After escaping Nazi-occupied Paris, and many perilous months in Vichy France, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), and his wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka (1901-1988), boarded the SS Serpa Pinto in Lisbon, Portugal. On Monday, June 23--Sivan 28 on the Jewish calendar--at 10:30 A.M., they arrived in New York.
Shortly after his arrival, the Rebbe's father-in-law, the then Lubavitcher Rebbe Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (who had been rescued from Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1940), appointed him to head the social and educational outreach programs of Chabad-Lubavitch. Thus the Rebbe began his decades-long revolutionary work to revitalize Jewish life in the Western Hemisphere, which spread, by means of the emissaries ("shluchim") he dispatched from his New York headquarters, to every part of the world.
Links:
Inspiring the Jewish American Revolution
World Jewry Thrives Seven Decades After Rebbe’s U.S. Arrival
This Shabbat is Shabbat Mevarchim (“the Shabbat that blesses" the new month): a special prayer is recited blessing the Rosh Chodesh ("Head of the Month") of the upcoming month of Tammuz, which falls on Monday and Tuesday of the coming week.
Prior to the blessing, we announce the precise time of the molad, the "birth" of the new moon. See molad times.
It is a Chabad custom to recite the entire book of Psalms before morning prayers, and to conduct farbrengens (chassidic gatherings) in the course of the Shabbat.
Links: Shabbat Mevarchim; Tehillim (the Book of Psalms); The Farbrengen
During the summer months, from the Shabbat after Passover until the Shabbat before Rosh Hashahah, we study a weekly chapter of the Talmud's Ethics of the Fathers ("Avot") each Shabbat afternoon; this week we study Chapter Three.
It is not so much that we need to be taken out of exile.
It is that we must take the exile out of ourselves.
What is exile? It is the belief that there is some place outside of G-d.
And that in that place, there are forces stronger than G-d.
And those forces will not allow you to do what your soul came here to do.
Fear no thing, no force, no being other than G-d. Do that which you must do as though nothing stands in your way.
Then you will have taken yourself out of exile. And G-d will complete the job.