- Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn
-
Not to be confused with Isaac Schneersohn.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe 
The Frierdiger RebbeBegan 21 March 1920 Ended 28 January 1950 Predecessor Sholom Dovber Schneersohn Successor Menachem Mendel Schneerson Personal details Born 1880-06-09 OS
LyubavichiDied 1950-01-28 NS
BrooklynBuried 1950-01-29, Queens Dynasty Chabad Lubavitch Parents Sholom Dovber Schneersohn
Shterna SarahSpouse Nechamah Dina Children Chana Gurary
(wife of Shemaryahu Gurary)
Chaya Mushka
Shaina HorensteinYosef Yitzchok (Joseph Isaac)[1] Schneersohn (Hebrew: יוסף יצחק שניאורסאהן; 9 June 1880 OS - 28 January 1950 NS) was an Orthodox rabbi and the sixth Rebbe (spiritual leader) of the Chabad Lubavitch chasidic movement. He is also known as the Friediker Rebbe (Yiddish for "Previous Rebbe"), the Rebbe RaYYaTz, or the Rebbe Rayatz (an acronym for Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak). After many years of fighting to keep Orthodox Judaism alive from within the Soviet Union, he was forced to leave; he continued to conduct the struggle from Latvia, and then Poland, and eventually the United States, where he spent the last ten years of his life.
Contents
Early life
Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn was born in Lyubavichi, Russia, the only son of Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn (the Rebbe Rashab), the fifth Rebbe of Chabad. He was appointed as his father's personal secretary at the age of fifteen; in that year, he represented his father in the conference of communal leaders in Kaunas. The following year (1896) he participated in the Vilna Conference, where Rabbis and community leaders discussed issues such as: genuine Jewish education; permission for Jewish children not to attend public school on Shabbat; the creation of a united Jewish organization for the purpose of strengthening Judaism. He participated in this conference again in 1908.[2]
On 13 Elul 5657 (1897) at the age of seventeen he married a distant cousin, Rebbetzin Nechama Dina Schneersohn, daughter of Rabbi Avraham Schneerson of Chişinău, son of Rabbi Yisroel Noach of Nizhyn, son of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn.[2]
In 1898 he was appointed head of the Tomchei Temimim yeshiva network.[2]
In 1901,[2] with financial support from Yaakov and Eliezer Poliakoff he opened spinning and weaving mills in Dubroŭna and Mahilyow and established a Yeshiva in Bukhara.[3]
As he matured, he campaigned for the rights of Jews by appearing before the Czarist authorities in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 he sought relief for Jewish conscripts in the Russian army by sending them kosher food and supplies in the Russian Far East.[3]
In 1905 he participated in organizing a fund to provide Passover needs for troops in the Far East.
With rising anti-Semitism and pogroms against Jews, in 1906 he travelled with other prominent rabbis to seek help from Western European governments, especially Germany and Holland, and persuaded bankers there to use their influence to stop pogroms.[2][3]
He was arrested four times between 1902 and 1911 by the Czarist police because of his activism, but was released each time.
Becomes Rebbe
Upon the death of his father, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn ("Rashab"), in 1920, Yosef Yitzchok became the sixth Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. It was an age of great social and political upheaval following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The victorious anti-religious Bolsheviks, some of them Jews, were intent on uprooting and suppressing all religious life in the "new" Bolshevist Russia.
Battling the Bolsheviks
Following the takeover of Russia by the Communists, they created a special "Jewish affairs section" run by Jews known as the Yevsektsiya, which instigated anti-Jewish activities meant to strip orthodox Jews of their religious way of life. As Rebbe of a Russian-based Jewish movement, Schneersohn was vehemently outspoken against the atheistic Communist regime and its goal of forcibly eradicating religion throughout the land. He purposely directed his followers to set up religious schools, going against the dictates of the Marxist-Leninist "dictatorship of the proletariat".
