Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the seventh rebbe of the Chabad Hasidic movement, perhaps best-known for leading the community after its re-establishment in New York following the Holocaust while engineering its transformation into the most familiar Hasidic sect in the world.
The very fact that he became rebbe in 1951 was unexpected since until his arrival in New York ten years earlier he had been a mechanical engineer living in Paris. Beyond having studied in yeshiva for a few years when he was a lad, his Jewish learning was mostly acquired from his father and tutors and he had neither been trained nor ordained as a rabbi, rejecting pulpits when his father-in-law tried to place him in one. Yet in America, he built a global messianic movement performing outreach to all Jewry, including the unaffiliated and unobservant.
Scheerson was born in Nikolayev, Ukraine, the oldest of three sons of Levi Yitzchak and Chana Schneerson. Mendel, as he was known, came from a prominent Chabad family descended from the movement’s third rebbe, after whom he was named. According to his own word, he was born April 18, 1902, yet his Russian passport indicates March 2, 1895, a discrepancy likely emerging from a desire to avoid being drafted in the czar’s army. If he was too young, he would be spared the draft.
Although related to all the rebbes of Chabad (of Lubavitch, as it is sometimes known) who followed the third, Mendel Schneerson grew up far from the centers of Chabad Hasidism in Russia. In 1907, his father was offered a rabbinic position in Yekaterinoslav, a city at the edge of the Pale of Settlement and roughly 1,000 miles south of where his cousin, the reigning fifth Lubavitcher rebbe, had his court at the time. Levi Yitzchak served a small Hasidic community, having gotten the job with the recommendation of the fifth Lubavitcher rebbe, who noted that in addition to his Torah knowledge, Levi Yitzchak “also knows and understands worldly matters.”
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Yekaterinoslav was then growing quickly and attracting many Jews who were abandoning traditional religious life. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of traditionally religious Jews recognized that without modern skills and some secular knowledge, their children would be unable to succeed and survive in the modern world. Mendel Schneerson was deeply affected growing up in such an open and vibrant Jewish environment. He studied privately with a Hasidic teacher who taught him the basics of Judaism and later Talmud and Chabad Hasidism. From 1909 to 1915, he studied in the yeshiva in Yekatrinoslav, a small institution that offered studies in classic Torah subjects along with Hebrew grammar and poetry. Notwithstanding his parents’ genuine attachment to Chabad Hasidism, they hired Israel Eidelsohn, a confirmed socialist and Zionist, to tutor him.
Schneerson developed a keen interest in science and mathematics. In 1920, he became apprenticed to an engineer. From 1923 to 1925, he attended the Polytechnic Institute in Yekaterinoslav University where he studied mathematics and engineering. In 1926, he left the university without a degree and went to Leningrad, where his cousin Yosef Yitzchak, then the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, lived. For the first time in his life, he would reside near the court of the Lubavitcher rebbe.
He also began a relationship with his cousin’s middle daughter, Moussia, whom he would marry two years later. The couple moved to Berlin (definitely not a center of Hasidism) and audited courses — he at Friedrich Wilhelm University and Moussia at the Institute for Foreigners, studying German language and culture. Schneerson would also occasionally sit in at the Hildesheimer rabbinical seminary, but did not graduate.
In January of 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Three months later, the Schneersons moved to Paris, where they lived at 9 Rue Boulard in the fourteenth arrondissement, a largely bohemian neighborhood. In April, Schneerson began taking secondary courses in mechanical engineering. By the end of the 1934 school year, he was granted admission to the École Supérieure de Mécanique et d’Electricité, graduating in 1937. His pride in his new status could be seen in the fact that on the letters he sent to his parents, he marked his return address as “Eng. M. Schneerson.” He also listed himself as such in the phone directory.
Writing from Paris to her in-laws in May, Moussia expressed the couple’s intention to remain in Paris as permanent residents. Moussia would forever look upon her years in Paris as among her happiest and freest, as she often told friends. But by 1937, the atmosphere in France was turning quite sour and Schneerson could not find a position as an engineer. The couple also remained childless after nearly a decade of marriage. On the eve of Yom Kippur in 1938, they received a letter from Schneerson’s father wishing that “God may remember you with a son, with ‘a seed both healthy and vital.’” But it was not to be.
With the outbreak of World War II the following year, Schneerson and his wife fled to Marseille, where he began emphasizing his ties to Chabad. In January of 1940, at his cousin’s invitation, he gave a talk to a small group of yeshiva students. In the darkness of the war, Schneerson shared his ideas about messianic redemption with the young refugees. Some of those present did not know who he was, even after his talk in Yiddish. Nevertheless, as those terrible days closed in on him, Schneerson was thinking about the ultimate redemption and beginning to talk very much like a disciple of his father-in-law, who also was swept up in messianic preaching.
