First Person

I got straight to the point. “Rebbe, I have heard that many miracles come from this room. Please give my daughter a blessing that she should be cured!”

Solar energy pioneer Yaacov (Jack) Hanoka, who held patents for 56 of his inventions and was known for his passion and optimism in finding alternative energy sources to fossil fuels, passed away at the age of 75.

The Rebbe said was, “It is enough that you were working with the dead, now you need to work with the living!”

One day, after another round of my incessant questioning, the teacher suggested, “Why don’t you write a letter to the Rebbe requesting a private audience?”

The Rebbe thought deeply for a few minutes and said, “Keep looking. To sit here, and not look, and say there is nothing out there, is placing a limit on G‑d’s creation. That you can’t do!” . . .

Flying across Grenada, I receive instructions from the Pentagon to call Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn.

Sitting on the stairs outside the Rebbe’s office, I found myself daydreaming, asking myself, “If I had unlimited time with the Rebbe, what would I ask him?”

The Rebbe told me, “You are very different from each other. Remove him from your agenda.”

The Rebbe explains to a London diamond dealer why his investment in education is so important.

I started looking around the Rebbe’s room to find the box of toys. I figured thousands of kids came through this room—there must be toys somewhere.

The Rebbe asked about my uncle. I responded by saying that he was well, thank G‑d, and had just retired. The Rebbe shook his head. In Yiddish, he said, “Retired—what does that mean?”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describes his first visit to Lubavitch World Headquarters and his meeting with the Rebbe.

After the White House talks, I returned to New York to call upon the Rebbe. My presentation, his interrogation, and his further clarification took close to three hours. By the time we finished it was nearly two in the morning.

The Rebbe's relationship with an international chess champion; the Rebbe's spiritual take on the "Game of Kings"; and the chassidic "kings" who enjoyed the game.

I cannot have kids. I wrote to him about the emphasis Orthodox Judaism seems to place on women having many kids.

He said an artist needs inspiration, that you have to wait for a certain thing to come down--he called it the 'holy spirit'--and for him putting on tefillin gave him his inspiration for the day...

No one knew how to tell me the news, and so, although I knew the truth in my heart, for those agonizing minutes I kept on hoping. Hoping that it was just an accident . . .

Rabbi Zev Segal, communal leader and Jewish activist, describes how the Rebbe approached Jewish life after the holocaust.

U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-N.Y.), the first African-American woman elected to Congress, helped expand federal food supplement programs at the urging of the Rebbe.

A glass inventor tells of his experiences with the Rebbe in France before and during WWII.

The former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel describes his meetings with the Rebbe, and explains why the Rebbe, an Ashkenazic rabbi, assisted all Jews.

How I saved lives with the Rebbe's precious advice in what became the most important story of my life.

The Rebbe himself had no children, yet he gave so many people blessings for children. Who are the Rebbe’s children?

You want to change the world? Start by changing yourself.

A warm relationship between the Rebbe and former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

There are differences. We don't focus on the differences. We focus on what we have in common.

A glimpse at the relationship between the Rebbe and Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, "the Rav."

After having met a believer you are no longer the same. Though you may not have accepted his faith, you have nevertheless been embraced by it. For the true believer believes in you as well

Question: How did you become a rebbe?
Answer: What do you do if they put the key in your pocket and walk away?

I take a look, and you have three hundred people in white shirts, because in those days most people wore white shirts. And in the middle is sitting a guy with a black beard, earlocks, a black hat and a black suit.

My father saw himself as a young child, sitting on his grandmother's lap. "Liuvu," she was saying to him, "anytime you are in trouble, the one who can help you is the Lubavitcher Rebbe." This was the first time he had ever heard of the Rebbe

I will forever attribute the first step of my restoration to sanity and self-respect to one man who, with unfathomable intuition and faith in humanity, made a selfless, precise therapeutic intervention in my spirit, and demanded neither my soul nor my bank book as recompense...

"There's an old man in Brooklyn," the Rebbe said, "who thinks about you and invites you to come back on your 20th anniversary." To Greene, he seemed more like a loving uncle than the spiritual leader of the Jewish world...

I had never seen such a strong bond and commitment in my life. The mere mention of his name would make their eyes sparkle. I never thought that I would be able to admire and respect someone so much...

