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
Where the Infinite Light is hidden
—there you see a world.
If you could see the light that generates this world
You would not see any world at all.
And yet the world you see
is nothing more than G-d's own hand hiding His light.
That is all there is to your world:
G-d hiding behind Himself.
Why?
So that you will search for Him
and find Him in this world of yours.