Menachem Mendel Schneerson

• 1. Introduction

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  Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known to his followers as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, handed out dollar bills every Sunday in Brooklyn. From 1986, he stood outside his office and greeted a line of visitors one by one. Each person received a dollar and was encouraged to pass it on to a charity of their choice. Thousands came every week, and the line could last up to six hours. Many used their few seconds at the front to ask for advice or a blessing.

  The man behind that ritual led a Hasidic movement that had nearly come to an end in the Holocaust. Under his leadership it grew into an international network of over 5,000 educational and social centers. They include kindergartens, schools, synagogues, drug-rehabilitation centers and care homes for the disabled.

  How did a young scholar from the Russian Empire come to lead such a movement? What did he ask of the thousands who sought him out? And why did many of his followers come to believe he was the Messiah, while some of the Orthodox world's most prominent rabbis attacked him?

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• 2. Prodigy and Engineer

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  Zalman Vilenkin tutored a boy in Yekaterinoslav from 1909 to 1913. Then he told the boy's father that he had nothing left to teach. The pupil was eleven years old. He was Menachem Mendel Schneerson, born in 1902 in the Black Sea port of Nikolaev, in the Russian Empire. Today that city is Mykolaiv in Ukraine. His father, Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, was a renowned Talmudic scholar and an authority on Kabbalah and Jewish law. The family had moved to Yekaterinoslav in 1907, when Levi Yitzchak became the city's Chief Rabbi.

  Once Vilenkin stepped aside, Levi Yitzchak taught his son Talmud, rabbinic literature and Kabbalah himself. The boy excelled at both, and he also sat exams as an external student at the local Soviet school. People called him an illui, a genius. By the age of seventeen he had mastered the entire Talmud, some 5,422 pages, along with all its early commentaries.

  Throughout his childhood, Schneerson helped in his father's office. He was said to have interpreted between the Jewish community and the Russian authorities on several occasions. Years later he reflected on that upbringing. He said: "I have the education of the first-born son of the rabbi of Yekaterinoslav. When it comes to saving lives, I speak up whatever others may say." He went on to receive rabbinical ordinations from three separate authorities: the Rogatchover Gaon, Joseph Rosen, and Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, author of Sridei Aish.

  In 1928 Schneerson moved to Berlin with his wife and enrolled at the University of Berlin. There he studied mathematics, physics and philosophy, and he later recalled enjoying the lectures of Erwin Schrödinger. His father-in-law, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, paid the tuition and assigned him communal tasks. He also asked Schneerson to write scholarly annotations to the responsa and Hasidic discourses of earlier Chabad Rebbes.

  The father-in-law wanted him to become more of a public figure. Schneerson described himself as an introvert and pleaded with acquaintances not to make a fuss over his family connection. In Berlin he befriended Joseph B. Soloveitchik. He wrote hundreds of pages of his own Torah discourses and exchanged letters on Jewish law with leading rabbis of Eastern Europe, including Joseph Rosen. He also kept a diary of private conversations with his father-in-law and of mystical correspondence with his father.

  In 1933, after the Nazis took over Germany, the couple left Berlin for Paris. There Schneerson took a two-year engineering course at a vocational college. Yosef Yitzchak recommended that Professor Alexander Vasilyevitch Barchenko consult him on religious and mystical matters. Rabbis such as Yerachmiel Binyaminson and Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler also sent him questions on law and Kabbalah.

  On the 11th of June 1940, three days before Paris fell to the Nazis, the Schneersons fled to Vichy and later to Nice. They stayed there until their final escape from Europe in 1941, which ran through Lisbon, Portugal. On the eve of his departure, Schneerson wrote a treatise setting out his vision for the future of world Jewry and humanity. He and his wife arrived in New York on the 23rd of June 1941.

  During the 1940s Schneerson became a naturalized American citizen. Wanting to contribute to the war effort, he volunteered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Drawing on his electrical engineering background, he drew wiring diagrams for the battleship USS Missouri and did other classified military work.

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• 3. Family Ties

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  In 1923, Schneerson visited the sixth Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, for the first time. There he met the Rebbe's middle daughter, Chaya Mushka, a distant cousin. Some time later they became engaged, and they married in Warsaw, Poland, in 1928. At the wedding, Yosef Yitzchak proudly asked his son-in-law to converse with the great Torah scholars present, including Meir Shapiro and Menachem Ziemba. The marriage lasted 60 years, and the couple had no children.

  Both men descended from Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Tzemach Tzedek and third Rebbe of Chabad. The younger man had been named for him. Schneerson later remarked that his wedding day bound the community to him and him to the community.

  Schneerson's father, Levi Yitzchak, was exiled by the Soviets to Kazakhstan in 1939. Of his two younger brothers, Dov Ber Schneerson was murdered in 1944 by Nazi collaborators. Yisroel Aryeh Leib Schneerson died in 1952 while completing doctoral studies at Liverpool University.

