Shevat 10: A Day of Two Rebbes

When I was 11 years old, my father gave me the manuscript as a gift. "This is a chassidic kiss," he said, "in time I will explain"

At the age of ten, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak was thrown into jail for helping a fellow Jew. This story is indicative of the pattern the rest of his life would follow.

The guard was stupefied: few were the cabinet-level ministers granted such a privilege, and here stood a young chassid with a beard, sidelocks, chassidic garb and a Yiddish accent, at a time when to even reside in Petersburg was forbidden to Jews

The three emissaries from the court of death entered the room, dressed in their uniforms of red and black, rifles in hand, their belts filled with bullets and hung with a pair of revolvers and another pair of Cossack knives, with helmets of brass and their faces aflame

Nachmanson turned to me, his face red with rage: "Forget that you are Schneersohn, the distinguished Bogamolnik. You are now a simple person who is being punished for your flagrant acts against the proletariat. Now you will pay for everything"

What if someone said to you, "I love you, but I don't like your children"? You'd probably say: "You don't know anything about who and what I am, and you don't know what love is, either!"

Some teach by writing books, others deliver lectures, still others regularly issue public letters, essays and commentary. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, widely regarded as one of the most influential teachers of our generation, did all of the above; but his primary medium of teaching was the farbrengen.

Essays, insights and letters, stories and first-person accounts, and an online biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory

Love, leadership, childhood, marriage, aging, rebellion, sleep, money, anxiety, death, life, and 43 other things according to the Lubavitcher Rebbe

Yahrtzeit candles, Mishna study, and more customs to be practiced on the day of a yahrtzeit.