our rebbeim – Melava Malka Stories

The Rebbe’s Miraculous Recovery

For five weeks in 1977, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and people the world over anxiously prayed for the recovery of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson, of righteous memory, after he suffered a sudden massive heart attack that left the doctors wondering whether he would pull through.

Dr. Ira Weiss, a Chicago-based cardiologist, flew to New York shortly after the Rebbe’s attack to serve as one of the lead physicians.

From Crown Heights to Miami

Our family arrived from Russia to France in 1947, and I was born the year after, the second of five children. When I was six, we emigrated to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, to be with the Rebbe.

From Bali to Israel

A young man from Rabbi Raskin’s congregation was getting married in Israel and his journey from Indonesia to Israel is a story of Hashgacha Pratis – Divine Intervention!

It all began with the groom’s grandfather, a textile merchant who immigrated from Iraq to Israel before 1948. As his business dealings expanded and developed in international arenas, he decided to move his family to Bali, Indonesia. He arrived there with his wife and young daughter, Chana.

The Mysterious Salvation

It happened one day that a poor man who lived close to Vilna, came to the city of Vilna. He was a very learned person and a Chasid and was walking to Liozna to the Alter Rebbe. Passing through Vilna, he decided to remain there for Shabbat. He made himself comfortable in the synagogue, took out a Gemara (book of the Oral Torah) from the bookcase and sat down to learn.The shamash (synagogue caretaker) realized that this passerby was not like the usual poor people.

The power of Tanya

The Rebbe’s grandfather, Reb Meir Shlomo Yanovsky*, was the Rav of Nikolayev. Once, there was a typhus epidemic and Reb Meir Shlomo fell ill. At that time there was no known cure for the illness. All the victims were quarantined in a building outside the city to avoid spreading the disease, and they were treated by a doctor who visited daily. Very few people returned from the building alive.

The Children’s role in the Yom Kippur war

“Being privileged to grow up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as a child, I would see the Rebbe all the time. Typically, we saw him on Shabbat, as there was school during the week, but I remember how exciting it was when we would be able to go to 770 (the central Chabad synagogue where the Rebbe davened – prayed and farbrenged – led Chassidic gatherings) for the Minchah service on days there was no school. At 3:15 in the afternoon, the Rebbe would come into the synagogue, and he would hand us each a coin to place in a charity box.

Continue reading The Children’s role in the Yom Kippur war

Ink that doesn’t fade

The well-known Rabbi Yosef Wineberg shared an interesting experience. In 1945, when he was living in Chicago, the Previous Rebbe sent his emissary, the distinguished Chassidic rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Levitin, to Chicago on a special mission. Rabbi Levitin was sent by the Lubavitcher Rebbe to visit and bring warmth and inspiration to the Jewish community in Chicago in general and to a certain Mr. Lisner in particular.

Rescued by the Rebbe: A Journey from Curacao to New York

I grew up in Curacao, a Caribbean Island that is part of the Netherlands Antilles. There were no Jewish schools on the island at the time, and I attended the Protestant school.

A Jewish priest

I was born and raised in Basel, Switzerland in 1937. When I was fifteen, my family moved to the Netherlands, where my father became the Chief Rabbi of the Hague. Here he opened a yeshivah for Hungarian refugees from the war. Five years later, I came to New York to enroll in the central Lubavitch yeshivah in Crown Heights.

Heartfelt tears of a mother saves her family

In the annals of Chabad, who has not heard of Reb Peretz Chein z”l, the prodigious Chasid of the Alter Rebbe, first Chabad Rebbe. His progeny today are leaders and shakers and movers around the world numbering in the thousands. Reb Peretz merited to live during the lifetime of six Chabad Rebbes, beginning with the Alter Rebbe till the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Yet his family from the Shaltiel clan, a well respected and knowledgeable Jewish family who were leaders among the Jewish people for many centuries, were not previously Chassidim. How did he come to become a Chasid?