The Avtzon family can count itself as part of the original corps of Russian Lubavitcher chassidim who physically as well as spiritually survived Stalin and the war years in exile in the Soviet Union. Rabbi Meir Avtzon a”h was born in 1909 in Mirgorod, Ukraine, studied in Tomchei Temimim in Charkov and became a mashgiach in the yeshivah in Kremenchu, and later in an underground yeshivah, as organized Torah learning was forbidden. Under the Communist regime, the intransigent chassid was exiled four times to places like Turkmenistan for the crime of teaching Torah. As World War II ended, he left Moscow for Tashkent, where he married Cheyena Karasik, daughter of Rav Leibel Karasik, famed mashpia in the town of Nevel.

(Cheyena’s mother died during the siege of Leningrad, and she slept in the cemetery for many nights to guard her mother’s kever Yisrael. Then, when she and her sisters were fleeing with their father, Reb Leibel died as they were running away to the countryside, and Cheyena buried him at the side of the road in the freezing Russian winter.)

Cheyena was 23 when they married, while Reb Meir was 36. In 1947, with one child, they managed to escape the USSR with Polish passports, boarding one of the last trains before the border was sealed. They lived in DP camps and then made their way to Paris under HIAS auspices, where Rabbi Avtzon helped raise funds for Tomchei Temimim in France. By the time they received papers to emigrate to Detroit six years later, in 1953, they had another five children.

Rabbi Avtzon soon found work as a mashgiach in a meatpacking plant, and did his utmost to teach chassidus and revive observance among the Jews in Detroit. He and his family lived in Oak Park, where they were famous for their supersized family (15 children).

Yonah Avtzon, born in 1957, was the eighth, and after learning in the Telshe yeshivah in Chicago, he went on to learn in Central Chabad-Lubavitch yeshivah in Crown Heights. His siblings, with the exception of Rabbi Gershon Avtzon — a well-known teacher of chassidus and the rosh yeshivah of Beis Menachem in Jerusalem for boys on an upward trajectory, Rabbi Mordechai Avtzon — longtime shaliach in Hong Kong, and Chani Zirkind of Chabad of Fresno, California, all eventually settled in Crown Heights.

IT

wasn’t long before Yaineh found his calling.

“In the late 1970s, a new crowd was coming in to Crown Heights,” his son Shmuly relates. “You had a lot of former hippies and college students who had become baalei teshuvah. These baalei teshuvah would attend the Rebbe’s farbrengens, but they didn’t understand Yiddish, so they couldn’t gain much.”

The Rebbe’s sichos were full of chiddushei Torah at the highest level, whether it was a hadran on a masechta or a chiddush in a maamar chassidus. So if you missed the nuances of language, you could miss the whole thing.

The Rebbe’s farbrengens began to have simultaneous live English translations in 1978 through headsets given out on request, but a year before that, Yaineh and some fellow yeshivah students began translating and printing the Rebbe’s Yiddish talks in English and distributing them in pamphlets all over the world.

In 1978, Sichos in English became an official organization. Yaineh, a trailblazing bochur known for his organizational skills, people skills, and tremendous dedication, was chosen to be in charge. He would at times bring translations to the Rebbe, who would then insert his own comments and edits.

Shmuly has a yellowing file of old faxes and documents, and shows us some of the original documents with the Rebbe’s handwritten edits.

“While I can’t always make out what the Rebbe had written, the notes are clearly concise and judicious,” he says. “Although English was only one of the Rebbe’s many languages — and certainly not one of his first — he had a keen eye for the subtleties of meaning.”

For example, when someone translated the phrase ol malchus Shayamim as “personal surrender,” the Rebbe changed it to “personal submission.” The subtle difference is that submission implies a yielding to Hashem’s Will while the struggle of the yetzer hara is still there, while surrender is a total giving up of the struggle or control. Another of many examples is that when someone translated a mitzvah temidis as a mitzvah for “all waking hours,” the Rebbe took out the word “waking,” to indicate that even in sleep they must be fulfilled.

