Chesky Malamud flew home to New York from Paris but has only been to his parents’ Crown Heights apartment long enough to take a shower.
The 20-year-old Malamud, who was sent as a Lubavitch emissary to France, is not in town for a family visit.
He is spending his nights at the old Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, across the street from the Beth Israel Medical Center, where Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, spiritual leader of the Lubavitch Chasidic sect, lies in an intensive care unit.
“He’s my life,” Malamud said of the 91-year old Lubavitcher rebbe.
In their black coats and wide-brimmed fedoras, Malamud and others who have gathered to be near their ailing leader cut striking figures against the green metal lockers at the public high school building, where the overflow of visitors to nearby Beth Israel have set up their base.
As Schneerson struggles to recover from the massive stroke he suffered March 10 — his second in the last two years — the Lubavitchers are busy doing what they do best: maintaining their spiritual focus in the midst of less-than-idyllic surroundings. Just as they have organized Chabad outreach programs in unlikely settings from Uruguay to Tunisia, the movement has transformed the two-block area from First Avenue to Gramercy Park in front of Beth Israel into Lubavitch country.
Meals and sleeping accommodations, as well as daily prayer services and Torah readings, are arranged by organizers working around the clock.
While the heavily guarded seventh floor of the hospital is off-limits to all but an inner circle of aids, downstairs in the hospital’s chapel or outside on the cordoned-off streets, supporters have camped out behind police barricades to pray and pass the time as they wait to bring the rebbe home.
WEDDING WAS MOVED TO BE NEAR REBBE
Rabbi Avraham Lider, an overheated Israeli with beads of sweat bristling through his reddish beard, is stage manager to the ground operation, issuing commands in Yiddish, English and Hebrew to clusters of black-hatted foot soldiers, on hand to manage the hundreds of devotees who come to pray for the rebbe’s recovery.
Lider speaks proudly of this past Shabbat, when Lubavitch operatives managed to house and feed an estimated 700 well-wishers who came to the hospital, all according to strict observance of Jewish law. On Sunday, a Lubavitch wedding was moved from Crown Heights to Gramercy Park in order to be close to the rebbe.
In an interview this week, Lider was focused on the immediate logistical operation and did not want to talk about the rebbe’s condition. “Don’t ask me about the seventh floor,” he said.
Even in the hospital lobby, animated young women who have stopped in after work to pray for the rebbe pass out outreach literature to unaffiliated Jews.
In the auditorium of the old Stuyvesant High School building, which is no longer used by the school, young men pace the aisles with battered prayerbooks, nosh on kosher pizza or doze off on folding hardwood chairs.
Under banners urging on high school athletic teams, the Lubavitchers have moved in a holy ark to house the Torah scrolls used during Shabbat and weekday prayers.
Seventeen-year-old Yaakov Munitz has been hanging out in the auditorium reciting Psalm 92, in honor of the rebbe’s being in his 92nd year. The young yeshiva student — whose family was sent to Pittsburgh as Lubavitch emissaries — explains his devotion to the rebbe with clear-headed deliberation.
“We have to get out of this galus, um, exile” he said, translating from the Orthodox vernacular into the language understood by out-siders, and referring to the biblical notion that the Jewish people will be led by the Messiah from their current state of exile.
Like many who have gathered to be near the rebbe, Munitz is not happy that Schneerson may be suffering but he is certain that a recovery, and then the rebbe’s revelation as the Messiah, is imminent.
“There’s no way that anything could happen” to the rebbe, Munitz said. “I have no doubt.”
“The rebbe is our father, for all practical purposes,” explained Crown Heights Community Council Chairman Rabbi Joseph Spielman, in an interview following the rebbe’s stroke Thursday.
But if fear and sadness is the expected response to the suffering of an ailing parent, the mood among followers gathered at the hospital this week was decidedly upbeat. And as the rebbe’s prognosis improved, so did their spirits.
Eager to accommodate the rebbe, Beth Israel has set up a 24-hour hot line giving daily updates on the rebbe’s condition. And Lubavitch spokesman Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky has been filing periodic statements on the rebbe’s condition direct from the hospital’s public affairs department.
Karen Zipern, the hospital’s public affairs director, who described herself as a Reform Jew, said she has been impressed with the Lubavitch leadership’s calm handling of the crisis, and with the outpourings of support and respect from the Lubavitch community.
And Zipern said she has started to learn about Chasidic philosophy. “To see all the devotion the rebbe brings out, makes you think twice — maybe there is something to this after all.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
