First Person

"Yes, I know," the Rebbe said. "But the situation will change very soon..."

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.