The Missing Years

LOST AND FOUND The Rebbe’s early years took on the moniker “The Missing Years” because so little was known about that time. In 2002 Rabbi Yechiel Cagen and his staff at JEM began working on a film entitled The Early Years. “We thought it would be only a single one-hour film” Cagen says. “But by the time we finished it was a series of five.” Meanwhile unbeknownst to them Rabbi Boruch Oberlander the Chabad shaliach in Budapest had been quietly doing similar research Photos: Amir Levy Jewish Educational Media/Early Years

T he seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson zy”a was such a prominent and influential figure that some people assume he was always a fixture in Crown Heights until his passing 23 years ago on 3 Tammuz. But he didn’t arrive in the US until 1941 when he was 39 years old and became Rebbe ten years later at the age of 49 a year after the passing of his father-in-law the previous Rebbe. Where was he before then?

It’s generally known that the Rebbe was born on 11 Nissan 1902 in the Russian port city of Nikolayev Ukraine. He was a child when his father Rav Levi Yitzchak Schneerson ztz”l became chief rabbi of Yekaterinoslav (today Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine). He married a distant cousin the daughter of Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson the previous Rebbe (known as the Rebbe Rayatz) in 1928 and the couple spent years in Berlin Paris and Vichy France before escaping to the US in 1941.

“Once the Rebbe arrived in New York we have information about him ” says Rabbi Elkanah Shmotkin co-author of the recently released Early Years: The formative years of the Rebbe Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson as told by documents and archival data (Kehot Publication Society). “But we know extremely little about his early life in Europe. He rarely spoke about himself and when he did it was always in the context of making a point about something else.”