The mystery began with a tantalizing clue: a woman without a name, known only through her relationship to someone else.
In a letter written by the sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, to Rabbi Mordechai Heifetz,1 on December 4, 1935 (9 Kislev, 5696), I read:
Regarding the request to teach Chassidism to the future daughter-in-law of our dear friend, beloved amongst men, who embodies chassidic qualities, the G‑d fearing, pious, R’ Mordechai Dubin – may he flourish – mazal tov – this is a very appropriate thing to do.2
This letter was the catalyst for a far-reaching chain of events. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak used Heifetz’s inquiry as an opportunity to broaden the issue of girls’ education in Chabad. In a lengthy reply, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak cited testimony that chassidim of old educated their daughters as well as their sons, concluding:
Thus, if fifty-five years ago, when every Chabad home shone with the essence and light of Chassidism, how much more so today do we feel the lack of education for girls in Torah and in the ways of Chassidism. It is clearly urgent, [and a matter that] touches upon one’s very soul; [we must] awaken the inner spark which is received as an inheritance from parents to their children.3
But who was the young woman to whom Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak referred? I set out to uncover more about her and restore her place in the historical record.
A Vienna Childhood
The young woman’s name was Edith (Eidel) Pappenheim. Born February 22, 1917, she was the second of seven children born to Kalonymus Kalman (Heinrich) Pappenheim (1880-1943) and Sophie (Schifra) Schiff (1886-1944).4 Her family belonged to the inner circle of Vienna’s Orthodox community, her grandparents being among the founding members of the city’s famous Schiffschule, formally “Khal Adas Jisroel,” a 750-seat synagogue that served as both spiritual center and a fortress against secularism’s inroads.5
Edith came of age in a protective environment, where home, synagogue, school, and community life reinforced each other. The Schiffschule complex housed a network of institutions: a school serving students from kindergarten through high school, a matzah bakery, a society to care for the ill, and a tzedakah fund—a kind of miniature shtetl amid the glamor and drama of interwar Vienna.
Of the country’s 250,000 Jews, 180,000 resided in Vienna, mostly packed into the four-square miles of the Second District, Leopoldstadt.6 Nicknamed Mazzesinsel, “Matzah Island,” Leopoldstadt was nearly 40% Jewish. Its streets were home to chassidic courts, secular Jewish intellectuals, polyglot Jewish newspapers, and coffeehouse culture.
In the aftermath of World War I, the glittering world of fin-de-siècle Vienna was cracking. The old Habsburg Empire collapsed, leaving Austria strained by political violence, economic hardship, socialism, authoritarianism, and rising antisemitism.
Edith’s family responded to these buffeting winds by anchoring themselves more deeply in tradition and community service. Their home at Praterstraße 33, near the Danube Canal and a short walk from the giant Ferris Wheel built for Emperor Franz Joseph’s Jubilee, was both private residence and community headquarters.7 Following the example of her grandfather Wolf, her parents hosted rabbinic greats from across Europe and held communal meetings and events in their home.
Wolf Pappenheim headed Agudath Israel’s Vienna branch, overseeing the planning and implementation of at least two of the movement’s Knessiah Gedolah conventions.8 Convened as a response to the challenges of modernity, these gatherings established Agudath Israel as the mouthpiece of interwar Orthodox Jewry and, through its Keren HaTorah arm, enabled the Beit Yaakov movement for women and girls to flourish. Wolf also served in the leadership of both Keren HaTorah’s central headquarters and Beit Yaakov in Vienna.9 Edith’s father, Kalman, served on the board of trustees for Beit Yaakov.
Given Edith’s family involvement with Agudath Israel and Beit Yaakov, she likely was certainly aware of the September 1929 Neshei Agudath Israel Women’s Conference in Vienna, attended by delegates from across Europe.10 A Bais Yaakov elementary school had opened for the academic school year 1926,11 which twelve-year-old Edith almost certainly attended. The conference program included a visit to the school, whose 150 students were described as “aristocratic, religious … girls … faithful Jews who will proudly carry the banner of the Torah Nation.”12 The description could ecertainly applied to the woman Edith would become: refined, devout, loyal, and formed by a world that expected its young women to carry Torah with dignity.
