A new volume of correspondence belonging to the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, sheds new light on the Berlin and Paris lives of his daughter and the son-in-law who would succeed him, particularly the increasing push by the Jewish leader for his son-in-law to assume ever more vital and public roles.
The years preceding the 1940 arrival in New York of Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson and the future Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, had not until recently revealed little in the way of primary sources dealing with the scholarly back and forth between the Sixth Rebbe and his son-in-law and the latter's courtship of the Rebbetzin.
But the release of the 15th volume of the Sixth Rebbe's letters by the Kehot Publication Society, the publishing arm of Chabad-Lubavitch, opens a door on a trove of correspondence discovered in just the past several years at the Rebbe and Rebbetzin's home three blocks from Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y. The new volume offers 303 of those letters, taking care to omit correspondence dealing with the Sixth Rebbe's medical care and his financial transactions.
What emerges is a fascinating story beginning with the meeting of two distant cousins, progressing to the suggestion of the young Rabbi Menachem Mendel marrying the Sixth Rebbe's daughter and concluding with the Rebbe's delegation of publishing responsibilities to his new son-in-law.
"My daughter this week, I learned, gained knowledge of Mendel," the Sixth Rebbe writes, affectionately using the middle name of the future Rebbe.
When the young Chaya Mushka was away in a remote vacation town, her future husband stayed with the Sixth Rebbe. He records that they spent the entire first day together, thereafter conversing "almost every day for several hours a day."
"I could say that I already know him a little," the Sixth Rebbe writes to his daughter.
Thus began a continued process of the Sixth Rebbe granting more and more responsibilities to his son-in-law. The letters touch on the future Rebbe's involvement in communal affairs after Soviet authorities imprisoned the Sixth Rebbe in 1927, and note an interesting example of the leader's reliance on the future Rebbe's judgment.
Among the tasks the Sixth Rebbe assigned to his son-in-law was to evaluate the well-known scholar Rabbi Yehudah Eber, who was under consideration for a leadership position in the Lubavitch educational system, the movement's flagship institution....
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