R’ Nissan Mangel, a distinguished rav and mashpia in Crown Heights, shares what he heard about the Rebbe’s involvement in the Yossele saga. * How the Satmar Rebbe referred a fateful question to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. * About the late night yechidus and the Rebbe’s answer
Prepared for publication by R’ Sholom Yaakov Chazan
Some background: 18 Teves 5720. Alter and Ida Schumacher made aliya from Russia with their two children. They asked Ida’s parents, Breslover Chassidim who lived in Mea Sh’arim, to raise their children.
They sent the nine year old Zeena to Kfar Chabad and Yossele was taken in by R’ Nachman and his wife Miriam Shtroks. When the young couple’s financial state improved, they wanted their children back. The grandfather agreed to take the girl out of the dormitory in Kfar Chabad and return her to her parents. He also promised to return Yossele with the start of the new school year, but did not follow through on this because he said the parents were planning to return to the Soviet Union and raise the boy as a communist.
The parents insisted on getting their son back and then Yossele disappeared. The parents feared he had been sent out of the country and they asked the court system for help. Despite court orders, the grandfather refused to have the boy returned to his parents. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had the Mossad get involved in the search for the boy.
THE FATEFUL QUESTION
R’ Nissan Mangel relates:
It was shortly after the Schumacher episode. I was standing at a bus stop in Flatbush on my way home to Crown Heights when a Chassidic looking fellow came over to me. He asked me how to get to Williamsburg. I told him that I was going to Crown Heights and from there he could take a bus directly to Williamsburg.
The bus came and he got on and sat down next to me. We got to talking. He was a rabbi from the Eidah HaChareidis in Yerushalayim. Unfortunately, I do not remember his full name.
When he realized that I am a Lubavitcher Chassid, he said to me, “I will tell you something interesting about the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s involvement in the Yossele story. A short time before Yossele was discovered, word reached Williamsburg that Mossad agents knew that Yossele was being hidden there and it was a matter of time before they found the hiding place.
“The father of the family which was hosting Yossele at that time, R’ Avrohom Zanvil Gartner, was a Satmar Chassid. Hearing the reports, he asked his Rebbe, R’ Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar, whether to continue hiding Yossele and wait until the Mossad agents found him, or to give Yossele up.”
(In newspaper accounts of the time there was an item about Yossele’s parents considering suing the Gartner family for keeping Yossele without their permission. It is possible that this is what Gartner was afraid about, or that he was afraid he would be accused of kidnapping – SYC.)
ASK THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE
The Satmar Rebbe’s answer was that he could not make this decision and only the Lubavitcher Rebbe could respond to this question.
Satmar askanim immediately formed a delegation of three rabbanim which included the rav who was telling this to me, R’ Shimon Yisroel Posen of Shopran (who a few months earlier had received a letter from the Rebbe in which the Rebbe noted that they had met before), and another distinguished rav whose name I don’t recall.
They arranged an urgent appointment with the Rebbe and were given a slot late at night. When they entered the Rebbe’s room, they presented the question and the Rebbe said the child could not be handed over to the Mossad.
The Rebbe expressed his surprise about Satmar Chassidim: Why don’t they obey their Rebbe at least as much as the Litvishe listen to their roshei yeshiva?
After the yechidus, they went straight back to Williamsburg where the Satmar Rebbe was waiting for them. He did not go to sleep until he heard the Rebbe’s answer. Of course, he told R’ Gartner to do as the Lubavitcher Rebbe said and not voluntarily hand Yossele over.
A SATMAR CHASSID AT THE REBBE’S YUD Shvat FARBRENGEN
Here is another story that happened to me from which we can also learn about the Satmar Rebbe’s admiration for the Rebbe’s holy work.
It was 5715 or 5716. I was learning in yeshiva in Montreal at the time and when I had yechidus the Rebbe suddenly asked me whether I put on Rabbeinu Tam t’fillin. I said no, for in those days it was customary to start putting them on only after you got married. I asked: Does the Rebbe think I should start putting them on? The Rebbe said yes.
When I returned to Montreal, I spoke to the mashpia of the yeshiva, R’ Wolf Greenglass, about what the Rebbe told me. I told him my concern that I did not know where I would get the money for new t’fillin since I was a young Holocaust survivor without a family to help me.
R’ Greenglass looked at me lovingly and said: I am responsible for the money for the t’fillin and in the meantime use my t’fillin. He gave me the address of a Satmar Chassid by the name of Weiss who manufactured the t’fillin boxes (a “battim macher”) and said: Go to him and tell him to make you battim on my account. Then he added: Since the Rashi t’fillin you use are old and not mehudar enough, tell him to prepare another pair, also on my account.
In those days, before Mivtza T’fillin, bachurim would go to swim in a pool on Friday afternoon. For several weeks I used that time to go to the battim macher to see how my battim were coming along.
The Satmar Chassid spoke against Lubavitch and opened his mouth against the Rebbe. One day I said to him: You’ve never been to the Rebbe so how can you speak against him when you did not hear him even one time? Come with me to visit the Rebbe.
Incredibly, he agreed and since it was soon Yud Shvat, we arranged to meet at the Rebbe’s farbrengen. In those days, the big farbrengens took place in halls in Brooklyn. I gave him the address and since he could not be there at the beginning, at 8:00, we arranged that I would step out of the farbrengen at 9:00 and he would be waiting at the entrance to the hall so I could bring him in and provide him with a place near the Rebbe.
I went out at 9:00 and nobody was there. I waited and waited and gave up after half an hour and went back to my place inside. I thought he had gotten cold feet.
The next Friday, when I went to him, I learned that he had also been at the farbrengen. “I was very late and arrived first at 10:00,” he told me. “Since I did not see you, I went inside on my own and heard the Rebbe. I thought that, indeed, he is a veritable angel of G-d, but then I pushed and got closer and when I saw the Rebbe’s hat I was very disappointed” [since it wasn’t one that Admurim wore].
ONLY THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE CAN
A few weeks passed and one Friday, when I went to see him as usual, he happily announced, “I am becoming a Chabad Chassid!”
I was taken aback, of course, and I asked him why he had changed his mind. He told me the following:
Last week, the Satmar Rebbe visited Toronto. Like many Satmar Chassidim in Montreal, I went to Toronto to see him. During the tish, the Admur told us about a group of Satmar Chassidim who went to Texas on business and were very successful. One thing bothered them though. In Texas you cannot obtain kosher meat and they had to eat from the food supplies their families sent along with them. Since they did well in business, they asked the Satmar Rebbe to send a G-d fearing shochet to them so they could eat fresh meat and they committed to paying the shochet well.
“I told them,” said the Satmar Rebbe, “that I cannot send a Chassidic shochet to Texas which is a ‘treife place,’ for he would certainly go off the derech. At first he would be embarrassed to go in public with his shtraimel, and then he would not wear his shtraimel even in shul, and then he would remove his peios and then his yarmulke.
“When the Lubavitcher Rebbe sends his emissaries, not only don’t they go off the derech, they make baalei teshuva! But I cannot take the responsibility for the shochet going off the derech.”
That t’fillin maker did not become a Chabad Chassid but his antipathy toward Chabad disappeared.