Edith’s older sister Liane was enlisted as an instructor at the Vienna branch of the Teachers’ Seminary at Leopoldgasse 26.13 When the dean, Dr. Shmuel Leo Deutschländer, came to the Pappenheim home and asked her to join the staff of the newly-founded branch, Liane demurred, explaining that she lacked the training and credentials. Deutschländer promised to provide curricular materials and told her, “You’ll study at night and teach by day.”14 Thus, Edith grew up surrounded by living examples of communal devotion, people who accepted responsibility before they felt ready because the needs of the hour demanded it.
During these years, both Liane and Edith took part in the burgeoning religious life for women, leading youth groups for younger girls, and giving Torah classes for women. Edith seems to have spent time at the Kraków Bais Yaakov, where she formed a close friendship with Basya Epstein Bender15 who was there between 1931-1933. This places Edith within the Bais Yaakov orbit of the movement’s founding mother, Sarah Schenirer, and within the company of future leaders of charedi girls’ education, including Dr. Judith Rosenbaum Grunfeld and Mrs. Vichna Eisen Kaplan.
In addition to her friend Basya, Edith also became close with a local Viennese girl, Chava Heschel, daughter of the second Kopischnitzer Rebbe.16 Through her experience with the Kraków Beit Yaakov, and through her friends Basya (who was from the town of Otwock, Poland) and Chava (the daughter of a chassidic rebbe), Edith was drawn beyond her Austro-Hungarian milieu into a more Eastern Europeanly inflected chassidic sphere.
The Road to Chabad
A generation earlier Sarah Schenirer had encountered Hirschian teachings in Vienna and carried them back to Kraków. Edith’s path reversed the flow: though a product of Vienna, she was shaped by Beit Yaakov and would eventually bring her training to Riga, Latvia, which likewise absorbed influences from both central and eastern Europe. This exposure may also help explain her later openness to marrying Zalman Dubin, a young man from a chassidic family.
But how did such a match come about? While no definitive answer has yet emerged, several possibilities suggest themselves. Perhaps the seed of the Pappenheim-Dubin match was planted at one of the Agudath Israel Knessiahs that occurred throughout the 1920s and 30s, which were attended by Edith’s father and grandfather, as well as by Zalman’s father, the famed Mordechai Dubin. Hailed as the unofficial foreign secretary of Lubavitch.17 “[Dubin’s] name was synonymous with charity, kindness, wisdom, and yiddishe shtoltz. He was renowned as a Jew to whom any Jew in need could turn.”18 Dubin headed the local Agudath Israel branch and represented the party in the Latvian parliament (Saeima). He served as head of the Riga Kehillah, was a shtadlan for Latvian Jews, and concerned himself with every matter that touched upon Jewish life anywhere, big or small.
Or maybe it started when the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, visited Edith’s childhood home in Vienna. Could he have played a role in the match?
In early 1935, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak was staying in the spa town of Purkersdorf, near Vienna. It was there, on 16 Shevat 5695 (January 20, 1935) that he began writing Der Langer Brif (“The Long Letter”) to his daughter, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson, then living in Paris with her husband, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Two days later, on 18 Shevat 5695 (January 22, 1935), Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak held a farbrengen in Edith’s home, attended by members of Vienna’s Agudath Israel. In fact, the connection between the Pappenheims and Chabad rebbes dated back to the times of the Fifth Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom DovBer Schneersohn, who had been a guest in the home of Edith’s grandfather, Wolf Pappenheim.19
In the course of the farbrengen, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak related a story about his grandfather, the Rebbe Maharash, who had once stirred an assimilated young Jewish gambler from France to return to his roots: “The Rebbe added that this young man later became a great Torah scholar and his descendants are among the most distinguished Jewish families.”20
The choice to recount a story about an assimilated Western Jew to this particular audience was deliberate. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s message for the Orthodox Viennese community, living in similarly acculturated surroundings, was clear and unequivocal: in the face of Western allurements, neither retreat nor compromise, but influence.
To move this charge into action, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak called upon each Agudah member to ‘donate’ another Jew to the organization, “so that another Jewish soul could be introduced to Agudah’s values and ideals.”21 The point was not merely institutional recruitment. Beneath it lay the spiritual obligation of the farbrengen itself: even a Jew formed by Western culture could return to his or her innate bond with G‑d through Torah and mitzvot.
This stance of unadulterated truth as the antidote to assimilation would recur in Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s many communications over the next decade.
