WaPo Article When Lubavitcher Rebbe Was Niftar

By Laurie Goodstein June 13, 1994
NEW YORK, JUNE 12 — Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the 92-year-old leader of the Brooklyn-based Lubavitch Hasidic movement, died early today, leaving one of the world’s largest ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities stunned and in crisis.

Even as his pine coffin was placed in the hearse, a panicked crowd of Lubavitch faithful chanted prayers for Schneerson to rise and reveal himself to be the Messiah for whom Jews have waited since antiquity.

His death four months after he suffered a massive stroke comes as a bewildering blow to the 250-year-old Messianic sect, which claims hundreds of thousands of followers around the world and plays a powerful role in Israeli politics. Schneerson, the seventh in the dynastic line of rabbis who have led the movement since its origins in the Russian town of Lubavitch, left no heir, nor did he designate a successor.

A sea of thousands of somber, black-hatted men and sobbing women and children filled the streets of Crown Heights and surged after the hearse. Women put away the tambourines they had brought to shake in ecstasy at the first glimpse of the Messiah. An estimated 30,000 people filed past the mausoleum where Schneerson was interred alongside his father-in-law, his predecessor as grand rebbe. Schneerson’s wife is buried nearby in the Queens cemetery.

“The rebbe has given us direction and purpose that we wouldn’t have had without him,” said Chana Leah, 48, of Crown Heights. “A lot of us feel that we’re nothing without the rebbe.”

A stream of politicians made their way into the sect’s headquarters to pay their respects, including Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and from Israel, Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu and Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich.

In Israel, hundreds of Schneerson’s followers rushed to Ben Gurion Airport to board flights to New York for his funeral, and Israel Radio reported that El Al, the national airline, added two flights to accommodate the crush of followers.

In the sect’s Kfar Habad village, many of the young men who were his disciples said they were in a state of shock and disbelief that he had died without revealing himself as the Messiah, but others repeated the story of how Moses went to Mount Sinai and failed to return on time, leading many of his tribe to think he had died, only to come back later.

“Some people have a strong belief the rebbe will rise up and bring us redemption,” said Nahum Cohen, a Schneerson follower in the village. “It’s what the rebbe said. Just now we have to wait. I never believed this would happen.”

Schneerson took over the position of rebbe — or “teacher” — of the Lubavitch Hasidim in 1951, settling with his followers in Crown Heights. He inherited a group that was little more than a demoralized band of Holocaust survivors, new arrivals in a country they found modern and bewildering.

Over the next 43 years, he would leave New York City only once — to visit the Catskills in 1957 — but he created an empire that runs what the group claims are 1,350 institutions around the world, including synagogues, summer camps, meeting houses, drug rehabilitation clinics, women’s centers and yeshivas — or Jewish day schools. On holidays, satellite television hookups carried his sermons to outposts of the faithful in such far off places as Tahiti, Kenya and Tunisia. The Lubavitchers are believed to run the world’s largest publishing house of Jewish religious literature.

While leaders of other ultra-Orthodox sects preached insularity, Schneerson taught his followers to reach out to secular Jews. On college campuses, they opened hundreds of “Chabad houses”; in the streets they fielded “mitzvah tanks” to distribute literature, and on Jewish holidays, they bought ads in buses, subways and newspapers. Their campaign was to rescue Jews from assimilation, or what Schneerson called “a spiritual Holocaust.”

Estimates of the number of followers vary widely — ranging from tens of thousands to as many as 300,000. Until his first stroke two years ago, Schneerson himself designed and directed all of this activity, say observers of the sect.

“He was the only one from the ultra-Orthodox who understood the vulnerability of Western culture, of Western man who works in New York and Washington and is very lonely, very much afraid, very much looking” for community and for purpose in life, said Menachem Friedman, an Israeli sociologist of religion at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, who has spent years studying the Lubavitchers.

Brilliant, charismatic and possessed of a piercing gaze and photographic memory, Schneerson regularly held one-on-one sessions with followers through the night until dawn, creating a powerful personal allegiance among the Lubavitch faithful. Thousands used to line up to seek his blessing or guidance and to receive from him dollar bills that the rebbe taught they should give to the needy. Instead, they laminated the bills he touched and gave away others.

Along the Brooklyn streets that surround the mock-Tudor, red-brick headquarters of the Lubavitch movement, shop windows, cars and banners are adorned with posters of the rebbe’s face and vendors sell postcards with his image.

In recent years, the Lubavitchers have come to play an increasingly visible role both in Israel, where Schneerson helped determine the outcome of the 1988 parliamentary elections, and in Brooklyn, where a fatal traffic accident involving his motorcade touched off several days of rioting in Crown Heights three years ago.

Schneerson had a unusual past for a Russian-born ultra-Orthodox scholar. While it is common today for Lubavitch to be educated exclusively in yeshivas, Schneerson never attended yeshiva at all, Friedman said. Instead, he had a secular education, living in the 1920s and 1930s in Berlin and Paris, studying philosophy and engineering and attending the Sorbonne. In 1929, Schneerson, who was the great-great-grandson of the third Lubavitcher rebbe, married Chaya Moussia, the second daughter of the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe.

Following the death of Schneerson’s father-in-law in 1950, a struggle for control of the Lubavitch movement ensued between Schneerson and his brother-in-law, the husband of the rebbe’s first daughter.

After about a year of jockeying, the Lubavitch began looking to Schneerson for leadership, believing his competitor was “too old world and too insular to confront a new situation in America,” said Samuel Heilman, the Harold M. Proshansky professor of Jewish studies and sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

In Hasidic tradition, when a rebbe dies, “unless there has been a designated successor, a kind of crown prince, then there is a period of transition in which a number of voices are heard and for a time nobody is dominant,” Heilman said.

That is the scenario that many observers of the Lubavitchers expect to see with Schneerson’s death since he had no children and no designated successor. The issue of who will follow Schneerson was further complicated by the fact that during his last years, even following his first stroke in 1992, which left him paralyzed and unable to speak, many Lubavitchers were convinced that he was about to declare himself the Messiah.

According to the teachings of the Talmud, the textbook of Jewish law and commentary written between the first and fifth centuries, there is in every generation an ordinary person possessed of great moral leadership who has the potential to become the Messiah if the world is spiritually prepared for his arrival. While this teaching is a symbolic one for many Jews, for the Lubavitchers it is at the very center of their faith. The sect runs a toll-free Messiah hot line, and some Lubavitchers wear beepers so they can be reached immediately with news of the Messiah’s coming.

As Schneerson’s following grew, almost all Lubavitchers came to believe that he was this generation’s candidate to redeem mankind. But as the rebbe lay ailing, a debate arose within the Lubavitch community about whether he would declare himself the Messiah or whether the world was not ready to accept him.

In the waning days of the rebbe’s life, the latter position appeared to gain strength when it was reported, in the New York-based Jewish weekly the Forward that Schneerson had written one — and perhaps two — secret wills, governing the disposition of his library and potentially giving clues as to who he felt should be his successor.

Standing in the rain that came and went as Lubavitchers waited for the casket to emerge yesterday, Daniel Jacobs, 44, said, “A lot of people are obviously going to be very disappointed that the rebbe is not standing up from his bed and proclaiming himself to be {the Messiah}. . . . But I don’t see why anything has changed. The work he gave us to do is still left to do.”

Correspondent David Hoffman in Israel and staff writer Malcolm Gladwell contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/06/13/death-of-lubavitcher-leader-rabbi-schneerson-stuns-followers/d22c9af8-7510-4adc-b12e-52bac6946977/?utm_term=.05a12df1ac86