  In 1947, Schneerson traveled to Paris to bring his mother, Chana, back to New York with him. He visited her every day and twice on Fridays, when he also prepared her tea. She died in 1964. From then until 1992, he gave an additional weekly sermon in her memory. These talks offered original insights and unprecedented analysis of Rashi's commentary on the Torah.

  Chaya Mushka died on the 10th of February 1988. When the traditional year of mourning ended on her Yahrzheit, the widowed Schneerson moved into his study above the central Lubavitch synagogue on Eastern Parkway.

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• 4. The Reluctant Rebbe

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  When Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn died in 1950, Chabad followers began urging his son-in-law to take his place. They pointed to his scholarship, his piety and his place in the dynasty. Schneerson refused the title, though he kept leading the communal work he already headed. The elders needed a full year to persuade him.

  That work had begun in 1941, soon after he reached New York. His father-in-law had appointed him director and chairman of three central Chabad organizations: Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch, Machneh Israel and Kehot Publication Society. As chairman and editor-in-chief of Kehot, he published the works of earlier Rebbes. He also published his own, including Hayom Yom in 1943 and a Haggadah in 1946.

  On the 10th of Shevat 1951, the first anniversary of his father-in-law's death, several hundred rabbis and Jewish leaders from the United States and Canada gathered. Schneerson delivered a Hasidic discourse titled "Bosi L'gani", which formally made him Rebbe. In it he declared his mission: to bring the Messiah. That night, members of the Israeli Cabinet and the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, sent congratulatory messages.

  In that first talk he warned followers against leaning on him. He said that in Chabad "it has been demanded that each work on themselves, and not rely on the Rebbes." He also described the kind of place that most needed his followers: "one must go to a place where nothing is known of Godliness, nothing is known of Judaism, nothing is even known of the Hebrew alphabet." That year he told Asher Penn of The Forward: "we must stop insisting that Judaism is in danger, an assertion that does little but place Jewry on the defensive. We need to go on the offensive."

  On Sunday and Thursday evenings, Schneerson received visitors in private meetings called yechidus. They began at 8 pm and often ran until 5 or 6 in the morning. The meetings were open to everyone. He spoke English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, French, Russian, German and Italian, and he advised people on spiritual and everyday matters alike.

  He played no favorites among visitors. His secretary once declined to admit John F. Kennedy, because Schneerson was already seeing people who had asked for appointments months earlier. In 1982 the meetings ended, because too many people wanted to attend. Afterward he met only those with a special occasion, such as a bride and groom before a wedding or a boy and his family before a bar mitzvah.

  During his four decades as Rebbe, he gave regular addresses on the weekly Torah portion and on tractates of the Talmud. He spoke without text or notes, and the talks lasted for hours, sometimes eight or nine without a break. He cited whole sections of classic and esoteric sources by heart. His method was to find the underlying principle shared by seemingly different ideas in an entire tractate.

  Schneerson worked over 18 hours a day and never took a vacation. He rarely left Brooklyn, except to visit his father-in-law's grave in Queens. The only other trips were to Camp Gan Israel in Parksville, New York, in 1956-1957 and 1960. He opposed retirement as a waste of precious years. On his 70th birthday in 1972, he proposed the founding of 71 new institutions to mark the start of his 71st year.

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• 5. Campaigns and Emissaries

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  In 1942, Schneerson launched Merkos Shlichus, a program that sent pairs of yeshiva students to remote places during their summer vacations. They taught Jews in isolated communities about their heritage and offered education to their children.

  A Chabad women's and girls' organization and a youth organization in Israel began in 1951, both aimed at women and teenagers. In 1953 he opened branches in New York, London and Toronto. He addressed his teachings equally to women and men, breaking with a long habit of reserving high-level Torah education for males. He called women's growing Torah study one of the "positive innovations of the later generations".

  In 1953 he also sent his first emissary to Morocco, where schools and a synagogue were established for the Jewish community. In 1958 he opened schools and synagogues in Detroit, Michigan; Milan, Italy; and London.

  Beginning in the 1960s, Schneerson set up mitzvah campaigns to encourage ten basic Jewish practices. These included tefillin for men, Shabbat candles for women, and loving your fellow for all people. Until then, tefillin had mostly been the habit of the meticulously observant. He has since been called the great modern popularizer of tefillin.

  In 1973 a Hanukkah campaign urged Jews everywhere to light their own menorah. All-tin menorahs were handed out that year, and a military manufacturer was commissioned to produce tens of thousands more. In 1974, a public menorah lighting took place at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Similar lightings on public grounds spread to cities worldwide. Legal challenges reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that public lighting did not violate the Constitution. Public lightings now take place in thousands of cities.

  Chabad also holds an annual Lag BaOmer parade at the address known as 770. It is one of the largest celebrations of that holiday, and thousands of Jews attend.