On the eve of Passover 5695 (April 15, 1935), Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak wrote to Kalman Pappenheim, asking him to speak with his “elder daughter” about publicizing the mitzvah of Family Purity.22 The editor of Igrot Kodesh identifies this daughter as Edith, which raises two chronological difficulties: 1) Liane was the elder daughter, and 2) Edith was not yet married, while Liane had married just five days earlier. The request is still a striking one, coming during the week of sheva brachot.23
This letter suggests that Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak turned to the Pappenheim family not only for communal activism, but as a possible source of female religious influence. If the struggle against assimilation was to succeed, its warriors could not remain confined to male leadership; it would require educated and dynamic women like these Pappenheim sisters, prepared to take a public stand for Torah values.
By the autumn of 1935, Edith herself had stepped into the role of public lecturer on topics of religious observance. In November she was in Latvia, where she remained for three months, perhaps to determine whether she could imagine making her life there. During her visit, she addressed a gathering of the Beit Yaakov and Bnot Yaakov organizations, delivering a lengthy report on the current activities of the Viennese Beit Yaakov movement.24 She also encountered a number of young women who would later form the nucleus of Achos Tmimim.25 It seems that she also formalized her engagement to Zalman, as it was during this sojourn that the question of Edith’s own study of Chassidism arose.
A Revolutionary Education
We now return to the letter that began this investigation. On 9 Kislev 5696, December 5, 1935, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak responded to Rabbi Heifetz’s inquiry about teaching Chassidism to Mordechai Dubin’s future daughter-in-law.
The timing is striking: Edith was then in Riga, moving between the world of Viennese Beit Yaakov activism and the emerging circles that would soon crystallize around young Chabad women, just as they were preparing for their first Yud-Tes Kislev farbrengen.26 Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s reply indicates both his approval of this revolutionary step, and his concern that the renewal of this tradition (teaching Chassidism to women) be undertaken with care. A successful outcome would require a teacher who was not only knowledgeable in the relevant topics but also skilled in presenting complex concepts and texts in ways a novice could grasp.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak selected one of his own discourses, Kinyan Hachaim, as the text with which to begin her studies. He directed Rabbi Heifetz “not [to] hurry through, but … take your time and explain it well.”
Kinyan Hachaim rests on a Torah verse, “Today is the birthday of the world,”27 recited in the Rosh Hashanah Mussaf Amidah after each set of shofar blasts. The discourse presents Rosh Hashanah not only as a day of judgement for the world, but as a day of personal repentance and return.
While the text is fairly short, it contains a number of foundational chassidic concepts: the difference between serving G‑d as His child or doing so as His servant, and how each shapes our mitzvah performance; the tension between free-choice and G‑d’s omniscience; the propitiousness of the Ten Days of Repentance for connecting with one’s true essence and G‑d. It also explains why Rosh Hashanah is observed on the anniversary of humankind’s creation rather than the first day of genesis, emphasizing the unique power and responsibility of humankind within creation. The text concludes by outlining the process of teshuvah and provides practical guidance for how to effect this mitzvah.
It is significant that Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak chose to begin Edith’s study of Chabad Chassidism with this text, rather than with Tanya, its foundational text, or with a more accessible medium, such as chassidic tales. Instead, Edith was brought into a discourse that exposed her to a wide range of theological and spiritual ideas, all framed through practical application.
Kinyan Hachaim also held particular significance for Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak himself: it was the first of his discourses that he selected for publication, suggesting that he viewed its themes as central to the guidance he wished to offer his followers in sustaining a Torah life.28
In the winter of 1936, Rabbi Heifetz updated Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak on Edith’s progress. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak was then in a sanatorium near Vienna, receiving treatment for various health problems.29 Despite these challenges, he continued to write prolifically and responded to Heifetz with detailed instructions for Edith’s program of study.30 The central message was always that Edith’s studies should not be rushed.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak instructed that Edith “... should practice reading each section [of Kinyan Hachaim] several times until it is well understood and she can discuss it in her own words, with her own personal style.” Any “kernels of wisdom or insights she gleans and grasps well, should be set aside … After reflecting on them a few times, she should write them down (in the same language she writes her personal thoughts) and try to explain them in writing for herself.”
Lastly, he instructed that Edith should “... write and explain … the takeaway.” This emphasis on elucidating a practical application to one’s daily service of G‑d (“ובכן”) is a quintessentially Chabad approach to Torah study: ideas must not remain abstract, but descend into thought, speech, writing, and service of G‑d.
Three Women From Frankfurt and One From Vienna
Pivoting from details about the manner in which Edith should study Chassidism, in the remainder of his letter Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak told a story about German Orthodoxy in which three women took upon themselves the observance of mikvah and helped rebuild Jewish observance in Frankfurt after the spread of Mendelssohnian education.