The Rebbe urged his translators to avoid generalizations and exaggerations, avoid extreme or forceful language, choose positive rather than negative wording, and use straightforward language and phrasing. He told them that their translations should be neither too literal nor too free, doing their best to capture the Rebbe’s voice in English. Among other things, Yaineh oversaw the translation of the Rebbe’s press release after an assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981 (it was put into the public record), and of an essay about the importance of school prayer that was read in Congress.

The Rebbe was also a stickler for keeping the format of translated texts as close to the original as possible. For example, the famous ma’amar “Heichaltzu” by the Rebbe Rashab on the subject of conflict resolution and ahavas Yisrael was translated into English by SIE. In the hopes of achieving greater clarity, the translator moved references that had been in the main text to the bottom of the page. The Rebbe was not pleased; he wanted the translation to adhere as closely as possible to the original format. “If it already went to print, then leave it for now,” he told the team, “but in the future, print it in the original way.”

“The Rebbe was a very exacting boss, pushing his chassidim to maximize their G-d-given potential,” says Shmuly, who was just a child when the Rebbe had his debilitating stroke in 1992 (the Rebbe passed away two years later). “He wanted everything to be done early, ahead of schedule, and with excellence. He pushed people to do their very best.”

In 1983, Yaineh married Rivka Chazan of Bnei Brak. She was born in Moscow, where her parents were stalwart chassidim who bravely kept the flame of Judaism burning in Soviet Russia against all odds, holding clandestine prayers in their home, hosting bris milah and chuppah ceremonies, and even baking matzah in a hidden cellar oven. After 20 years as refuseniks, the Chazans were finally allowed to make aliyah in the late 1960s, when Rivka was six. (Rabbi Aharon Chazan would later write an autobiography entitled Deep into the Russian Night, which detailed his own family’s survival for years in the USSR while raising 13 children and remaining Torah-true).

In 1984, when the Rebbe asked his chassidim to learn three chapters of the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah a day (or one, if three were unsustainable), Yaineh instituted telephone call-in learning and hired lecturers, in order to make the learning more widely available. (If the lecturer didn’t come through for some reason, Yaineh would fill in himself.)

The Rebbe eventually trusted Yaineh’s judgment to the point where he no longer asked to see every translation SIE produced, as long as someone would be accountable. “If Yaineh takes responsibility for it, it’s enough,” the Rebbe said. But the result was that Yaineh Avtzon took his editing duties extremely seriously.

And what he took on was huge. The Rebbe spoke for over 11,000 hours in public, on over 3,000 occasions, and the Rebbe’s printed Torah, in Hebrew and Yiddish, is about 250 volumes. And that’s besides the many, many letters, talks and notes that have not yet been published and are still being worked on, which will bring the total to the 350-volume range.

The most unique feature of the Rebbe’s expositions, Shmuly explains, was his ability to seamlessly weave in all aspects of exegesis, the revealed parts of Torah (nigleh) as well as the hidden parts (nistar) in addition to what are commonly known as drush and sod.

“It can go from a profound explanation in Rashi to a halachic implication and then how Kabbalah and chassidus looks at it,” Shmuly explains, “and always, the Rebbe would say, ‘Torah milashon horaah (the word Torah comes from the word instruction),’ that it has to have a practical goal in day-to-day life. So no matter what the Rebbe was speaking about, even if it was a deep, elaborate pilpul in Kodshim, it was always connected to the times we’re living in, the spiritual energy of the specific time of the year, and what’s happening in our communities and around the world — because Torah is a living thing, and all parts of Torah come together.”

For decades, Rabbi Yonah Avtzon could be seen walking the streets between his home and office, reviewing page-after-page of manuscripts and printer’s proofs with a pair of reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. He personally read through every single one of the many works being readied for print by his team. And even as he battled the kidney ailment that eventually took his life, those files accompanied him to doctors’ visits and hospital stays.