After the February Revolution, elections were called for Jewish city councils and a General Jewish Assembly. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok's father, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, worked tirelessly to organize a religious front with a center and a special office that would deal with it all. For this reason, he called a unique conference of all the Torah giants throughout Russia. This conference was held in 1917 in Moscow, and was preceded by a meeting of the leading Rabbis, to decide which matters would be discussed there. This smaller meeting was held in Petrograd. However, because the participants in this meeting were few and in a hurry to return home, the Moscow conference failed to yield proper results. Thus, it was necessary to convene once again, this time in Kharkiv in 1918, to discuss the elections for the General Jewish Assembly.[2]
In 1921 he established a branch of Tomchei Temimim in Warsaw.[2]
In 1924 he was forced by the Cheka (Russian secret police) to leave Rostov due to the Yevsektsiya's slander, and settled in Leningrad.[3] In this time he labored to strengthen Torah observance through activities involving rabbis, Torah schools for children, yeshivot, shochtim, senior Torah-instructors and the opening of mikva’ot; he established a special committee to help manual workers be able to observe Shabbat. He established Agudat Chasidei Chabad in USA and Canada.[2]
In 1927 he established a number of yeshivot in Bukhara.[2]
He was primarily responsible for the maintenance of the now-clandestine Habad yeshiva system, which had ten branches throughout Russia by this time. He was under continual surveillance by agents of the NKVD.
Imprisonment
Schneersohn argued against his Hasidim leaving Russia, even if they were able do. He explicitly forbade his followers from leaving, describing those who did as "deserters".[4]
In 1927 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Spalerno prison in Leningrad. He was tried by an armed council of revolutionaries, accused of counter-revolutionary activities, and sentenced to death.[3] A world-wide storm of outrage and pressure from Western governments and the International Red Cross forced the communist regime to commute the death sentence and instead on 3 Tammuz it banished him to Kostroma in the Urals for an original sentence of three years.[3] Yekaterina Peshkova, a prominent Russian human rights activist, helped from inside as well. This was also commuted following political pressure from the outside, and he was finally allowed to leave Russia for Riga in Latvia, where he lived from 1928 until 1929.
He then went to visit the Palestine where he visited holy gravesites and met with rabbis and community leaders. From there he travelled to the USA, where he was received in the White House by US President Herbert Hoover, who, as Republican presidential candidate had lobbied for his release.[3] Lubavitch followers in America begged their Rebbe to leave Russia and stay in America, but Schneersohn declined, saying that America was an irreligious place where even rabbis shaved off their beards. From 1934 until the early part of the Second World War he lived in Warsaw, Poland.
Accorrding to Chabad scholar Avrum Erlich, Schneersohn didn't have a large power base in the United States:
“ Unlike many of his learned followers, who had studied in the Habad yeshivot, he was not renowned as a scholar or a teacher, although none denied his knowledge of Hasidism. In America, he did not have a power base of large numbers of loyal Hasidim as he might have had in pre-Communist Russia, and his power base in Eastern Europe had been strongly propped up by overseas charities, especially through financial support from the United States."[4] ” Warsaw to USA
Following Nazi Germany's attack against Poland in 1939, Rabbi Schneersohn refused to leave Warsaw. He remained in the city during the bombardments and its capitulation to Nazi Germany. He gave the full support of his organizations to assist as many Jews as possible to flee the invading armies. With the intercession of the United States Department of State in Washington, DC and with the lobbying of many Jewish leaders on behalf of the Rebbe (and, reputedly, with the help of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,[5] the head of the Abwehr), he was finally granted diplomatic immunity and given safe passage to go via Berlin to Riga, and then on to New York City, where he arrived on March 19, 1940.[6]
When Schneersohn came to America, two of his chassidim came to him, and said not to start up all the activities in which Lubavitch had engaged in Europe, because "America is different." To avoid disappointment, they advised him not even to try. Schneersohn wrote, "Out of my eyes came boiling tears", and undeterred, the next day he started the first Lubavitcher Yeshiva in America, declaring that "America is no different." [7]
The community in Crown Heights remained small, and synagogue records show that at some points during 1950 they struggled to form a regular minyan.[4]
Launch of Lubavitch Activities in the USA
During the last decade of Schneersohn's life, from 1940 to 1950, he settled in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in New York City. He was often too ill to stand. The community in Crown Heights remained small, and the synagogue records show that at some points during 1950 they struggled to form a regular minyan.
Schneersohn was already physically weak and ill from his suffering at the hands of the Communists and the Nazis, but he had a strong vision of rebuilding Orthodox Judaism in America and he wanted his movement to spearhead it. In order to do so he went on a building campaign to establish religious Jewish day schools and yeshivas for boys and girls, women and men. He established printing houses for the voluminous writings and publications of his movement, and started the process of spreading Jewish observance to the Jewish masses worldwide.