  In 1983, Schneerson launched a global campaign to promote monotheism and the Noahide Laws among all people. He argued that these laws were the basis for human rights. Several times a year his addresses were broadcast on national television. He spoke on a moment of silence in American public schools, more government funding for solar energy research, aid to developing countries, and nuclear disarmament.

  A year later, in 1984, he started a campaign for daily study of Maimonides's Mishneh Torah. Each time the learning cycle ends, a Siyum celebration marks the finish and the start of the next, and many Jewish leaders have attended.

  The emissaries he sent out, called shluchim, now serve in all US states and in over 100 countries and 1000 cities. Together they run more than 3,600 institutions, including approximately 300 in Israel. In many towns Chabad is the only Jewish presence. Every other Jewish movement, from Reform and Conservative to Orthodox and Haredi, has copied this model. Jonathan Sacks, then Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, observed that if the Nazis searched out every Jew in hate, the Rebbe wished to search out every Jew in love.

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• 6. Rescue and Diplomacy

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  In 1950, Schneerson encouraged the founding of Autocars Co. of Haifa, Israel's first automobile company. By 1956 it produced 28% of the country's exports. He also set up trade schools to train young Israelis, new immigrants and Holocaust survivors. A carpentry school opened in 1954, an agriculture school in 1955, a printing and publishing school in 1956 and a textile school in 1957. He never visited Israel himself.

  On the 28th of May 1967, days before the Six-Day War, Schneerson told a crowd of thousands that Israel would win. He quoted the verse "the Guardian of Israel neither sleeps nor slumbers". He had also called for a global tefillin campaign as a means of divine protection. The campaign drew criticism at the 1968 Agudat Yisrael convention. Afterward, the prominent Orthodox rabbi Yitzchok Hutner wrote to Schneerson privately. He distanced himself from the convention and asked forgiveness for any pain his earlier letters had caused.

  After the Entebbe raid, Schneerson spoke publicly on the 16th of August 1976. He praised the Israeli soldiers who flew thousands of miles, risking their lives to possibly save tens of Jews. He said their portion in the Hereafter was guaranteed. Haredi rabbis later vilified him for the praise. He protested vehemently against ultra-Haredi elements who tried to undermine the soldiers' motives.

  He opposed returning any territory captured in the Six-Day War and called land for peace an "illusion of peace". He said this stance rested solely on concern for human life, not on nationalist or religious reasons. In 1984, Benjamin Netanyahu was serving as Israel's Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Netanyahu later said Schneerson told him: "You will be serving in a house of darkness, but remember that even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide." Netanyahu retold the exchange to the UN General Assembly on the 23rd of September 2011.

  In 1979, during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis, Schneerson directed an effort to bring Jewish youth out of Iran. As a result, several thousand Iranian Jewish children were flown to safety in New York.

  Behind the Iron Curtain, letters reached him through secret messengers, addressed to "Grandfather" as a code name. He sent many emissaries on covert missions to sustain Judaism under Communist regimes and supply religious and material needs. He opposed demonstrations for Soviet Jews, saying he had evidence they harmed those Jews. He preferred quiet diplomacy. On one known occasion he told Senator Chic Hecht to give President Ronald Reagan the contact details of people who wanted to leave, so Reagan could lobby for their release.

  After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Schneerson called for the rescue of Ukrainian Jewish children and founded a special organization to do it. The first rescue flight took off on the 3rd of August 1990, carrying 196 children to Israel and a shelter campus. Since then, thousands more have been brought there and given housing, education and medical care.

  Natan Sharansky, Chairman of the Jewish Agency, called Chabad-Lubavitch an essential connector to Soviet Jewry during the Cold War. Shimon Peres said it was to Schneerson's credit that "Judaism in the Soviet Union has been preserved".

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• 7. Visitors and Honors

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  Israeli President Zalman Shazar visited Schneerson whenever he came to New York and corresponded with him extensively. Prime Minister Menachem Begin called on him many times, including a famous visit before flying to Washington to meet President Carter. General Ariel Sharon often quoted Schneerson's views on military matters. When Sharon weighed retiring from the army, Schneerson advised him to stay at his post. Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu also came for advice.

  Israeli politicians and military experts were surprised by his detailed knowledge of their country's local affairs. Despite these meetings, he said many times that he followed a nonpartisan policy and stayed out of politics.

  American visitors included Robert Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Jacob Javits, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins and Joe Lieberman. According to Howard Mortman's book When Rabbis Bless Congress, Schneerson was the rabbi most mentioned in Congress.

  His message to Washington returned often to three themes. He praised the American motto "E pluribus unum" and "In God We Trust". He urged the government to develop independent energy rather than depend on totalitarian regimes. And he asked it to press aid recipients to do more for the education and culture of their deprived citizens.