“My father was always editing, wherever he went,” Shmuly relates. “He could be at a doctor’s appointment and have a sheaf of papers with him. It wasn’t until he got sick that he asked me to get involved a little. But before that, he never brought his children into his work. I think he wanted them to spread their own wings, to not have to follow in his shadow. And maybe he also figured there wasn’t much money in it.”

By the time of his passing on 3 Shevat in early 2019, SIE had published more than 150 volumes and hundreds of thousands of pages — not only of the Rebbe’s sichos, but various collections of his letter and correspondences, the Shulchan Aruch HaRav of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (seven of thirteen volumes were completed by a team of translators at the time of his passing, and another five have been completed since), and the Likkutei Dibburim of the previous Rebbe, Rav Yosef Yitzchak (known as the Rayatz).

When Yaineh was niftar, his children discovered that he had not paid himself $200,000 in back salary, preferring to make sure the others were paid first.

“We were a family of 12 kids,” Shmuly remarks, “and we always somehow had what we needed, but my father never put his own needs above those of his employees.”

Because his mission was to make sure the public would benefit from his texts, Yaineh sold his books at almost no profit and made all of his works accessible online for free, forgoing much potential revenue. For years, as Yaineh withheld his own salary, he sustained his family as a shadchan, surviving on shadchanus gelt. As a warm, affable people person, he had a gift for making matches.

“My father was the shadchan in Lubavitch for 20 years,” Shmuly says. “He made more than 400 shidduchim and accompanied many couples through the process. When he passed away, people came to the shivah and said things like, ‘My daughter just went on her third date! What should we do now?’”

ASYaineh Avtzon’s health declined, he began giving Shmuly — who at that point was teaching chassidus in the 770 beis medrash — an hour or two of editing to do every day. (Of course, Yaineh would review the work.)

After one particular hospital stay, Yaineh came home and did his best to continue editing. “Ta, you have no energy,” Shmuly told his father. “Why do you need to push yourself?”

“My father felt he had a mandate from the Rebbe, which compelled him to continue,” Shmuly says. “I asked him, ‘Did the Rebbe tell you to do all the edits personally, or to take achrayus for them? Maybe you can delegate some of the work.’”

For a moment, his father wavered. “Shmuly, I’ve been doing this for 40 years for the Rebbe,” he said. “I can’t stop now.”

But Yaineh called him a few days later and asked him to go to his basement office, where he had left some papers with edits on the side. He asked Shmuly to work on some pages for him.

“I went and got those pages and saw that they had some of my father’s edits on them, so I asked him what exactly I should do with them, what I should look for,” Shmuly remembers.

It was just eight days before Yaineh’s passing, when he sent his son a message. “He was working on a sichah of the Rebbe on parshas Bereishis for the first volume of Selections from Likkutei Sichos,” Shmuly says, “and he wrote, ‘See it so you know what I look for.’”

This felt like a message that the Rebbe’s mandate was being passed to him. Shmuly panicked. “What should I do about this?” he asked his older brother, Rabbi Levi Avtzon, a shaliach in South Africa (who subsequently joined the SIE Vaad together with longtime translator Rabbi Eli Touger and Mayer Preger).

But then their father was niftar, and the matter took on its own momentum as Shmuly was encouraged to step up to the plate. Shmuly says, “I was barely 31 years old, and I felt very young to take on such responsibility, even though my father started this work when he wasn’t even 20. I thought, ‘Who am I to take this on?’ It’s not like I’d been groomed for years for this job.”

He did have some years of teaching under his belt, an experience that comes through in the precise, pedagogical way he has of relating ideas and events. He’s never at a loss for a date or a quote from a source. He also has a polished, professional presence that is surely helping when dealing with his staff and donors.

At the time, SIE had seven employees, some of them as old or older than his father. It had already branched out from translating the Rebbe’s sichos to translating other works of Chabad chassidus.

