Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn
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| Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn | ||
|---|---|---|
| Lubavitcher Rebbe | ||
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| Term | 1920-03-21 – 1950-01-28 | |
| Full name | Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn | |
| Main work | Sefer Hamaamorim | |
| Born | 1880-06-09 OS | |
| Lyubavichi | ||
| Died | 1950-01-28 NS | |
| Brooklyn | ||
| Buried | Queens | |
| Dynasty | Chabad Lubavitch | |
| Predecessor | Sholom Dovber Schneersohn | |
| Successor | Menachem Mendel Schneerson | |
| Father | Sholom Dovber Schneersohn | |
| Mother | Sterna Sarah (daughter of Yosef Yitzchok of Ovruch) | |
| Wife 1 | Nechamah Dinah | |
| Issue 1 | Chanah Gurary Chaya Mushka (wife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson) |
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Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok[1] (Joseph Isaac)[2] Schneersohn (1880 - 1950) was an Orthodox rabbi and the sixth Rebbe (spiritual leader) of the Chabad Lubavitch chasidic movement. He is also known as the Frierdikker Rebbe (Yiddish for "Previous Rebbe") or the Rebbe RaYYaTz (an acronym for Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak). After many years of fighting to keep Judaism alive from within the Soviet Union, he was forced to leave; he continued to conduct the struggle from Latvia, and then Poland, and eventually the United States, where he spent the last 10 years of his life.
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[edit] Early life
Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn was born in Lyubavichi, Russia. He was appointed as his father's personal secretary at the age of fifteen. In 1897 at the age of seventeen he married a distant cousin Nehama Dina Schneersohn. He was appointed as the first head of the new Tomchei Temimim network of Lubavitch yeshivas in the Russian empire.[citation needed]
As he matured, he campaigned for the rights of Jews by appearing before the Czarist authorities in St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 he sought relief for Jewish conscripts in the Russian army by sending them kosher food and supplies. With rising anti-Semitism and pogroms against Jews, he travelled with other prominent rabbis to seek help from Western European governments. He was arrested four times between 1902 and 1911 by the Czarist police because of his activism, but was released each time.[citation needed]
[edit] Becomes Rebbe
Upon the death of his father, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, in 1920, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn became the sixth Rebbe of Lubavitch. It was a time of great social and political upheaval following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The victorious anti-religious Bolsheviks, some of them Jews, were intent on uprooting and suppressing all religious life in the "new" Bolshevist Russia.[citation needed]
[edit] Battling the Bolsheviks
Following the takeover of Russia by the Communists, they created a special "Jewish affairs section" known as the Yevsektsiya which instigated anti-Jewish activities meant to strip orthodox Jews of their religious way of life. As Rebbe of a Russian-based Jewish movement, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn was vehemently outspoken against the atheistic Communist regime and its goal of forcibly eradicating religion throughout the land. He purposely directed his followers to set up religious schools going against the dictates of the Marxist-Leninist "dictatorship of the proletariat".[citation needed]
Thus in 1927 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Spalerno prison in Leningrad. He was tried by an armed council of revolutionaries who repeatedly threatened his life waving guns in his face. He was sentenced to death. A world-wide storm of outrage and pressure from Western governments forced the communist regime to commute the death sentence and instead banished him to Kostroma on the Urals for three years.[citation needed] This was also commuted following political pressure from the outside, and he was finally allowed to leave Russia for Riga in Latvia 1928 - 1929. He then went to visit the Holy Land (Israel) and the USA where he was received by US President Herbert Hoover in the White House. Lubavitch followers in America begged their Rebbe to leave Russia and stay in America, but Schneersohn declined, saying that America was an irreligious place where even rabbis shaved off their beards.[citation needed] From 1934 until the early part of the Second World War he lived in Warsaw Poland.
[edit] Warsaw to USA
Following Nazi Germany's attack against Poland in 1939 Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn refused to leave Warsaw. He remained in the city during the bombardments and its capitulation to Nazi Germany. He gave the full support of his organizations under Chabad Hasidism to assist as many Jews as possible to flee the invading armies. With the intercession of the United States Department of State in Washington, DC and with the lobbying of many Jewish leaders on behalf of the Rebbe (and, reputedly, with the help of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,[3] the head of the Abwehr), he was finally granted diplomatic immunity and given safe passage to go via Berlin to Riga, and then on to New York City where he arrived on March 19, 1940.
[edit] Launch of Lubavitch in the USA
Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn was already physically weak and ill from his suffering at the hands of the Communists and the Nazis, but he had a strong vision of rebuilding Orthodox Judaism in America and he wanted his movement to spearhead it. In order to do so he went on a building campaign to establish religious Jewish day schools and yeshivas for boys and girls, women and men. During the last decade of his life, from 1940 to 1950 he was often too ill to stand. He settled in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in New York City. He established printing houses for the voluminous writings and publications of his movement, and started the process of trying to win over the Jewish masses world-wide to his cause.[citation needed]
He began to teach publicly, and many came to seek out his teachings. He began gathering and sending out a small amount of his newly trained rabbis to other cities - a trend which was emulated and amplified by his son-in-law and successor Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. In 1948 he established a Lubavitch village in Israel known as Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv. He died in 1950 and was buried in the Borough of Queens in New York City. He had no sons, and his younger son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson succeeded him as Lubavitcher Rebbe, while the older son-in-law, Rabbi Shemaryahu Gurary was appointed to lead the Chabad Yeshiva network Tomchei Temimim. His gravesite became a central point of focus for his successor who would visit it regularly for many hours of prayer, meditation and supplication.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^
- http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=110174
- http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Yosef%20Yitzchak%20Schneersohn&page=1
- https://secure.jewishcontent.org/cgi-bin/sie?action=7&id=&group=History
- http://www.judaism.com/display.asp?etn=CAIAH
- http://store.kehotonline.com/index.php?stocknumber=EFR-HERO&deptid=3214&parentid=10&page=1&itemsperpage=10
- http://store.kehotonline.com/index.php?stocknumber=EFR-LIKUD1&deptid=3214&parentid=10&page=1&itemsperpage=10
- ^ Certificate of Naturalization.
- ^ Altein, R, Zaklikofsky, E, Jacobson, I: "Out of the Inferno: The Efforts That Led to the Rescue of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn of Lubavitch from War Torn Europe in 1939-40", page 160. Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch, 2002 ISBN 0826606830
[edit] External links
- Biography
- The "Ohel" - Gravesite
- Yud Shvat
- Books in English
- Memoirs
- Video of Schneersohn arriving in America
- Family Tree
- Complete published works in Hebrew
- Rigg, Bryan Mark (2004). Rescued from the Reich : How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10448-0.
[edit] Time-line of Lubavitcher rebbes
| Preceded by Sholom Dovber Schneersohn |
Rebbe of Lubavitch 1920—1950 |
Succeeded by Menachem Mendel Schneerson |
