Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, was born an ordinary human being 109 years ago at the edge of the Pale of Settlement in czarist Russia. According to some of his followers, he left us temporarily in New York 17 years ago, perhaps to return to us as the Messiah, not as an ordinary human being. Now two expert researchers wish to restore the Lubavitcher Rebbe to the status of an ordinary human being with their controversial biography. To put it mildly, Chabad officials do not like the book, which is entitled "The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson" (Dvir and The Shazar Center). They claim that the book takes a hostile attitude and holds predetermined views. Chabad leaders point to omissions, at least some of which are significant and appear to be deliberate, and many inaccuracies. In the United States, where the book was first published, Chabad officials have already expressed their anger and criticism in responses and essays about the English edition that was published around a year ago an edition that won a National Jewish Book Award for 2010. The authors, Professor Menachem Friedman, one of the leading researchers of Jewish society in the modern era, and Professor Samuel Heilman, the chairman of the Jewish Studies Department at the CUNY Graduate Center, both Orthodox Jews (Friedman in Israel and Heilman in the U.S.), interpret the life of a complex and surprisingly open-minded man in their 400-page work. For approximately half his life, the Lubavitcher Rebbes lifestyle was fairly open, far from holiness or asceticism. Only after the Holocaust, when he arrived in the U.S., did the Rebbe change his lifestyle and reinvent himself, according to their description. Friedman and Heilman had the impression that the deciding majority of Chabad hasidim saw, and still see, their rebbe as the Messiah, who will reveal himself when the time of the Redemption arrives. Chabad officials say that this group is a small minority. Whatever the case, the authors claim the intervening years have not weakened the faith of Chabad hasidim. On the contrary, the movement has grown stronger: the institution of emissaries that the Rebbe established throughout the world, and that has gained so much admiration, has doubled in size since his death in 1994. They claim that now, more than ever, the institution of emissaries is seen as a tool for bringing the Redemption, and the revelation of the Rebbe as the Messiah, closer. Both professors pour quite a bit of cold water on the Rebbes image. Going as far back as his childhood, they reveal that he received a fairly open education. They describe how he lived a students life for the five years that he spent in Berlin and the seven years that he spent in Paris, and note that his acquaintance with Moussia, his future wife and the daughter of the sixth Chabad rebbe, lasted much longer than was conventional five and a half years until they were married. She was 27 and a half at the time they wed. The Chabad officials claim that the authors omit an essential fact: It was at the request of the brides father, who had been imprisoned during that time. A varied education As the leader of a hasidic movement, Menachem Mendel kept his distance from both secular and religious Zionism, and his relationship with the state of Israel was complex, moving between expressions of enthusiasm and criticism. Yet as a boy and young man, Menachem Mendel drank from the fountain of Zionism, and the education that he received was unusually open. His parents, Chana and Levi Yitzchok Schneerson, who lived in Yekaterinoslav, a cosmopolitan city on the banks of the Dnieper River, did not send their son to the Tomchei Temimim Yeshiva in Lubavitch, as might have been expected of them. They also made sure that alongside his religious studies, young Menachem Mendel studied Hebrew grammar and poetry, including the works of Haim Nahman Bialik. Meanwhile, Chabad officials ask whether the authors surprise over the openness of the Rebbes education results from the fact that it is actually surprising, or whether the problem has more to do with what many people, including the authors, believe education was like in the society in which the Rebbe lived. In any case, although the Lubavitcher Rebbes father was the rabbi of a hasidic community in Yekaterinoslav, he wished to give his children a general education as well. Despite what Friedman and Heilman describe in their book as Chabads basic antipathy toward Zionism, Levi Yitzchok Schneerson hired one Yisrael Idelson as his childrens tutor. Idelson, an avowed socialist Zionist, eventually changed his name to Bar-Yehuda and became interior minister in the Israeli government. Before he served as a minister, he lived on Kibbutz Yagur and was appointed to leadership positions in the United Kibbutz Movement and in the Ahdut HaAvoda political party. Fate had a good laugh when, as interior minister, Bar-Yehuda sought to pass a law stipulating that the right to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return would be given to any Jew who declared in good faith that he was Jewish, without the need for any other proof. Years later his own pupil, Rebbe Menachem Mendel, would demand that the right to immigrate under the Law of Return be given only to those who were Jewish according to Jewish religious law. This demand created a severe crisis between segments of American Jewry and the state of Israel. Professor Friedman says that although Levi Yitzchok Schneerson, the Rebbes father, was not a Zionist, Menachem Mendels friends came from families who were already drawn to secularization. The most reliable description came from their neighbors from that time, Avraham and Vardina Schlonsky. Later on, Schlonsky became one of Israels best-known poets, while Vardina became an important pianist and composer. But despite the marked