Shmuly became an unwitting publisher with salaries to pay and donors to court. Initially, he suffered from a bad case of imposter syndrome. He had no business or managerial background, no editorial training beyond his father’s brief guidance, and — articulate and well-spoken as he is — no formal secular education, as is the policy in many Chabad cheders and yeshivos.

When asked how Chabad puts out such polished publications, when many of the chassidim have little secular education, Shmuly just shrugs. “We just don’t follow the usual rules,” he says. Maybe it’s a combination of determination, intelligence, siyata d’Shmaya, and perhaps the Rebbe’s brachah, that underlie the success of this and so many other enterprises.

Shmuly says that he did seek out business training, “but I didn’t find it helped that much. I mostly learned on the job.”

Still, hoping to learn more about the Jewish publishing business, he set up a meeting with the director of a leading well-known and respected Jewish publishing company.

“He gave me some of the tricks of the trade,” Shmuly says. “But there was one point on which we differed. He told me I had to have total control of my product, with the content locked in. At SIE, my father had a policy to make all the content available online, for free. He thought, however, that we should abolish that, and from a business standpoint, he was probably right.

“I realized that there are different models for running a publishing business, and our modus operandi is hafatzah, spreading Torah. We can put everything online, and people will still buy our seforim. By putting things online, we can reach not just thousands of people but hundreds of thousands.”

Of course, there were people even in his own circles who told him the book business is moribund. But SIE has disproven the naysayers. Jews always want to learn from a sefer, especially on Shabbos, and the nearly 700-percent growth of SIE since Shmuly took over is proof of that.

Sales are especially strong during the week of the nineteenth of Kislev (the day Rav Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the Admor Hazaken or Alter Rebbe of Chabad, was freed from prison, heralding a new era in the revelation of the “hidden” Torah), and the fifth of Teves.

“There was a lawsuit about the ownership of the Rebbe’s vast library, and it was decided in Chabad’s favor on 5 Teves in 1987,” Shmuly explains. “It became a day of celebration in Chabad. How did we celebrate winning back a library? With books, of course. Today we have a full week of book sales, and up to 90 percent of our direct sales happen during that time.”

HE received another golden nugget of advice about running the business from a contemporary in the Chabad publishing industry.

“You can look at SIE as your organization, or you can see it as the Rebbe’s organization,” he said. “If it’s the Rebbe’s organization, then the Rebbe will find ways to make it work.”

That change in mindset not only eased Shmuly’s sense of burden, but played itself out in incidents that he describes as “crazy Hashgachah.”

For example, in 2021 he found his back against the wall when he needed $40,000 to print a sefer by the promised date. He reached out to one of his donors, who had to decline. “I can’t give such a big sum,” the would-be donor said.

That was at 2:45 in the afternoon. That evening, around 9 p.m., he received a text from Moshe*, a wealthy individual with whom he had developed a connection, but had never approached for a donation. It was the end of July, and they hadn’t had any contact since May.

Suddenly Shmuly’s phone pinged with a message from Moshe: “I was at the Ohel (the kever of the Rebbe and the Rayatz) today, and I felt inspired to make a donation of $36,000 to SIE.”

Elated, Shmuly went back to his first donor to ask for the remaining $4,000, which he happily contributed.

“In seven hours, I received everything I needed,” he says.

A year later, a similar scenario replayed itself. SIE needed $50,000 to publish the next sefer in the series. Remembering Moshe, Shmuly reached out to say he needed money. “Whatever you can do,” he wrote.

The response came a few hours later. “Yes, I can do something,” Moshe wrote. “Ironically, I was at the Ohel again today, and when I wrote my note for the Rebbe, I ended it with, ‘I remain available to support your initiatives and endeavors as you make them known to me.’ Let me know.”

Moshe donated $25,000, and gave again the following year.

“This is the Rebbe’s project, and the Rebbe is paying the bills,” Shmuly says. “We don’t operate according to the traditional fundraising model — raise the money, then plan the project. We jump in and do the project first, and then we figure out the money. So far, it’s been working.”