It is hard not to hear the story as a message meant for Edith. She too was a young German-speaking Orthodox woman, preparing for marriage and standing at the threshold of a new religious path.
Throughout the following years, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak repeatedly returned to the idea that educated, pious women could serve as agents of Jewish renewal during periods of religious crisis. Edith herself would soon be invited into that tradition.
Finding Her Voice: Chabad Speaks in German
!["The Teachings of Chabad Chassidism and Their Educational and Ethical Significance: The Lubavitcher Rebbe's Response to a Written Inquiry from Germany"](https://w2.chabad.org/media/images/1374/TgfK13748234.png?_i=_nD03955430FF679EB635DCC8E0A88D554 ""The Teachings of Chabad Chassidism and Their Educational and Ethical Significance: The Lubavitcher Rebbe's Response to a Written Inquiry from Germany"")
On April 17, 1936, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak responded to Professor Chava Bitner31 who had asked whether German Jews should study Chassidism. His answer was a sweeping introduction to Chabad Chassidism: its basic ideas, history, and central texts. He emphasized that anyone with reason and understanding could study Chassidism, but that such study required preparation: Fear of Heaven and the actual performance of mitzvot. Two months later, the essay was printed in volume 4 of HaTamim and Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak asked Edith to translate it from the original Hebrew into German.
It is astonishing that Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak entrusted this work to Edith: a nineteen-year-old woman, only six months into her formal study of Chassidism. The assignment speaks volumes about his confidence in her intelligence, Jewish learning, and ability to grasp chassidic concepts quickly. It also underscores Edith’s own courage to accept such a task.
One wonders how she received it. Did she see the translation as a kind of test, or even a graduation exercise? She had already given public Torah lectures and personally knew many prominent Jewish leaders through her family’s public work. Still, this request came from the rebbe of her future father-in-law and fiancé. It was no small thing. Edith must have felt both the weight of the expectations placed on her and the significance of carrying Chabad thought into German.
She seems to have completed her first draft fairly quickly. In a letter to her father dated July 23, 1936, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak mentions that he enclosed a letter for “his daughter, the young student,” adding “I am greatly pleased that even here, in the sanatorium, with G‑d’s help, something beneficial is being accomplished through the translated letter … [which was] given to Dr. G., who read it twice or thrice and was deeply interested in its contents.” Dr. G. related to Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak “that even in Paris, among the assimilated Jewish men and women, the recent events had awakened them to return to Judaism – and that he himself was among them.”
The compliment is unmistakable. Only a year and a half earlier (January 1935) at the farbrengen in Edith’s childhood home, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak told the story of the assimilated French gambler who returned to Torah and built a distinguished Jewish family due to the intervention of the Fifth Rebbe, Rabbi Shmuel. Now Edith’s translation was reaching another Western Jew who was stirred to return. The call of the hour was outreach to those who saw themselves on the periphery of Jewish life, and Edith, newly initiated into Chabad thought, was already helping carry that call forward.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak directed Rabbi Chaim Mordechai Aizik Hodakov (then, principal of the Torah v’Derech Eretz Schools in Riga and head of Jewish education for the Latvian Ministry of Education) to arrange for the work’s publication. Supervision of the project was entrusted to Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s son-in-law, the future Seventh Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel.32
Over the next few months, as Edith prepared for her wedding, married, and relocated to Riga, letters flew back and forth between Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, his son-in-law, and Hodakov as the work moved toward publication. Rabbi Menachem Mendel urged that the finished booklet be printed in sufficient time to be distributed amongst the various Chabad communities in advance of the tenth anniversary of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s liberation from Soviet imprisonment on Yud-Beis Tammuz.
In June 1937 (23 Sivan, 5697), Rabbi Menachem Mendel wrote to Hodakov about corrections to the galleys. He stressed the importance of the project, since “this is the first attempt at publishing Chassidism in the German language, it is of the utmost importance … to ensure that this production is done very well, making it as thorough as possible, thereby allowing it to reach the broadest circles.”
Rabbi Menachem Mendel specified that the product should be pamphlet-sized, using a deco style font in navy ink and heavy paper with a deckle edge, explaining that “the exterior appearance should look appealing” and give the reader a pleasant experience. “If this pilot project turns out successfully,” he concluded, “it is my hope that we will then be able to procure permission to also translate and publish some of the kuntreissim33 into German, French, etc. At any rate, there is much weighing on the results and impact of the first attempt.”
