Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn
Joseph Isaac (Yosef Yitzchok) Schneersohn (1880 - 1950) was the sixth Rebbe (Rabbi) of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic Judaism movement. After many years of fighting to keep Judaism alive in the Soviet Union, he was forced into exile, which eventually brought him to theUnited States after spending some years in Poland. He was the father-in-law to the last and most famous Rebbe Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson.
Seen here is Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn seated left, with his son-in-law and successor Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson standing right
Early Life
Joseph Isaac Schneersohn was born in the actual town of Lubavitch in White Russia also known as Belorussia. He was appointed as his father's personal secretary at the age of fifteen. In 1897 at the age of seventeen he married a distant cousin Nehama Dina Schneersohn. He was appointed as the first head of the new Tomchei Temimin network of Lubavitch yeshivas in Russia.
As he matured, he campaigned for the rights of Jews by appearing before the Czarist authorities in St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 he sought relief for Jewish conscripts in the Russian army by sending them kosher food and supplies. With rising anti-Semitism and pogroms against Jews, he travelled with other prominent rabbis to seek help from Western European governments. He was arrested four times between 1902 and 1911 by the Czarist police because of his activism, but was released each time.
Becomes Rebbe
Upon the death of his father in 1920 Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn became the sixth Rebbe (paramount leader) of Lubavitch. It was a time of great social and political upheaval following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The anti-religious secular -minded Bolsheviks, with Jews in their midst, were intent on uprooting and suppressing all religious life in the "new" Soviet Russia.
Battling the Bolsheviks
Following the takeover of Russia by the Communists, they created a special "Jewish affairs section" known as the 'Yeksektzia' which instigated anti-Jewish activities meant to strip Jews of their Torah based way of life based on Orthodox Judaism. As Rebbe of a Russian-based segment of the Jewish people, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn was vehemently outspoken against the Communist regime and its goals to establish atheism in the land. He purposely directed his followers to set up religious schools going against the dictates of the Marxist Leninist "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Thus in 1927 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Spalerno prison in Leningrad. He was tried by an armed council of revolutionaries who repeatedly threatened his life waving guns in his face. He was sentenced to death. A world-wide storm of outrage and pressure from Western governments forced the communist regime to commute the death sentence and instead banished him to Kostroma on the Urals for three years. This was also commuted following political pressure from the outside, and he was finally allowed to leave Russia for Riga in Latvia 1928 - 1929. He then went to visit the Holy Land (Israel) and the USA where he was received by US President Herbert Hoover in the White House. From 1934 until the early part of the Second World War he lived in Warsaw Poland.
Warsaw to USA
Following the Nazi attack against Poland in 1939 Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn refused to leave Warsaw. He remained in the city during the bombardments and its capitulation to Nazi Germany. He gave the full support of his organizations under Chabad Hasidism to assist as many Jews as possible to flee the invading armies. With the intercession of the United States Department of State in Washington, DC (at that time Germany was not at war with the USA, which only happened much later when Adolf Hitler declared war on the USA after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941) and the lobbying of many Jewish leaders, he was granted diplomatic immunity and given safe conduct to go via Berlin, then to Riga, and then on to New York City where he arrived on March 19 1940.
Launch of Lubavitch in the USA
Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn was already physically weak and ill from his suffering at the hands of the Communists and the Nazis, but he had a strong vision of rebuilding Orthodox Judaism in America and he wanted his movement to spearhead it. In order to do so he went on a crash building campaign to establish religious schools for boys and girls, men and women from 1940 until 1950. He settled himself in Brooklyn. He established publications, printing houses for the voluminous writings of his movement, and started the process of trying to win over the Jewish masses world-wide to his cause.
He began to teach publicly and there were some notable rabbinic leaders, such as the famous Rabbi Aaron Kotler of the Lakewood Yeshiva who criticized his methodology. He began gathering and sending out a small amount of his newly trained rabbis to other cities which was emulated and amplifeid by his son-in-law and successor Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson with phenomenal success. In 1948 he established a Lubavitch village in Israel known as Kfar Chabad near Lod. He died in 1950 and was buried in the Borough of Queens in New York City. He had no sons, so his two remaining sons-in-law were left to run the Lubavitch movement. His gravesite became a central point of focus for his successor who would visit it weekly for many hours of meditation and supplication.
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