Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson

Early years

Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson zy"a, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the seventh Rebbe of the Chabad dynasty, was born on 11 Nissan in Nikolaev, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire (today Mykolaiv, Ukraine). His father, Rav Levi Yitzchok Schneerson, was known as a great scholar. His mother, Rebbetzin Chana, descended from a distinguished rabbinic family. Two brothers, Dovber and Yisroel Aryeh Leib, were born after him.

At the age of five he moved with his family to Yekaterinoslav (today Dnepropetrovsk), where his father took up the post of chief rabbi. Even as a small child his mind was unusually sharp, and he left school to study with private teachers. By his bar mitzvah he was regarded as a Torah prodigy, and in his teenage years he devoted himself to mastering the depths of Torah.

Torah and leadership

In 1923 he first met Rav Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson, then the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who brought him into his close circle and entrusted him with a variety of tasks. In Warsaw, in the fifth year after that meeting, he married Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka (1901–1988), the second eldest daughter of the Rebbe. The couple settled in Berlin, where he studied mathematics and science at the university. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they moved on to Paris, and he went on with his studies at the Sorbonne.

Tefillah and Torah study remained his main occupation. His father-in-law turned to him on many matters, among them the preparation of Lubavitch publications. He also acted as the Rebbe's private secretary and travelled on his behalf to meet leaders of European Jewry. After the Nazi occupation of Paris, the couple had to flee. They reached New York on June 23, 1941, and Rav Yosef Yitzchok placed his son-in-law at the head of Lubavitch's educational arm, its social-service organization and its publishing house.

On 10 Shevat 5710 (1950), Rav Yosef Yitzchok passed away. Everyone saw in Rav Menachem Mendel the natural successor, yet he hesitated to take up the leadership. A year later he formally accepted the title of Rebbe. He told the chassidim that, although he would give himself entirely to his work as Rebbe, each man and woman remains accountable for his or her own deeds and for the search for Elokus (awareness of Hashem).

Over the forty-four years that followed, Lubavitch grew from a small movement left nearly in ruins by the Holocaust into a worldwide community of about 200,000 members. The Rebbe saw what his generation needed and what the coming decades would require, and he set up education and outreach centers, offering social services and humanitarian aid to every person, whatever his background or level of observance. He founded a corps of shluchim (emissaries) and sent them out to establish Chabad-Lubavitch centers that would meet the spiritual and material needs of local communities. Today Chabad-Lubavitch has more than fourteen hundred institutions spread over thirty-five countries and six continents, and its shluchim number in the thousands.

The Rebbe was a man of striking contrasts. Crown Heights, in New York, was almost the whole of his physical world, yet his influence was felt across the globe. He was a leading authority in both the revealed and hidden parts of Torah, spoke many languages and was at home in scientific subjects, and was also recognized as a brilliant scholar of mathematics and science. To outsiders he might look like a leader of the old world presiding over a somewhat insulated community, but he knew the modern world thoroughly and reached out warmly to the wider world, Jew and non-Jew alike, urging education, goodness and unity. Above all he is remembered for his extraordinary love and concern for every Jew.

Because he joined deep Torah learning to secular training, compassion and insight, leaders in politics, business and religion quietly came to him for advice. From 1986 he received thousands of visitors in person each Sunday and gave each a dollar bill, to inspire them to give tzedakah. Many kept the bills as a keepsake of their visit, a sign of how deeply his presence touched them.

After the collapse of communism and the miracles of the Gulf War, the Rebbe declared that these events signaled the approach of an age of peace and calm for all mankind, the time of Moshiach. He urged intensive study of the Torah's teachings on the Messianic era, and he often repeated the words of Chazal that a single good deed can bring Moshiach's era closer.

Teachings and seforim

Hundreds of volumes of the Rebbe's teachings have been printed, and dozens of them have appeared in English renditions.

Later years and passing

The Rebbe was ninety years old in 1992 when he suffered a stroke. Two years later he passed away, on 3 Tammuz 5754 (June 12, 1994), in New York.

Soon afterward a bill was introduced in the United States House of Representatives to award the Rebbe the Congressional Gold Medal. Both houses passed it by unanimous consent, honoring his lasting contributions to world education, morality and charity.