הרב יוסף יצחק שניאורסאהן

Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (12 Tammuz 5640/1880–10 Shevat 5710/1950), the Rebbe Rayatz, known among chasidim as the Frierdiker Rebbe, was the sixth Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. The only son of the Rebbe Rashab, Rav Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, he was born in the town of Lubavitch and named for his mother’s father, Rav Yosef Yitzchak of Avrutch, son of the Tzemach Tzedek. At fifteen his father made him his personal secretary; at seventeen he married his relative Nechama Dina, and that same year, 5657/1897, his father set him over the newly founded Tomchei Temimim yeshiva. In the Czar’s Russia he stood before the authorities in Petersburg and Moscow for his brethren — sending kosher food to Jewish soldiers in the Far East during the Russo-Japanese War, traveling in 5666/1906 to press the bankers of Western Europe to use their weight against the pogroms — and was arrested four times for his labors.

On his father’s histalkut in 5680/1920 he became Rebbe, just as the new Soviet power set out to uproot Yiddishkeit. He spread a hidden network of chadarim, yeshivot, mikvaot, shochtim, and teachers across Russia, with a special committee to help workers keep Shabbat. In 5687/1927 he was arrested in Leningrad and sentenced to death. To an interrogator who waved a revolver at him — “this toy has changed many minds” — he answered: that toy frightens a man who has many gods and one world; a man who has one Hashem and two worlds is not frightened by it. A storm of pressure from abroad — the Jewish member of Latvia’s parliament, Mordechai Dubin, tied a trade treaty to his fate — forced the regime to commute the sentence to exile in Kostroma on 3 Tammuz, and on 12–13 Tammuz he was freed entirely; Chabad chasidim keep those days as the Chag HaGeulah to this day. Before the year was out he left Russia for Riga.

In Av 5689/1929 he traveled to Eretz Yisrael — Yerushalayim, Meron, Tzfat, Teverya, and Chevron, where he was given entry into Me’arat HaMachpelah — and from there sailed for a year-long journey through the kehillot of America, received at the White House by President Herbert Hoover, who had pressed for his release. From 5694/1933 he lived in Warsaw and then in nearby Otwock. Trapped in Warsaw under the German bombardment in 5700/1939, he was brought out through the intercession of the American government and reached New York in Adar 5700/1940. Chasidim warned him that “America is different”; the very next day he founded the first Lubavitcher yeshiva on American soil, declaring that America is no different. From 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn he built Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, Machne Israel, and the Kehot publishing house, raised the call “L’alter l’teshuvah, l’alter l’geulah,” fixed the daily shiurim of Chumash with Rashi, Tehillim, and Tanya, and in 5709/1948 founded Kfar Chabad in Eretz Yisrael.

His written Torah fills shelves: the maamarim of chasidut gathered in the Sefer HaMaamarim, his Yiddish sichot in Likkutei Dibburim and the Sefer HaSichot, seventeen volumes of Igrot Kodesh, and the Sefer HaZichronot on the early generations of chasidut. He was niftar on Shabbat parshat Bo, 10 Shevat 5710/1950, at 770, and was buried at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, New York. His son-in-law Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson succeeded him as the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe and went again and again to daven at his resting place, the Ohel, with the requests of Jews the world over in hand.