Monday will mark 79 years to the passing of Rabbi Levi Yitzchok Schneerson, the Rebbe’s father, who served as the chief rabbi of Dnieper, Ukraine for several decades.
In the spring of 1939, the communists arrested him for his unrelenting struggle to keep Judaism behind the Iron Curtain alive. He was jailed, interrogated, and tortured for many months and finally banished to the remote town of Chile, Kazakhstan for five years. The isolation and malnourishment took its toll and two months after moving to the larger city of Almaty with its fledgling Jewish community, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak passed away at the age of 66.
In the early 1920s, when the Soviets unleashed their war on Judaism, many prominent rabbis and leaders fled to the free world to reestablish their academies and continue studying and teaching Torah in peace. The previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok, remained there and created the most intricate and sophisticated network of underground Jewish activism to ensure the millions of Russian Jewry would not be lost to our people forever. In 1927 he was banished from the Soviet Union but remained in touch with his thousands of students and followers there and continued to support their heroic activities. On the ground, however, the last remaining prominent rabbinical figure was Rabbi Levi Yitzchok, and throughout the 1930s he stopped at nothing to make Jewish observance more bearable for all Jews. To appreciate the extent of his sacrifice it’s important to realize that he was a brilliant scholar in Jewish law and mysticism and had authored thousands of pages of original Torah teachings. It is quite plausible that if he would have secluded himself in his vast library and interacted only with local Jews who sought his teachings and counsel the authorities would never bother him. Instead, he chose to endanger his life and scholarly legacy to confront the powerful evil regime to benefit Jews throughout the country who were not technically his rabbinic responsibility. Here is one example of this. As all factories in Russia were owned by the government, it was their policy that set the standard for the matzah production, but Jews would not buy the matzah for Pesach without proper rabbinic supervision. The authorities instructed Rabbi Levi Yitzchak to endorse the government baked matzah but he refused unless his handpicked supervisors were installed in every bakery and answered solely to him. To this end he traveled to Moscow and explained his position to President Mikhail Kalinin who then gave him exclusive authority on the matzah production. That year tens of thousands of Jews had kosher matzah for the holiday, but the enraged officials arrested the heroic rabbi days before Pesach. As a result, he spent the rest of his life in tremendous suffering and isolation, without books to study or fellow Jews to interact with. Decades of his tireless work of transcribing volumes of Torah teachings were lost as well, but his efforts played an essential role in keeping countless of our brothers and sisters connected to our heritage for generations to come. Rabbi Levi Yitzchok teaches us the sacrifices we should be willing to make for the spiritual benefit of others. Even if it may negatively impact our own spirituality, nothing should stand in the way of reaching out to the furthest places, literally or figuratively, to ensure no Jew is ever lost to our people. We encounter these choices more often than we can imagine. So let's be inspired to prioritize the spiritual needs of others and realize the impact this can have beyond our imagination.