In 1940, Yosef Yitzchak, along with his immediate family and entourage, were extracted from Poland and brought to New York. The State Department had been convinced that he was “a sort of Pope of the Jews” and that his liberation from the Nazis would have significant political value. He in turn managed to get Mendel and Moussia out of France. On June 23, 1941, the Schneersons arrived in New York. Met by several Lubavitchers, they were taken directly to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where Yosef Yitzchak had now located himself and his court.
The experience of the Holocaust and his flight from Europe must have been monumental in Schneerson’s life. Most of European Jewry had been crushed and burned. Those in the Soviet Union were trapped and seemed lost, while the Jews in Palestine were locked in a battle for survival. Yet the Schneersons were safe in New York. Surely, this evoked in him deep religious questions and perplexity — perhaps even disorientation and some survivor guilt.
“Gevalt [for heaven’s sake],” Mendel wrote in 1948, “the Messiah told the Ba’al Shem Tov that he would come with him when he spreads the wellsprings to the outside. And this task was given to us, to lead — and what are we doing about it? We are suffering in exile even though the rebbe shli’ta [his father-in-law, may he live for many days] in his ma’amar [discourse] promised that the redemption would come quickly in our days.”
The Schneersons found a new home a couple of blocks from what would become the Chabad headquarters. This would become his world. In 1946, unable to attend his father’s funeral in Kazakhstan, Schneerson recited Kaddish for a year in the emotionally supportive surroundings of the Chabad community, an experience that could not help but arouse in him more feelings of closeness to these people from whom he had so long been distant.
In January 1950, Yosef Yitzchak died. His widow had hoped to see Shmaryahu Gourarie, the husband of Yosef Yitzchak’s oldest daughter and for years the late rebbe’s right-hand man, or his son and the rebbe’s only grandchild Barry (Shalom DovBer) Gourarie, assume the leadership. But it was the would-be engineer who emerged as the one chosen to be the movement’s seventh rebbe. It began, according to the recollections of those who were present, during the initial seven-day mourning period, when each of Yosef Yitzchak’s surviving sons-in-laws sat shiva in separate rooms at Chabad headquarters. Schneerson’s weeping throughout the week made a deep impression. After having been far less visibly engaged in the life of the Hasidic court for so long, Schneerson was now evidently more broken up than Shmaryahu Gourarie and seemed to be dramatically expressing what the Hasidim were all feeling. Moreover, as was customary at such times, each of the sons-in-law offered words of Torah to those who had come to console them, an implicit competition among the men to see who could demonstrate greater insight and erudition and draw a more enthusiastic and engaged audience.
At the end of the year of mourning, it was the younger son-in-law who, even in the face of the opposition of Yosef Yitzchak’s widow, took the throne. Many thought he was a more modern man for a post-war modern world. Expressing her opposition, his mother-in-law refused to give him the sixth rebbe’s shtreimel, the fur hat that her husband wore. So Schneerson simply decided to wear a black fedora, which has been the emblem of Chabad men ever since.
As rebbe, Schneerson championed a plan for Jewish outreach — or spreading the “wellsprings” — that his predecessor had begun in the last years of his life, creating a corps of shluchim, or emissaries, to engage unaffiliated or under-affiliated Jews throughout the world. Schneerson used a variety of tactics to accomplish this, including a “tefillin campaign,” in which he tried to get adult Jewish males to don these phylacteries or amulets in public; an “uforatzto campaign,” to expand Lubavitcher influence by creating Chabad houses staffed by shluchim around the world — a kind of Jewish “peace corps”; a “mitzvah campaign,” to encourage Jews to do more ritual commandments; and most prominently a “moshiach campaign,” that would engage Lubavitchers to hasten the coming of the messiah. He got them to announce everywhere and to everyone: “We want moshiach now!”
These campaigns were directed at all Jews, not only the Orthodox, and they put Lubavitchers firmly in the public eye. They were dispatched all over the world, even to places where Jews only come for business or leisure, from Shanghai to Kathmandu, the Virgin Islands to Alaska, and thousands of other venues, making Chabad rabbis the face of Judaism in countless far-flung locations. Even in Israel, which Schneerson never visited, his image is today seen on posters and billboards across the Jewish state — all part of a campaign predicated on the belief that if enough Jews perform mitzvahs, the messiah will appear.
As he aged, and with no obvious heir in sight, many of his followers began to believe that Schneerson himself was the messiah. “Long live our rebbe, our teacher, the king messiah,” they sang, to their leaders’ obvious pleasure and encouragement. Whether Schneerson believed this himself is a matter of debate. When he died, on June 12, 1994, some refused to believe he was not the messiah, and intensified their campaign of outreach in the hopes that he would reappear and usher in the age of redemption. As of this writing, their efforts have not born fruit.
