הרב שמואל שניאורסון

Rebbe Shmuel Schneersohn of Lubavitch (2 Iyar 5594/1834–13 Tishrei 5643/1882), the Rebbe Maharash, was the fourth Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. The youngest son of the Tzemach Tzedek, he was raised at his father’s side in Lubavitch, and though several of his older brothers established courts of their own — Kapust, Liadi, Nezhin — it was Shmuel whom his father, near the end, directed to receive chassidim and say chassidut before them; on the Tzemach Tzedek’s passing in 5626/1866 he took up the leadership in Lubavitch itself, and led it until his passing.

His sixteen years of leadership joined the inner and the outer. He said and wrote maamarei chassidut without pause — the volumes of Likkutei Torah — Torat Shmuel, printed across the last decades, preserve his discourses year by year — and he demanded of chassidim that the deepest wisdom be learned and lived: it is a mitzvah and an obligation, he taught, to know the seder hishtalshelut, where one’s soul stands at every moment. At the same time he traveled the capitals of Europe and to Petersburg to stand against the persecution of Russian Jewry, laboring to stop the pogroms that broke out in 5641/1881. A man of broad knowledge and languages, his health was frail from youth; he was niftar at only forty-eight.

His watchword became the inheritance of every Lubavitcher chassid: Lechatchilah Ariber — the world says that if you cannot crawl under, climb over; but I say, from the outset, go over. His son Rebbe Sholom Dovber, the Rashab, founder of Yeshivat Tomchei Temimim, succeeded him; he rests in Lubavitch beside his father.