Alone Against an Empire 

The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe defied Stalin’s secret police to create an underground Jewish movement, then escaped to America and faced down assimilation on the way to creating today’s global Chabad. What lay behind Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn’s one-man stand?

It was 1920, and after three brutal years of Soviet enlightenment, the writing was on the wall for Russian Jewry.

Lenin and his henchmen were still struggling to assert control of the massive empire of the czars, but in one area at least, they were making progress. The Communist Party’s Jewish Section — known as the Yevsektsiya — was well into its campaign to utterly destroy Jewish life in the USSR.

The drive to turn Jews into the new Homo Sovieticus was led with an extraordinary degree of hatred by a group of Jewish renegades, many from religious homes. Rabbis were put on trial, shochtim arrested, shuls and chadarim closed, Zionists and Bundists disappeared, and children were forced into state schools to be indoctrinated with Marxism.

Anyone who could manage it crossed the border to free Poland. But for millions of Jews, there was no escape.

Amid the general despair, a dramatic encounter between a father and son took place in Rostov-on-Don, southern Russia, that set the course for a clandestine Jewish campaign that would sustain Jewish life in the USSR for decades.