He began to teach publicly, and many came to seek out his teachings. He began gathering and sending out a small amount of his newly trained rabbis to other cities - a trend later emulated and amplified by his son-in-law and successor Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
In 1948 he established a Lubavitch village in the Land of Israel known as Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv, on the site of an abandoned onetime Arab village of Safria.[3]
He died in 1950 and was buried at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, New York City. He had no sons, and his younger son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson ("The Rebbe") succeeded him as Lubavitcher Rebbe, while the older son-in-law, Rabbi Shemaryahu Gurary led the Chabad Yeshiva network Tomchei Temimim.
After Schneersohn's passing, his gravesite, known as "the Ohel," became a central point of focus for his successor, who would visit it regularly for many hours of prayer, meditation, and supplication for Jews all over the world.
After his successor's passing and burial next to his father-in-law, philanthropist Joseph Gutnick of Melbourne, Australia, established the Ohel Chabad-Lubavitch Center on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens, which is located adjacent to the joint gravesite.
Published works
Hebrew and Yiddish
- Sefer Hamaamarim – 5680-5689, 8 vol.
- Sefer Hamaamarim – 5692-5693.
- Sefer Hamaamarim – 5696-5711, 15 vol.
- Sefer Hamaamarim – Kuntresim, 3 vol.
- Sefer Hamaamarim – Yiddish
- Sefer Hasichot – 5680-5691, 2 vol.
- Sefer Hasichot – 5696-5710, 8 vol.
- Likkutei Dibburim, 4 vol.
- Kuntres Torat Hachasidut
- Kuntres Limud Hachasidut
- Admur Hatzemach Tzedek U’Tenuat Hahaskalah
- Kitzurim L’Biurei Hazohar
- Sefer Hakitzurim – Shaarei Orah
- Kitzurim L’Kuntres Hatefillah
- Sefer Hazichronot, 2 vol.
- Moreh Shiur B’Limudei Yom Yom – Chumash, Tehillim,
Tanya
- Seder Haselichot
- Maamar V’Ha’ish Moshe Anav, 5698
- Igrot Kodesh, 14 vol.
Hebrew translations
- Likkutei Dibburim, 5 vol.
- Sefer Hasichot – 5700-5705, 3 vol.
- Sefer Hazichronot, 2 vol.
English Translations
- Lubavitcher Rabbi’s Memoirs
- On Saying Tehillim
- The Tzemach Tzedek and the Haskala Movement
- On Learning Chasidut
- On the Teachings of Chasidut
- Some Aspects of Chabad Chasidism
- Chasidic Discourses, 2 vol.
- Likkutei Dibburim, 5 vol.
- The Principles of Education and Guidance
- The Heroic Struggle
- The Four Worlds
- Oneness in Creation
CD/Video
- America Is No Different
See also
Notes
- ^ His Certificate of Naturalization gives his name as Joseph Isaack.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i The Four Worlds, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Kehot, 2006, pp. 87-90. ISBN 0-8266-0462-5
- ^ a b c d e f g h Encyclopedia of Hasidism, entry: Schneersohn, Joseph Isaac. Naftali Lowenthal. Aronson, London 1996. ISBN 1-56821-123-6
- ^ a b c The Messiah of Brooklyn: Understanding Lubavitch Hasidim Past and Present, M. Avrum Ehrlich, Chapter 5,
- ^ Altein, R, Zaklikofsky, E, Jacobson, I: "Out of the Inferno: The Efforts That Led to the Rescue of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn of Lubavitch from War Torn Europe in 1939-40", p. 160. Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch, 2002 ISBN 0-8266-0683-0
- ^ See video.
- ^ See video.
External links
- Biography
- The "Ohel" - Gravesite
- Yud Shvat
- Books in English
- Memoirs
- Video of Schneersohn arriving in America
- Family Tree
- Some of his published works in Hebrew
Time-line of Lubavitcher rebbes
Preceded by
Sholom Dovber SchneersohnRebbe of Lubavitch
1920—1950Succeeded by
Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Categories:- Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn
- 1880 births
- 1950 deaths
- American Hasidic rabbis
- Kabbalists
- Philosophers of Judaism
- Prisoners sentenced to death by the Soviet Union
- Rabbis whose tombs have become pilgrimage sites
- Rebbes of Lubavitch
- Russian Orthodox rabbis
- Hasidic rabbis in Europe
- Russian prisoners sentenced to death
- Schneersohn dynasty
- Soviet expellees
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