Here we see that Edith’s work is the first chassidic matter being translated into German, and from what I can tell, any foreign language. The finished booklet seems to have satisfied Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak enough that, on August 10, 1937, he instructed Hodakov to purchase one hundred copies for him to take to Marienbad “to distribute to the German youth.”34 This helps explain why Edith’s role mattered so much: the translator of this work needed not only fluent Hebrew and eloquent German, but sensitivity to both Chabad thought and the German-speaking Jewish world it hoped to reach. Perhaps her surname, which was an old and respected one in Germany and Austria-Hungary, added cachet.
Few existing copies of the work survive. One is held at the National Library of Israel and two are preserved in the Aguch Library next to 770 Eastern Parkway. Edith’s35 original translation, “Die Chassidism-Chabad-Lehre und ihre erzieherische und ethische Bedeutung: eine Antwort des Liubawitscher Rabbi auf eine briefliche Anfrage aus Deutschland,” can be found online on Chabad.org’s German language affiliate.36
A Celebrity Wedding and a New Life in Riga
The union of a Pappenheim, whose lineage stretched back generations in Central European Orthodoxy, with the son of Latvia’s foremost community leader, was a celebrity affair trumpeted in the Jewish press. Riga’s Agudath Israel newspaper, Hajnt carried Dubin’s public invitation to the wedding and reported on the grand send-off of the Dubin family from the Riga train station, where rabbis, scholars, community leaders, and Chabad chassidim gathered with singing and farbrengen. The pages of Hajnt overflowed with congratulatory greetings from all sides – politicians, organizations, religious figures, and community leaders
Their wedding represented more than the union of two prominent Jewish families. It brought together several of the religious worlds that had shaped Edith's life: the Austro-Hungarian traditionalism of the Sofer dynasty,37 the Agudath Israel and Beit Yaakov circles of Vienna and Kraków, and the Chabad community of Latvia. Held at Vienna’s Schiffschule on 4 Adar 5697 (14 February 1937), the wedding was an international Jewish event. Thousands of congratulatory telegrams poured in from across Europe, Palestine, and the United States, including from over twenty-two Latvian government officials, including presidents past and present, its minister of war, director of the national bank, and many more. Riga held its own festivities with an all-night farbrengen and three hundred wedding meals distributed by the Folk’s Kitchen.
Hajnt headlined the celebration as “Riga at a Hungarian-Galicianer Wedding,” combining “European sophistication, rabbinic discourse, and chassidic warmth and enthusiasm.” Reports were spiced with quite a bit of joking about the culture and custom clash between the two communities: “The Viennese wedding feast, which was supposed to end by 10:00 p.m., stretched until 3:00 a.m. following foreign traditions of extended joy.” The sheva brachot that followed received extensive coverage in the press, and community locals noted that “the Latvians must be good judges of character if they took the most beautiful bride and the greatest scholar in Vienna!”38
Following the wedding, the young couple settled in Riga, and later spent time in Otwock. Edith’s husband, Zalman, had studied at Tomchei Tmimim in Otwock in the fall of 1937, and did so again in 1938, following their wedding. The couple rented an apartment in the same courtyard as Rebbetzin Shterna Sarah, the mother of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak.39 While in Otwock, Edith was involved in some capacity with the Beit Yaakov school there, and resumed her friendship with Basya Bender, who was teaching in the Otwock Beit Yaakov.40 It seems that around this time Edith decided to use her Jewish name, Eidel, at least in written communication.41 This may reflect her exposure to Chabad Chassidism, whose teachings place great importance on using one’s Jewish name due the spiritual vitality that it channels. We will follow her lead, and henceforth refer to her as Eidel.
The Emergence of Eidel Dubin
Just six weeks into married life, Eidel was speaking for Jewish women’s groups in Latvia, with transcripts of her lectures being printed in Hajnt: “A few weeks ago, Eidel Dubin, the daughter-in-law of Riga’s communal leader R' Mordechai Dubin, arrived in Riga. In Riga, she is known as the wife of Schneur Zalman Dubin, but in Vienna, she was well known as one of the most active members of the Beit Yaakov movement [...] Mrs. Dubin is an outstanding speaker, capable of inspiring her audience.”
