JEWISH LIFE
Hartford man discovers treasure trove of Chabad Rebbe’s Holocaust correspondence BY DOVID MARGOLIN
I
n July of 1941, a worried Rabbi Shimon Leib Greenberg of Chicago sent a letter to a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied France who had just arrived in New York. The Warsaw-born Greenberg had lived with his wife and stepson in Paris before moving to the United States in 1939, intending to send for his family when he could. In September of 1939 World War II broke out, and by early summer of 1940 the Germans had captured Paris and communication was severed. Did the recent arrival have any word of Greenberg’s loved ones? On Monday, July 14, 1941 (19 Tammuz, 5701), the refugee responded in a handwritten letter. He and his wife, he wrote in Hebrew, had left Paris just days before the Nazis’ arrival on June 14, 1940. Before that, he had seen Greenberg’s stepson, a young man named Yaakov Potlik. But that was then. “A few weeks before our recent trip from France I received regards from Potlik from acquaintances who had come [to Marseille] from Paris and had seen him there,” he wrote. “But they don’t know what the current situation is, in particular since they last saw him before the
current chaos in Paris, when [the Nazis] took many of our brethren Jews and sent them to work” in labor camps. The author of the letter helpfully writes out an address for Rabbi Zalman Schneerson, a Jewish activist aiding refugees in Marseille, and suggests that Greenberg maintain contact with him in order to send food, money and immigration documents to his wife and stepson. He continues, “Currently, it seems to be impossible to send money [to occupied France] through American Express. However, there might be a way to send money through [another recently arrived immigrant] Mr. [Leibish] Heber, and it is best to verify that with him directly.” The new refugee was Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, still nine years away from assuming his father-in-law’s position as Rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. The Rebbe had arrived in New York on the S.S. Serpa Pinto three weeks earlier together with his wife, the Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka.
Greenberg was an eminent Chabad Chassid who had studied at the yeshivah in the White Russian village of Lubavitch, and the Rebbe had known him in Poland and then during their years living in Paris. In response to his request for information, the Rebbe wrote Greenberg his detailed letter and dispatched it to Chicago, where Greenberg was living at the time. The letter was among Greenberg’s possessions when he relocated to Hartford, in 1947, but remained entirely unknown to the world. Then, on June 13, 2021, Leonard Holtz discovered it in a shoebox in his Hartfordarea basement, nearly 80 years to the day of its writing. The letter is a unique historical document because it is one of only two known surviving letters written by the Rebbe in the Jewish calendar year 5701, or October 1940 to September 1941. In fact, the next known letter is dated May of 1942. More, this newly discovered letter sheds light on the Rebbe’s efforts to help his fellow Jews stranded in the Holocaust that would consume European Jewry. The curious fact is that despite the Rebbe’s voluminous output (his published letters alone fill 33 volumes), almost none of his early wartime correspondence have surfaced—though he certainly wrote correspondence during this period. That means there are surely many more out there. From the moment of the letter’s providential discovery the team of scholars at Vaad Hanachos B’Lahak (Lahak), led by Rabbi Chaim Shaul Brook, worked for days straight to bring it to print, adding copious background
and sources in the footnotes. As he went through last-minute proofreading, Brook commented that there are several layers of meaning in the letter. “It is the first time that we see the Rebbe himself speaking of his escape from Paris to Vichy France and then on to America,” he explains. “We knew this information from other testimonies, but here the Rebbe describes it himself. It’s a major revelation.” The letter was published by the Kehot Publication Society in a pamphlet together with a Chassidic discourse delivered by the Rebbe in 1974. It also includes a second recently discovered letter—this one from the summer of 1942—addressed to a Chabad Chassid in a refugee camp in Jamaica, to whom the Rebbe notes he is sending seforim (books) and prayer books for the Jewish refugees in the camp. But the 1941 Holocaust-era letter almost didn’t reach the light of day. That is, until Laura Zimmerman asked her husband, Leonard Holtz, the director of the Hebrew Funeral Association in Hartford, to perhaps spend some time clearing out their basement of the many old books and papers that had piled up there over the years. The day was Sunday, June 13, 2021, or the 3rd of Tammuz on the Jewish calendar, which was also the 27th anniversary of the Rebbe’s passing. But the story doesn’t end there. “I thought to myself, ‘Is this real?’ ” an emotional Holtz tells me by phone about the hours after his discovery, and the otherworldly events that followed. “Could this really be?” And then: “Why did the Rebbe pick me?”
BE THE REB WHICH EENBERG IN , R E GR ETT 1941 L ABBI SHIMON THE LATTER’S . THE JULY WITH R E HAS ABOUT CUPIED PARIS S E R A H C H S ATION NAZI-O INFORMD STEPSON IN N WIFE A
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JEWISH LEDGER
| AUGUST 6, 2021
ON JUN HIS BAS ERA MENA HOL ZI
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