The Rebbe Speaks (Video)

Footage from the Rebbe’s 1985 gathering in celebration of the birthdate (in 1880) of his father-in-law, the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, and the Sixth Rebbe’s release from Soviet incarceration (1927). The Sixth Rebbe was imprisoned for spreading Judaism in the Soviet Union.

An hour-long excerpt from a televised gathering with the Rebbe’s in 1981. In this talk the Rebbe focuses on the topic of education and the urgent need for children to be raised with the knowledge of a Higher Being, an “eye that sees and ear that hears” everything they do.

The events of the Previous Rebbe’s liberation on the 12th of Tammuz raise a fundamental question: How is it that one solitary individual was able to stand against a tyrannical world power?

The Stalinist regime that imprisoned my father-in-law, the Rebbe, in 1927, was then a superpower. Despite that, he defied his oppressors. He did not budge an inch in anything that jeopardized his principles. Even at the train station, about to be exiled, he declared publicly: “Only our bodies, not our souls, were sent into exile.” And indeed, his defiance led to his release.

When my father-in-law, the Rebbe, was freed in Leningrad, he stated: “It was not myself alone that G-d redeemed, but every Jew, even those who are Jews in name only.”

He spoke about the imperative to provide Jewish children with an authentic Torah education, even under communist rule.

After the Rebbe’s liberation from Soviet-imposed exile, he delivered a Chasidic discourse expounding the verse: “You caused a vine to journey out of Egypt; You expelled nations and implanted it.” The Sages explain that just as a vine is uprooted from its place and replanted elsewhere in order to grow more plentifully, likewise, when G-d moves a Jew to a new location, it is only in order to increase his success.

The twelfth and thirteenth days of Tammuz mark the release of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, from Soviet imprisonment, which was the result of his efforts in strengthening Torah and mitzvah observance among Soviet Jewry.

In a public letter written after his liberation from Soviet imprisonment in 1927, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson wrote that the release was not his alone, but a redemption for every Jew, even one for whom the title “Jew” may seem irrelevant.