Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known to adherents of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement as the Lubavitcher Rebbe or simply the Rebbe, was an Orthodox rabbi and the Rebbe of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.
As leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, he took an insular Hasidic group that almost came to an end with the Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential movements in religious Jewry, with an international network of over 5,000 educational and social centers. The institutions he established include kindergartens, schools, drug-rehabilitation centers, care homes for the disabled, and synagogues.
Schneerson's published teachings fill more than 400 volumes, and he is noted for his contributions to Jewish continuity and religious thought, as well as his wide-ranging contributions to traditional Torah scholarship. He is recognized as the pioneer of Jewish outreach. During his lifetime, many of his adherents believed that he was the Messiah, though not all Chabadniks subscribe to this belief. His own attitude to the subject, and whether he proclaimed it, is hotly debated among academics and scholars of Judaism. During Schneerson's lifetime, the messianic controversy and other issues elicited fierce criticism from many quarters in the Orthodox world, especially earning him the enmity of Elazar Shach.
In 1978, the U.S. Congress asked President Jimmy Carter to designate Schneerson's birthday as the national Education Day in the U.S. It has been since commemorated as Education and Sharing Day. In 1994, Schneerson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his "outstanding and lasting contributions toward improvements in world education, morality, and acts of charity". Schneerson's resting place attracts Jews for prayer.
Biography
Early life and education
Menachem Mendel Schneerson was born on April 5, 1902 , in the Black Sea port of Nikolaev in the Russian Empire. His father was rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, a renowned Talmudic scholar and authority on Kabbalah and Jewish law. His mother was Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson. He was named after the third Chabad rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Tzemach Tzedek, from whom he was a direct patrilineal descendant.In 1907, when Schneerson was five years old, the family moved to Yekatrinoslav, where Levi Yitzchak was appointed Chief Rabbi of the city. He served until 1939, when he was exiled by the Soviets to Kazakhstan. Schneerson had two younger brothers: Dov Ber Schneerson, who was murdered in 1944 by Nazi collaborators, and Yisroel Aryeh Leib Schneerson, who died in 1952 while completing doctoral studies at Liverpool University.
During his youth, he received a private education and was tutored by Zalman Vilenkin from 1909 through 1913. When Schneerson was 11 years old, Vilenkin informed his father that he had nothing more to teach his son. At that point, Levi Yitzchak began teaching his son Talmud and rabbinic literature, as well as Kabbalah. Schneerson proved gifted in both Talmudic and Kabbalistic study and also took exams as an external student of the local Soviet school. He was considered an illui and genius, and by the time he was 17, he had mastered the entire Talmud, some 5,422 pages, as well as all its early commentaries.
Throughout his childhood, Schneerson was involved in the affairs of his father's office. He was also said to have acted as an interpreter between the Jewish community and the Russian authorities on a number of occasions. Levi Yitzchak's courage and principles guided his son for the rest of his life. Many years later, when he once reminisced about his youth, Schneerson 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."
Schneerson went on to receive separate rabbinical ordinations from the Rogatchover Gaon, Joseph Rosen, and Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, author of Sridei Aish.
Marriage and family life
In 1923, Schneerson visited the sixth Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, for the first time. He met the rabbi's middle daughter Chaya Mushka, who was a distant cousin. Sometime later, they became engaged but were not married until 1928 in Warsaw, Poland. Taking great pride in his son-in-law's outstanding scholarship, Yosef Yitzchak asked him to engage in learned conversation with the great Torah scholars present at the wedding, such as Meir Shapiro and Menachem Ziemba. Menachem Mendel and Chaya Mushka were married for 60 years and were childless.Menachem Mendel and Yosef Yitzchak were both descendants of Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, known as the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Rebbe of Chabad. Schneerson later commented that the day of his marriage bound the community to him and him to the community.
In 1947, Schneerson traveled to Paris to take his mother, Chana Schneerson, back to New York City with him. Schneerson would visit her every day and twice each Friday to also prepare her tea. In 1964, Chana Schneerson died.
On February 10, 1988, Schneerson's wife Chaya died. After the traditional year of Jewish mourning had passed on her Yahrzheit, the widowed Schneerson moved into his study above the central Lubavitch synagogue on Eastern Parkway.