She spoke about the Exodus from Egypt, arguing that every generation faces a defining challenge; the central question of her own generation being Torah-true education, for which Jewish women bore a special responsibility. Citing the example of our matriarch Sarah, Eidel maintained that a woman must first educate herself before she can educate her children and others, concluding, “Only by educating children with pure faith, without distorting Judaism, will we be worthy of redemption from this exile.”42
The image of the righteous women of Egypt was one Eidel would return to repeatedly. Faced with persecution and uncertainty, she presented Jewish women not as passive custodians of tradition but as active participants in the survival and redemption of the Jewish people.
A month later, she addressed a group of Orthodox girls and reminded them of their Jewish birthright:
You have all heard of our forefather Abraham. He was the first person in the world to seek out the Creator and to truly find Him. When G‑d made a brit (covenant) with him, this eternal bond was not only for Abraham himself, but primarily for the future generations, for his children … You may think, dear girls, that when it says, “his children,” it refers only to sons. But the verse also includes “his household,” which refers to his daughters as well.”43
Eidel paired this charge with an emphasis on practical mitzvah observance: affixing a mezuzah, keeping Shabbat, dressing in a Jewish style, saying blessings, eating kosher food, and giving charity. She identified these acts as foundational to the architecture of Jewish survival: “A healthy Jewish home is immediately recognizable” from the mezuzah at the door to “the beautiful glow of the Shabbat and holiday candles,” and the aura of peace and unity that “illuminate a true Jewish home.”44 Some of these practices, it should be noted, would later be included in the canon of the Seventh Rebbe’s mitzvah campaigns.
Despite her youth, Eidel did not hesitate to speak up for the Torah values with which she was raised. She warned her listeners that they were “young saplings” in a storm, vulnerable to ideologies seeking to uproot them. Orthodox youth, she insisted, must not only preserve their own commitments but awaken their parents as well: “Father, Mother, I have learned in school how you must live! You must keep a kosher home, observe Shabbat, and fulfill all the mitzvot.”45
A few weeks later, Eidel addressed the challenge of assimilation directly in a lecture on the holiday of Shavuot. Jewish nationhood, she argued, did not begin with the physical liberation of the Exodus but with the acceptance of the Torah at Sinai. Ancient civilizations had possessed culture, patriotism, and national pride, yet vanished from history. The same fate awaited Jews who abandoned Torah, whether through assimilation or through forms of Jewish identity that substituted philanthropy or nationalism for mitzvah observance.
“The only reason we became G‑d’s people,” she reminded her audience, “is that we stood at Mount Sinai and declared, ‘We will do, and we will hear’… The only way to unite with G‑d is through Torah.”46
The following months were momentous. Eidel’s German translation of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s essay was distributed in Marienbad over the summer, and the New York branch of Achos Tmimim was founded, extending the movement across the Atlantic. During this time, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak spent a number of months at Wald Sanitorium in Perchtoldsdorf, departing Austria on March 9, 1938. Three days later, German troops crossed the Austrian border in the Anschluss, bringing an abrupt end to the Jewish world that had nurtured Eidel.
Mordechai Dubin played a prominent role in aiding Austrian Jewish refugees, joined by Sophie and Kalman Pappenheim.47 Eidel and Zalman assisted with their rescue efforts, spending considerable time outside the country. Mordechai, Zalman, and Eidel only arrived back in Latvia on April 14, just one day before Passover.48 Nine days later, on the final day of the holiday, hundreds of Viennese Jews were forced into Prater Park and publicly humiliated in front of jeering onlookers, a grim preview of what lay ahead.
!["The suffering and hardships of the Jews of Vienna are becoming more terrifying and severe from day to day" -
Hajnt, April 19, 1938.](https://w2.chabad.org/media/images/1374/OLwY13748239.png?_i=_n504BC99DD0473598AAE3BCDC5D75568D ""The suffering and hardships of the Jews of Vienna are becoming more terrifying and severe from day to day" -
Hajnt, April 19, 1938.")
At the same time, in Otwock, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak marked Acharon shel Pesach with a farbrengen, telling the story of a courageous Jewish woman whose self-sacrifice earned her a place in the heavenly “palace of righteous women,” underscoring his repeated emphasis that women’s courage, ingenuity, and sacrifice could sustain Jewish life.49
Fulfilling Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s Charge: The Mikveh Campaign
On May 8, 1938, Eidel delivered the first in a three-part lecture series titled, “The Jewish Woman, Then and Now.” The event drew an overflow crowd, with Hajnt noting that “every last seat” was occupied and that the audience included “the most distinguished women of Riga’s Jewish society.”