Some of those projects include a new, multi-volume set of Likutei Sichos in English. SIE has also expanded on an initiative that Yaineh began, compiling and translating volumes on specific topics the Rebbe talked about, such as shidduchim, health, chinuch, and various topics specific to women, including the Rebbe’s revolutionary approach to limud Torah for women and their special role in doing hafatzah, given their unique feminine koach and capacity.

Shmuly notes that it’s now 50 years since what the Rebbe called “Shnas Hachinuch (the year dedicated to Torah education,” in which he introduced the famous “12 Pesukim” (from Torah and Chazal) for children to learn and recite daily, explaining that it would totally transform their day.

“Several times a year, the Rebbe would have talks and rallies just for children — it was quite unusual for a gadol to have special talks only with children,” Shmuly relates. “The Rebbe introduced a model, how to understand kids, how kids think, what makes them tick, and how to enable them to grow in their avodas Hashem — so that’s something else we’re putting together, which is especially important today as parents are bombarded with parenting models that come from foreign, non-Jewish sources and hashkafos.”

Chabad chassidus has never shied away from technology. The Rebbe trained as an engineer at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, and always recognized the potential of media such as radio, phone lines, and even television broadcasts to propagate Torah. In a speech in 1984, the Rebbe stated that technology, particularly radio, “is a koach adir, an awesome power, that Hashem embedded in nature,” to be used for the propagation of Torah and chassidus.

But whether or not the Rebbe ever imagined the massive power of AI and its interface with nearly every part of our lives, it was only a matter of time until SIE began to adopt artificial intelligence as an aid in its translation work. The problem with this, as anyone in the editing and translation business knows, is that AI tends to “hallucinate,” producing responses that are not accurate. Small mistakes can drastically change the meaning of a text, and a phrase used by a rebbe in the eighteenth century may mean something different in the context of an AI 2025 “brain.” SIE currently has a team of programmers working to upgrade its AI software to avoid such errors, while going ahead with using AI for translation.

“For certain projects, we’ve gotten it to do about 75 percent of the work, while we do the rest,” Shmuly says. “Our translators have to be vigilant about the accuracy and edit everything that comes out. But it allows us to work more quickly and efficiently.”

There was an impromptu “AI + Chassidus” conference this past summer to discuss the possibilities. Shmuly Avtzon, an eager participant, introduced a platform being developed by SIE that will offer immersive and personalized chassidus learning. This new platform, with adaptive content and guided interaction, will meet users at their level and help them advance step by step.

This planned “virtual beis medrash” of SIE, in partnership with other major Chabad publishers such as Kehot Publication Society and Lahak Hanochos, is a platform that has all of Chabad chassidus on it — hundreds and hundreds of seforim, all digitalized, translated and available in multiple languages, and on different levels for all types of people from all types of backgrounds. It will include everything that AI brings to the table — text access, AI study tools, human community, multimedia content, and practical resources.

“The idea is to make chassidus engaging, interactive, and exciting,” Shmuly says. It would allow anyone from an unaffiliated Jew with very little background to a seminary student to a kollel avreich to access texts with translations, summaries, and questions and answers — and with a level of accuracy that AI isn’t best known for.

The goal, he says, is hafatzah, spreading Torah to as many Jews as possible. That’s one of the first lessons he learned from his father. When Chabad.org founder Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Kazen a”h, who envisioned a world where Jewish teachings would be available everywhere even before the World Wide Web was up and running, began sharing Jewish content on the nascent Internet in the mid-1990s, Yaineh was one of his early partners, excited about this new medium in which his translated texts could reach unimaginable multitudes.

“Chassidus teaches that in the time of Mashiach, the lower physical world and the higher spiritual world will merge and infuse each other,” Shmuly says. “We are using technology to spread that ruchnius even in the ‘lowest’ places. Because as we’re standing at the precipice of Geulah, this is a time in which, no matter who you are, you can have direct access to the deepest secrets of the Torah.”

Rachel Ginsberg contribute to this report.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1090)