions, and the approach of focusing inwardly has created a massive, self-confident world of Torah and chassidus.

In the final analysis, the postwar renaissance has been a group effort in which no one group can claim all the credit. No stream of American Orthodoxy is an island unto itself, and the rising tide generated by all the movements has lifted all boats.

Outward Bound

The experience of one Hungarian Holocaust survivor, says Rabbi Elizerie, exemplified the two schools of thought among postwar gedolim.

This man had relatives in Australia who were willing to sponsor his relocation, and approached Rabbi Yonasan Steif, a famed dayan in prewar Budapest who had been his rav, for guidance.

“There is no Yiddishkeit in Australia — stay here in the US in our community,” was the answer.

But in a quandary, the man decided to approach the Lubavitcher Rebbe. “You say that there is no Yiddishkeit there — so you’ll make Yiddishkeit there,” the Rebbe told him.

Today’s global Chabad network has its roots in that message, when the Rebbe directed his chassidim — and any survivor who would listen — to see themselves not just as refugees but as teachers and givers.

“The Rebbe prodded them to take on leadership roles, infusing them with a new sense of purpose.”

Australia — where Chabad now enjoys a dominant role — is a case in point. In encouraging six families to immigrate to the distant continent, he told them that “this is a mission that the Divine Providence has brought you there to fulfill.”

Outreach was everywhere, including American campuses — another aspect of the Rayatz’s bold innovation. Decades before the yeshivah world’s kiruv movement moved onto university campuses, the Lubavitcher Rebbe sent two students to Brandeis University, encouraging them to reach out to fellow Jewish students.

The Rayatz may not always have been first — Chabad’s North African schools were founded in the 1950s, whereas the Otzar Hatorah network began in 1945, for example. It may not always have been transformative — England’s postwar Jewish boom came from other sources, for example.

But step into the wider Jewish world beyond today’s vast Orthodox community, and the Rayatz’s contribution seems peerless. Whether Chabad pioneered or not, the Rayatz created a movement from scratch that has been a relentless force for reaching out to Jews wherever they are.

Warm Welcome    

Besides his own work as shaliach in Yorba Linda — part of the Greater Los Angeles area — where he moved in the early 1980s, Rabbi David Eliezrie himself has become something of the face of Chabad’s emergence as a national force.

He is Chabad’s representative to major organizations such as the Jewish Federations and is a member of the Jewish Agency’s board of governors.

That seat at the top table of organizations that were previously secular strongholds is an acknowledgement of Chabad’s centrality to wider American Jewish life.

But Rabbi Eliezrie says that Chabad is not just a force to be reckoned with — it’s now bigger than Reform in terms of engagement. “A Pew report from 2020 shows that 37 percent of American Jews have interacted with us once, and of the 16 percent who do so often, over 65 percent are Reform, Conservative, or unaffiliated.”

And that, says the biographer of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, is the ultimate tribute to his subject. “He was a lone soldier, facing down Communism, then assimilation in America and worldwide.”

Chabad’s emergence in the postwar world contains an element of poetic balance. The leader who was forced to take his movement underground for it to survive Communist Russia, then seeded its reincarnation as an institution which, more than any other, is a visible Jewish presence in the public square.

For Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn himself, the one-man stand against the Yevsektsiya and Stalin, against Jewish apathy and despair, were his marching orders — those he’d received from his father.

“I am my father’s disciple,” went one line in his vast correspondence. “A Jew who was instilled with ahavas Yisrael and the idea that we must put our lives on the line for another Jew.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1098)