Fallacious arguments flew away like frightened bats as we toned the walls of our hearts to prepare for an all-out war -- fairly fought, wind against wind

How could you mend a fracture so deep, such a hole in the heart of humanity? ... Would it be possible to search out every Jew in love as Jews had once been searched out and hunted down in hate?

"Now that you have interviewed me," said the Rebbe, "I'd like to interview you. Unless you have any objections?"

"When a Jew in Miami," the Rebbe said to me, "sees pictures of Jews at the Western Wall wearing tefillin, he gets an urge to put on tefillin himself."

He made of each Chasid a "rebbe," made each Chasid feel that responsibility and love for every Jew, made each Jew sense her or his own greatness and holiness.

"In these days of confusion the Rebbe's statesmanship and strategic vision are a wellspring of living waters."

Yitzhak Rabin was a straight-as-a-die agnostic, and shy to a fault. So, when on a spring day in 1972 he was kept waiting at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for his appointment with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he became fidgety...

An artist relates his personal encounters with the Rebbe, beginning from the age of 15

Who was William Guttman, driving a cab through Manhattan on the night shift? Finally I asked him, as he had asked us, "Are you Jewish?"

He was a world-famous figure, I was an anonymous student from 3000 miles away. Quickly it became clear to me that he believed in me more than I believed in myself

It was a meeting without preliminaries or conclusion. He said few words and did not encourage me to necessarily become part of his community, yet the meeting redirected my life.

The Rebbe immediately corrected me, "We cannot label anyone as being 'far.' Who are we to determine who is far and who is near? They are all close to G-d!"

Often the secretary would ring, and I would rise to leave because I knew there were people waiting. But the Rebbe would keep me back saying, "What? We are talking about the community."

I was quite nervous as I took my place on line in front of the Rebbe's door. I had of course heard the Rebbe speak in public, but this was different, I told myself. This is yechidut...

A spur-of-the-moment visit to Rabbi Menachem Schneerson's tomb brings unexpected and astonishing results.

In his reply the Rebbe wrote: "Do you think it is right that a Jew who put on tefillin yesterday for the first time in over twenty years should wait another six weeks for you to buy him a pair of tefillin ?"

I simply had no more talk left in me. I had spent hours casting about for some suitable activity that could serve as a replacement for the speaking, but thus far, I had come up with nothing.

My partner handed the Rebbe a note he'd prepared with the name of his sickly relative and some details about her condition. As the Rebbe read the details, his face transformed before our eyes; from welcoming and jovial to somber and serious.

The Rebbe said, "Build a college in Yeroham. It would transform the image of Yeroham as a town that people longed to leave to a place where people from across Israel and abroad would come to live and learn."

My father-in-law turned to the Rebbe and said, "If the Rebbe would come to Israel, it would do so much good for those living there."

To my great surprise, the Rebbe asked me about my very personal plans, about my dating to get married.

We were supposed to be back home in New York by now, but a heavy snowfall there made it impossible for any planes to land...

My introduction to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in London, UK, and how my meetings with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory, evolved.

I purchased a dilapidated old house with a wonderful view overlooking the Old City. My intention was to reconstruct it, in the anticipation of one day moving to Israel. Of course I assumed that the Rebbe would approve.

Tthe Rebbe turned to my wife and asked her, "How is the women's section?"

The Rebbe told me a lesson from bookkeeping, "You should be aware of the importance of bookkeeping in Jewish thought..."

"A rabbi recently said to me," the Rebbe, of righteous memory, told me in a 1972 audience, "that the only solution for Jews in small communities in England, is for them to move to Israel."

We discuss the salaries, women leadership and the purpose of the new building.

The Rebbe discusses with my daughter the issue of her attending art school.

The Rebbe explained to me that when having a positive influence on children, “Sometimes informal contact is more important than formal schooling.”

In my second audience with the Rebbe, I mentioned that a relative of mine was dating a non-Jew...

I felt that the Rebbe was not only someone I could rely on for spiritual guidance, but also someone I could fully trust with Israeli security concerns. Considering my position at the time, that was not something I could take lightly.

The Rebbe did something absolutely extraordinary; he said to himself: if the Nazis searched out every Jew in hate, we will search out every Jew in love.