A generation earlier, discussions of Jewish womanhood and Family Purity belonged almost exclusively to the private sphere, but by 1938 they had become matters of urgent public concern. The organizers themselves marveled at the revolutionary quality of the speech: “Fifty years ago, such a topic would not have been relevant. The theme of tonight’s lecture by our distinguished speaker, Mrs. Eidel Dubin, clearly illustrates how far we have distanced ourselves from our past…”
Eidel's appearance at the podium is a fulfillment of the vision Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak had articulated several years prior: that educated, articulate Jewish women should strengthen Jewish life by bringing these traditionally private mitzvot into the public conversation. The timing, too, is striking: less than two months after the Anschluss, with Austria shattered and refugees streaming eastward, Eidel responded not by retreating into personal mourning, but by speaking publicly about the responsibilities of Jewish women.
Across the three lectures, Eidel approached the topic from multiple perspectives. She demonstrated that Jewish women had always occupied central roles in religious, educational, and communal life. “The Jewish home is the fortress of our nation,” Eidel declared. “Only through a pure and sanctified family life can we hope for redemption from exile.”50
She marshaled evidence from Maimonides and contemporary physicians to argue for the mitzvah’s physical and psychological benefits. She cited Rabbi Meir’s dictum that the periodic separation between husband and wife strengthens love and harmony in marriage.51
And she addressed the stigma around mikveh. She observed that the mitzvah had been “distorted and discredited by the intelligentsia” as a matter fit only for “common folk, the simple masses, and not refined and intelligent women.” Speaking as a woman formed in Western Europe, she was “truly shocked to see how neglected this critical mitzvah of Family Purity is in these lands.”
For those surprised by her public frankness, Eidel explained that the hour demanded it. Assimilation, godless nationalism, and reliance on the nations had all failed; like the Jews in Egypt, the Jewish people now needed Divine redemption. That redemption, she insisted, would come “through the merit of their righteous women.”
Eidel’s presentations were so popular that she was invited to speak in Liepāja52 and Ventspils.53 Hajnt reported that her two-hour address held the audience “with the greatest attention,” praising her as “a gifted orator” whose fluent, compelling presentation wove together ma’amarei Chazal and logical argument.
The effect of Eidel’s lecture was immediate. Within ten days, the Liepāja community resolved to restore their women’s mikveh. Hajnt noted that since Eidel’s lecture, the topic had become “the primary subject of discussion” in the city. Her address had brought to the surface what had “long weighed on the hearts of Jewish women and mothers” – that the mikveh’s condition had become so dire that observant women faced serious hardship, especially in winter. The community, the paper concluded, now had to prove its commitment by restoring the mikveh “in accordance with the needs of modern times.”54
War, Rescue, and the End of a World
The months that followed placed Eidel’s public work within a rapidly darkening European landscape, with Latvia as a notable safe haven. On 25 Tammuz 5698 (July 24, 1938), Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak sent his “Epistle on the Preservation of a Jewish Soul” to the girls of Achos Tmimim in Riga, which they later printed in booklet form. The title captures the task increasingly confronting Eidel and her generation: to preserve not merely individual lives, but the spiritual and communal life of the Jewish people itself.
Within months, the phrase took on devastating urgency. During Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938), synagogues across Germany and Austria were burned and destroyed, including Eidel’s beloved Schiffschule, founded by her grandparents and the site of her wedding to Zalman scarcely two years earlier.
In 1939, as Europe lurched toward war, the Pappenheim and Dubin families crisscrossed Europe, fleeing danger and endangering themselves by engaging in rescue work. By May, some 130,000 Jews had left Austria, and members of Eidel’s family began arriving in Riga. By summer’s end, Eidel’s friends and associates from the Beit Yaakov and yeshivah worlds were also on the move.
On Friday, September 1, 1939, a group of yeshivah students from the Mirrer Yeshiva arrived in Riga to news of the outbreak of World War II. Eidel’s friend Basya and her husband, Dovid Bender, were among them. After Shabbat, the Benders visited Eidel and Zalman at the Dubin summer dacha in Jūrmala. Mordechai Dubin provided funds for the Mirrer group, and the Benders left four days later for the United States via Stockholm, the route Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak would take the following year.55
Mordechai Dubin was deeply involved in the efforts to save Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak from Warsaw, all the while attending to the needs of Polish and Austrian Jews who continued to stream into Latvia.56 Through the combined efforts of Chabad chassidim in the United States and Mordechai Dubin in Latvia, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak and his family reached Riga in December 1939 and departed for the United States three months later. Given what we now know about the rescue, whose every step is documented in Altein’s Out of the Inferno, we can well understand the immense pressure and focus of the entire Dubin family during this time.
