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| Russian Jewish children remained in summer camp as the coup raged in Moscow. (Photo: Lubavitch Archives) |
As the world watched hard-line Communists make their last-ditch effort 20 years ago to reclaim control of the fracturing Soviet Union, a young Rabbi Berel Lazar was due to return to Moscow. Lazar, a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary who was then rabbi of the Russian capital's Marina Roscha district, had been in New York attending to his wife and newborn baby. The August coup of 1991 – known popularly as the Putsch – began a day before their scheduled return.
"I got a call from Moscow in the middle of the night Aug. 18," relates Lazar, today the Chief Rabbi of Russia. "Counselors at our summer camps outside the city were frantic, as everybody was in Moscow at that time. People everywhere were saying it was time to leave.
"They didn't know whether to go or stay," continues the rabbi. "They asked me if they should leave, while I was asking myself if I should go back."
At a time when tanks rolled up to the Russian parliament building and Muscovites with means flooded airline terminals looking for ways out, Jewish institutions throughout the city – which had just started enjoying an era of social reforms instituted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev – shut their doors. Plagued by visions of 1964, when hardliners abruptly ended the process of de-Stalinization championed under Nikita Khrushchev, and of the earlier October Revolution of 1917, people throughout the city feared the return of violent anti-religious crackdowns and political oppressions.
Lazar frantically wrote into the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, and asked what to do. The Rebbe struck an optimistic note with Lazar, echoing messages he sent to Russians on the ground in Moscow. All would be alright, the Rebbe asserted. Jewish institutions should continue operating, summer camps should stay in session, and their American counselors should remain. To Lazar, the Rebbe said that he and his family should return to Russia as planned.
"There was shooting in Moscow, but in the Rebbe's eyes, there was nothing to worry about," says Lazar. "Everyone else was sure the coup was going to continue, but the Rebbe encouraged us."
Emboldened by the Rebbe's assurances that the climate would improve and his insistence that Jewish life continue, many Jews in the Russian capital ultimately stayed. As it turned out, the coup ended as quickly as it began, and by Aug. 24, order had returned.
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