difference in the religious and political leanings of the Schlonsky and Schneerson families, and although the Schlonskys were not meticulous about keeping kosher, they celebrated the Sabbath and festivals together, and the children spent a great deal of time together and divided their time between the families ground-floor apartments during vacations. It is likely that this was when Menachem Mendel first acquired the belief he would later teach in the Chabad movement that it was obligatory to reach out to non-observant Jews. The future rebbes studies at the universities in Yekaterinoslav, Leningrad and Berlin were also a good deal more open than what we might have expected of the Schneersons, who belonged to the Chabad elite. When the court of Chabad moved to Riga (Menachem Mendel could not know then that he would become the movements leader), he concentrated on his high-level studies in Berlin. Friedman and Heilman believe that Mendels acts show that even though he was determined to enter the Rebbes court and marry Moussia, he was not willing to be a hasid like all the other hasidim. They claim that, at that time, he wore modern dress, and that he and Moussia led double lives. On the one hand, they lived as students, and on the other they kept in touch through letters and visits with the court and the family in Riga. A curious episode in the Rebbes life deals with the years in Paris when he lived with his wife, Moussia, her sister Sheyna and Sheynas husband, Menachem Hornstein. Menachem Mendel earned a degree in mechanical engineering and in electrical engineering. Both couples lived in the same building in the 14th arrondissement in Paris, far from the Jewish quarter. Their neighbors were Russian painters, a Hungarian journalist and a boxer. This was fairly close to the center of Bohemian life in Paris, which was full of writers and artists from all over the world. But Menachem Mendel changed. It did not happen overnight. The turning point in his life came after the Holocaust. According to the authors, the man who sought refuge in academia and who had, for years, avoided commitment to the hasidic court, found himself in the United States just before 1950 as a childless survivor of the Holocaust, pursued by the bereavement that had struck his family and searching for an answer to the riddle of his survival. After a battle over the succession [of the title of "Rebbe"] (which the book describes in minute detail), Menachem Mendel received an opportunity to change the world, and he grasped it with both hands. An address for every Jew He did an amazing thing, says Friedman. On the one hand, he created an address for every Jew in the remotest places in the world, what was known as the emissary program, with Chabad mitzvah tanks and operations to spread Jewish teachings and Chabad Houses, and tefillin and kashrut and synagogues and mikvaot. On the other hand, he created a feeling that the Messiah was at the threshold, that his generation, the seventh in the Chabad dynasty, was the one whose aim would be to bring the Redemption and the Messiah. But the longer the Messiah tarried and the Redemption did not come, the more the hasidim convinced themselves that the Rebbe himself was the Messiah. At first, Menachem Mendel hushed them. But later, he accepted it (Chabad officials say that this is a lie, citing quotes from the Rebbe himself as evidence that he actually forbade anyone to refer to him as such). According to Friedman, the Rebbes relationship with the state of Israel was part of his Messianic view. He saw the state as the theft of a sacred concept. He never uttered the phrase state of Israel, saying the Holy Land instead. He would say that the tanks of the IDF owed their victory to the tanks of Chabad. Israels victory in the Six Day War was proof for him that his actions and those of his hasidim were accomplishing their purpose. The Lubavitcher Rebbe was so convinced that the state of Israel survived and thrived because of his acts and those of his hasidim that on the second day of Simchat Torah in 1974, he almost forced one of the Israelis visiting him to call Israel and give Defense Minister Moshe Dayan his advice to conquer Damascus. Dayan did not heed the Rebbes advice. The harshest quotation from the Rebbe regarding the state of Israel that appears in the book was taken from one of the haredi newspapers that interviewed the Rebbe on Israels tenth anniversary. The Rebbe says there that one must not see the state of Israel as the beginning of the Redemption (the accepted view of religious Zionism), and charges that Israel has become a place where the Sabbath is desecrated in public. During the interview, the Rebbe reprimands the countrys leaders, saying: "When you changed the name of the Land of Israel to the state of Israel in 1948, you took from the nation of Israel the name that was written in the Torah. You established the secular state of Israel rather than the Holy Land of Israel ... They brought the Diaspora to Tel Aviv and to Jerusalem, claiming that it was freedom and independence. Instead of following the Torah ... the demand to become like all the nations has returned ... Zion and Jerusalem are not ours ... This is not the Zion for which we yearned." Heilman and Friedman say that no episode illustrates the Rebbes combative stance toward Zionism more than the role that he filled in what would be called the Schumacher Affair, in which 6-year-old Yossele Schumacher was smuggled out of Israel by her grandfather who wanted to prevent the boy from being raised secular. The authors say that the man who was active in preventing the return of the kidnapped child was his uncle, Shalom Starkes, a Chabad hasid, who was in direct and indirect contact with the Rebbe. Although Starkes went to prison in Israel, he received a pardon from President Zalman Shazar, who was close to the