Eidel, too, was personally involved in refugee relief. She assisted Beit Yaakov girls who reached Vilna and worked with her friend, Basya Bender (then in America) to raise funds through the American Beth Jacob Committee.57
By now, Eidel had become the sort of woman Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s stories had celebrated: resourceful, responsible, and devoted to sustaining Jewish life in crisis.
One bright spot during this terribly difficult time was her sister Ilse’s marriage to Gabriel Blumenfeld. Her sister Flora later married Moshe Yehudah Kahan.
Eidel’s last recorded speech, delivered June 3, 1940,58 alongside one of the Achos Tmimim girls, Baila Godin (whose brother served as secretary to Mordechai Dubin), bore the poignant title, “Whither the Jewish Woman?” In its words one hears the pain Eidel was enduring as the Nazis advanced across Europe, and her firm commitment to faithfulness. “Today is a sad time for all of humanity in general and for the Jewish people in particular,” she began. Yet, unlike those without faith, “the Jew with faith understands why he suffers; he accepts all tribulations [...] and holds fast to the holy Torah, the Tree of Life.”
Returning to themes that had occupied her public career, Eidel spoke of the three mitzvot of challah, Shabbat candles, and mikveh as the distinctive spiritual mission of Jewish women. In the face of mounting attacks on the Jewish people, she called not for military or political solutions, but for spiritual resistance: “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts59… Our weapons against our enemies … must be purity and holiness. Our banner must bear the motto: Come, let us walk in the light of the L-rd.”60
Fourteen days after Eidel’s stirring call, the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, ending its independence.61 By the end of the month it was incorporated into the USSR. Jewish communal institutions were shuttered, and Mordechai Dubin’s records and archives seized.62
Anticipating catastrophe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak mounted a determined effort to rescue his chassidim in Europe. In August 1940, the United States approved visas for 109 Latvian Jewish community leaders and their families. The first four names on the list were “Dubins – Morduchs, Fanija, Zalman, Edite.”63
But the family did not leave. The closure of the American Legation in Riga following the Soviet occupation undoubtedly complicated matters, but it’s likely the Dubins felt they could not abandon either Eidel’s family or the wider Latvian Jewish community. After Zalman was mistakenly arrested in place of his father, the danger became unmistakable. In February 1941, Mordechai Dubin was arrested by Soviet authorities and eventually transferred to Moscow.64 Despite appeals reaching as far as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, no rescue proved possible.
The German invasion of Latvia on June 22, 1941, brought swift catastrophe. Within days, every synagogue in Riga was burned but one, many with people locked inside.65 In October, Jews were confined to the Riga Ghetto, Eidel, Zalman, and their families amongst them.66
Stepping into his father’s role as community protector, Zalman remained active in the ghetto’s underground Jewish life. Having witnessed the destruction of Riga’s Jewish world, they likely knew of the Rumbula massacres67 and suffered the death of Eidel’s sister Ilse in the ghetto. In June 1943, the ghettos of Riga, Liepāja and Daugavpils (Dvinsk) were liquidated. Eidel, Flora, and their parents were sent to Kaiserwald, a concentration camp outside Riga; Zalman was deported to Germany in 1944.68
Epilogue: The Legacy of a Lost Pioneer
In the last photo I have found of Eidel, likely from an identity card, she looks straight into the viewer’s eyes, her expression marked by determination and sorrow. Her wavy wig is neat, her dress elegant and modest; she wears a touch of lipstick and a short string of dark pearls. She was twenty-six years old when she was killed.69
Long before there were thousands of Chabad women emissaries, there was Eidel Dubin—a twenty-year-old lecturer who could quote Tanach, Talmud, Maimonides, and Hume; draw large audiences; and move communities to action. She appears as an early prototype of the now prolific shluchah: intellectually serious, publicly effective, charismatic, and personal, traditional in values yet modern in bearing.
She inherited a tradition of righteous women who sustained Jewish life in times of crisis and, for one luminous span of time, added her own chapter to that history.
This article is drawn from a book in progress on the life and work of Eidel Dubin. Because so much of her story survives only in scattered fragments, readers with documents, photographs, family recollections, or other relevant information are warmly invited to contact the author.
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