Berlin
After his wedding to Chaya Mushka in 1928, Schneerson and his wife moved to Berlin in the Weimar Republic, where he was assigned specific communal tasks by his father-in-law, who also requested that he write scholarly annotations to the responsa and various Hasidic discourses of the earlier Rebbes of Chabad-Lubavitch. Schneerson studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Berlin. He would later recall that he enjoyed Erwin Schrödinger's lectures. His father-in-law took great pride in his son-in-law's scholarly attainments and paid for all the tuition expenses and helped facilitate his studies throughout.During his stay in Berlin, his father-in-law encouraged him to become more of a public figure. However, Schneerson described himself as an introvert and was known to have pleaded with acquaintances not to make a fuss over the fact that he was the son-in-law of Yosef Yitzchak.
While in Berlin, Schneerson met Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and the two formed a friendship that remained between them years later when they emigrated to America. He wrote hundreds of pages of his own original Torah discourses, and conducted a serious interchange of halachic correspondence with many of Eastern Europe's leading rabbinic figures, including Joseph Rosen. In 1933, he also met with Chaim Elazar Spira, as well as with Talmudist Shimon Shkop. During this time, he kept a diary in which he would carefully document his private conversations with his father-in-law, as well as his kabbalistic correspondence with his father, Levi Yitzchak.
Paris
In 1933, after the Nazis took over Germany, the Schneersons left Berlin and moved to Paris, where Menachem Mendel continued his religious and communal activities on behalf of his father-in-law.While in Paris, he took a two-year course in engineering at a vocational college.
During that time, Yosef Yitzchak recommended that Professor Alexander Vasilyevitch Barchenko consult with Schneerson regarding various religious and mystical matters, and prominent rabbis, such as Yerachmiel Binyaminson and Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, turned to Schneerson with their rabbinic and kabbalistic queries.
On June 11, 1940, three days before Paris fell to the Nazis, the Schneersons fled to Vichy and later to Nice, where they stayed until their final escape from Europe in 1941.
New York
In 1941, Schneerson escaped from Europe via Lisbon, Portugal. On the eve of his departure, Schneerson penned a treatise where he revealed his vision for the future of world Jewry and humanity. He and his wife, Chaya Mushka, arrived in New York on June 23, 1941.Shortly after his arrival, his father-in-law appointed him director and chairman of the three Chabad central organizations, Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch, Machneh Israel and Kehot Publication Society, placing him at the helm of the movement's Jewish educational, social services, and publishing networks. Over the next decade, Yosef Yitzchak referred many of the scholarly questions that had been inquired of him to his son-in-law. He became increasingly known as a personal representative of Yosef Yitzchak.
During the 1940s, Schneerson became a naturalized US citizen and, seeking to contribute to the war effort, he volunteered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, using his electrical engineering background to draw wiring diagrams for the battleship USS Missouri, and other classified military work.
In 1942, Schneerson launched the Merkos Shlichus program, where he would send pairs of yeshiva students to remote locations across the country during their summer vacations to teach Jews in isolated communities about their heritage and offer education to their children.
File:הרב שמריהו גוראריה לצד חותנו הרייצ.jpg|left|thumb|262x262px|A dinner for the Tomchei Tmimim Yeshiva network in 1943, from right to left: Menachem Mendel Schneerson, his father-in-law Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, and his brother-in-law Shemaryahu Gurary
As chairman and editor-in-chief of Kehot, Schneerson published the works of the earlier Rebbes of Chabad. He also published his own works, including the Hayom Yom in 1943 and Hagadda in 1946.
On a visit to Paris in 1947, Schneerson established a school for girls and worked with local organizations to assist with housing for refugees and displaced persons. He often explained that his goal was to "make the world a better place" and to do what he could to eliminate all suffering. In a letter to Israeli President Yitzchak Ben Tzvi, Schneerson wrote that when he was a child the vision of the future redemption began to take form in his imagination "a redemption of such magnitude and grandeur through which the purpose of the suffering, the harsh decrees and annihilation of exile will be understood..."
In 1991, a car in convoy with Schneerson's motorcade accidentally struck two Guyanese American children while running a red light. One of the children was killed. The incident triggered the Crown Heights riot.