When the Lubavitcher rebbe died June 24, 1994, without naming a successor, the question in the minds of many was: Who would run the movement?
The childless Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson left no obvious successor and never groomed or named someone outside his family.
Fractiousness and in-fighting among the aides over decisions as central as the medical care of their ailing leaders heightened the uncertainly about Lubavitch’s future leadership.
A year later, most of the rebbe’s followers and those in charge of the organizations he established have used his earlier opinions as guidance. They have made decisions, both personal and institutional, based on their interpretations of the vast amount of written literature and video and audio recordings the rebbe left.
When it comes to important new decisions, the answer as to whom is in charge may best be illustrated by how a decision was made on the disposition of three notebooks that were discovered after the rebbe’s death.
The notebooks, which date back to 1932, are filled with hundreds of pages of Schneerson’s handwritten thoughts and analyses on matters ranging from Torah to astronomy.
His aides had known of the existence of two of the notebooks, but not their whereabouts. The discovery of the third notebook came as a complete surprise.
A few weeks after the rebbe’s death, Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, the rebbe’s longtime aide, spokesman and executor of his will, found the notebooks while sorting through the contents of a file cabinet in the room in which the rebbe lived and worked.
“I knew it was a treasure of incalculable value,” said Krinsky. “It was like digging and digging and then finding a diamond.”
The pages of handwritten notes “shed light on the rebbe in the early years, what he was immersed in, which there was previously little information on,” he said.
The rebbe down his thoughts and insights while he was in Warsaw, in Paris and in Nice, France, addressing issues in Jewish literature and customs, in mathematics and medicine.
One essay sheds light on his thoughts as prepared to immigrate to the United States.
In the spring of 1941, when the rebbe was 39, he was waiting with his wife in Lisbon to board the boat that would take them to New York.
The day before they embarked, he wrote an essay explicating the Talmudic requirements of those required to recite “Gomel,” a special prayer of thanks to God for travelers.
“You see the genius of the rebbe in his early years. They weren’t necessarily things he spoke about in his later years,” said Krinsky.
Krinsky brought the find to the board of the Agudas Chasedei Chabad (Union of Chabad Chasidim), the policy-making body for the Lubavitch movement, which is also the beneficiary of the rebbe’s estate.
Agudas Chasedei Chabad still lists the rebbe as president, and the chairman as Rabbi Chaim Hodakove, who died in 1993. Rabbis Krinsky and Nissam Mindel are its officers.
Together, they and the other 20 members of the board looked over the treasure of the handwritten pages and decided, by consensus, to publish it in parts as it was analyzed and notated, rather than wait for all the volumes to be completed, which could take years.
They assigned four young scholars to the task and so far, have published 10 Hebrew-language pamphlets.
The 11th was released last Friday, in honor of Monday, June 26, the anniversary of the day in 1941 that the rebbe arrived with his wife, Chaya Mushka, on American shores.
A translation into English is planned for the near future.
Krinsky also found diaries from the 1920s, when the rebbe was a young married man, which are full of reflections on what his father-in-law, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, who was then the head of the Lubavitch sect, said on various Torah-related topics.
There are also letters written to leading Torah scholars dating even further back, when the man who would eventually be considered by many to be the leading religious figure in the Jewish world was just a teen-ager.
Some of them have already been published, Krinsky said.
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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.