Chabad movement and assisted it. Between actual and virtual Will there be a successor to the Rebbe? Will there be another leader, the eighth, to continue the dynasty? Friedman says no, unless the hallucination reaches the point where someone claims that he is the resurrected Rebbe. Unlike Chabads position that the Messianists are a fringe group that give the movement a bad name, Heilman believes that the more time passes, belief in the Rebbe as the Messiah is growing stronger. He believes that it will grow much more powerful and that the Rebbes success as a leader has grown even more after his death. There is a virtual Rebbe, and the boundary between him and the actual Rebbe is blurred. Videos of his gatherings and speeches are screened again and again in every Chabad center. There is no need for a new Rebbe. There is a Rebbe in reverse. The virtual Rebbe will never die, never get sick, never have another stroke. It must be noted that Friedman never met the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Heilman met him once after his stroke, when the Rebbe was no longer communicative. He remembers that at the beginning of the 1970s, several Chabad representatives contacted him with the suggestion that he write the Rebbes biography. Heilman says: "I asked them whether I could interview him or his wife. When they said no, I said no." Throughout the book, the two authors deal with the Messianic question, but are careful not to call the Rebbe a false messiah. As Orthodox Jews who researched the phenomenon of the Rebbe as the Messiah, do they still believe in the thirteenth principle of faith as laid down by Maimonides belief in the arrival of a redeemer? Friedman declines to answer. Heilman says that, formally, he believes in the idea of redemption, but says: "Meanwhile, we must live our daily lives. As an Orthodox but modern Jew, I straddle two worlds." The book also deals with the fact that the Rebbe never visited Israel, and claims that his anti-Zionist position prevented many hasidim from immigrating to Israel and thus increasing the number of people saved from destruction, like the Gur Hasidim, for example. Friedman and Heilman recall that the Rebbes wife, Moussia, lived as a completely private person. She experienced a great deal of loneliness, read newspapers, watched television, walked alone in the streets of New York and was friendly with a small group of Russian-speakers who discussed literature. But the harshest and most moving description in the book is the moment that the Rebbe suffered the terrible stroke during a solitary visit to the grave of his father-in-law, the sixth rebbe. This was the stroke that resulted in his death two years later. For the first time, the authors said, he had no control not over his hasidim and not over himself. As each precious moment went by, one after the other, his secretaries made the decisions for him: He would not be taken to the hospital, where he would be forced to obey the instructions of physicians and nurses, stripped of his clothing and his self-respect. He would be brought to his palace at 770 Eastern Parkway. And so it was. A Chabad scholar responds Rabbi Chaim Rapoport who studied the life of the Rebbe and his approach to the coming of the Messiah was privy to many inside Chabad events. Rapoport holds the Jewish medical ethics portfolio in the U.K. Chief Rabbi Cabinet, which is headed by Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, perhaps the most authoritative rabbi in Britain. Rapoport refuses to accept the claim that the Rebbe saw himself as the Messiah just before he passed away, calling this "false." He cites a detailed will the Rebbe wrote several years prior to his death and a conversation held with him after his wife Chaya Mushka (Moussia) had passed away, where he talked about the possible problems that might arise when he departs. "The will and this conversation prove that the Rebbe knew that he had no eternal life but the study conducted by the professors has no mention of this fact," says Rapoport, even though he holds them in high regard academically. According to Rapoport, in 1991 the Rebbe felt that he had to step out of a synagogue following statements he had heard that referred to him as the Messiah. There were also similar cases where he publicly rebuked those who engaged in a guessing game as to the identity of the Messiah and he refused to accept letters that had addressed him as the Messiah. According to Rapoport, the Rebbe indeed felt that redemption was just around the corner and hoped that it would happen during his lifetime. "But this was just a reflection of his hopes and aspirations, not a concrete fact that must be validated," he said. Those in Chabad who still view him as the Messiah are in the minority, he claims. Rapoport also takes issue with the way the book describes the Rebbe's view of the state of Israel. "The authors are singling out harsh statements he made but omit very positive things he said on the Jewish state and its military. He even said that the fighters of the Six Day War were to be held in a higher esteem than Yeshiva students," Rapoport claims. Though not a Zionist, the Rebbe was pro-Israel and wanted to cement its Biblical bond with the land. He rejected secular Zionism, which he viewed as an attempt to make Israel a nation just like all other nations, while also rejecting national religious Zionism and its view that the establishment of the state of Israel was the first step towards redemption and the coming of the Messiah. Rapoport also rejects the claim that the Rebbe was not affiliated with a synagogue when he lived in Paris or that he was not fully engaged with Torah study, calling this a distortion of the facts. He cites the various religious commentaries the Rebbe authored during that time and points out that there is a synagogue very close to where he lived.