  Education was his strongest cause. He backed a Department of Education separate from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He declared 1977 a "Year of Education" and urged Congress to follow. He argued that "The educational system must, therefore, pay more attention to the building of character, with emphasis on moral and ethical values." The Ninety-Fifth Congress passed a Joint Resolution proclaiming 1978 as a Year of Education. It designated the 18th of April 1978 as "Education Day, U.S.A." Schneerson became the first rabbi to have a US national day proclaimed in his honor.

  Every year since, the President has proclaimed his birthday as Education Day. In 1982, Ronald Reagan proclaimed it a "National Day of Reflection". He presented a "National Scroll of Honor" signed by the President, the Vice-President and every member of Congress. Every president from Richard Nixon to Joe Biden has recognized his work.

  In 1994 Congress posthumously awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal. It honored his "outstanding and enduring contributions toward world education, morality, and acts of charity". In 2009, the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History chose him as one of eighteen American Jews for its "Only in America" Hall of Fame.

  New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Benjamin Netanyahu and the entire staff of the Israeli Embassy in Washington attended his funeral. President Bill Clinton wrote a condolence letter calling him "a monumental man". Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said: "The Rebbe's loss is a loss for all the Jewish people."

  Joseph B. Soloveitchik told his students after a visit that Schneerson had a "gewaldiger" comprehension of the Torah. Mordechai Eliyahu, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, said Schneerson jumped effortlessly from one Talmudic tractate to Kabbalah and then to Jewish law. His published teachings fill hundreds of volumes, and he wrote tens of thousands of letters answering requests for blessings and advice. Since his death, he has been called the Rebbe for all people.

  Elie Wiesel described the quality that visitors remembered most: "When the Rebbe was alone with anyone, it was an opening." He added: "It wasn't a break-in. It was just an invitation."

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• 8. The Messiah Question

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  In a 1991 talk, Schneerson told his followers he had done all he could to bring world peace and redemption. He said: "I have done my part, from now on you do all that you can." A few months later, a CNN reporter met him at the Sunday line. Schneerson told the reporter: "Moshiach is ready to come now; it is only on our part to do something additional in the realm of goodness and kindness."

  On Sunday, the 1st of March 1992, Gabriel Erem, editor of Lifestyles Magazine, asked for a message to the world for a ninetieth-birthday issue. Schneerson answered that "ninety" in Hebrew is tzaddik, meaning righteous. He said this was a direct call for every person to become a real tzaddik for many years, until 120. He added that the message "applies equally to Jews and non-Jews".

  Supporters pointed to a traditional teaching that every generation has one person worthy of being the Messiah. If God deems the time right, that person is revealed. Many felt that if anyone qualified, it was Schneerson. He consistently rejected any claim that he was the Messiah. Critics still objected to a children's song he commended, with the words "We want moshiach (the messiah) now / We don't want to wait". Scholars continue to debate what his own attitude was.

  From the 1970s, Elazar Shach of the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak accused Schneerson of building a cult of crypto-messianism around himself. Shach eventually called for a boycott of Chabad and its institutions. Israel's Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was another critic. Schneerson never answered Shach in public. He did rebuke those who disparaged Jews and sowed division, saying that "every Jew, regardless of differences and levels of observances, is part of Am Echad".

  In 1977, during the hakafot ceremony on Shemini Atzeret, Schneerson suffered a heart attack. At his request, doctors set up a mini-hospital at his office. Bernard Lown, Ira Weiss and Larry Resnick treated him there for four weeks. He recovered with few, if any, noticeable lasting effects.

  Fifteen years later, he suffered a serious stroke while praying at his father-in-law's grave. It left him unable to speak and paralyzed on the right side. Hopes that he would be revealed as the Messiah grew more widespread.

  On the morning of the 12th of June 1994, Schneerson died at Beth Israel Medical Center. He was buried at the Ohel, beside his father-in-law, at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, New York. After his death, most of his followers regarded him as the Messiah. A small fringe group goes further and considers him the creator of the universe. That claim is noted in the book The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference.

  Soon afterward, the executors of his will found several notebooks in a drawer in his office. They held scholarly thoughts and religious musings from his earliest years. Most entries date between 1928 and 1950. They were published as Reshimot, in ten volumes between 1994 and 2001.

  He had named no successor as leader of Chabad-Lubavitch, which caused controversy over his will. He wrote one legal will before witnesses, during the week of mourning for his wife in 1988. It transferred stewardship of all the major Chabad institutions and all his possessions to Agudas Chasidei Chabad. No executed copies are known of a second will, which named three senior Chabad rabbis as directors of that organization.

  The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth called his gravesite "the American Western Wall". Thousands of Jews go there to pray each week. Many more send faxes and e-mails asking for prayers to be read at the grave. In 2024, former United States president Donald Trump visited the Ohel.

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