Growing up in the Soviet Jewish underground in the 1960s, Baruch Lepkivker would often hear his father, Yaakov, sing a single refrain from a particular Chassidic melody. It was just a movement, what’s referred to as a tenuah, a piece of a much longer niggun the elder Lepkivker had once heard years earlier but could no longer recall in its entirety. But those few, powerful bars clearly meant something to him.
As for what, Baruch and his siblings could only wonder. Childhood spent in the Soviet Union meant the Lepkivker children learned early on not to ask too many questions. It was not only paranoia that kept their father, Yaakov, better known as Yankel, from sharing much about his past.
In 1948, a 20-year-old Yankel was arrested together with three other Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidim attempting an illegal escape from the Soviet Union into Romania. Stalin’s secret police apparatus took a deep interest in what they called the “case of the Chassidim,” and Viktor Abakumov, the head of the MGB—as the KGB was at the time known—was personally briefed on its progress. After months of secret police interrogations, Lepkivker and his friends were sentenced to 25 years of hard labor. Yankel was released in 1955, during the period following Stalin’s death—after “only” six years of imprisonment—when his case was re-examined and the charges against him downgraded from treason to illegal border crossing.1 He eventually married and built a family in the city of Tashkent, Soviet Uzbekistan, risking everything once again by raising them as Chassidic Jews. Although he was ostensibly free, Yankel was still a convict. The same people who’d released him were ready to take him back if ever they felt the need.
After waiting for 13 years, the Lepkivkers finally received permission to leave the USSR in 1969, settling in Bnei Brak, Israel, where Yankel continued to sing the refrain from time to time. Among the changes his children adapted to in their new surroundings was the ability to ask questions, and it was here that Baruch finally sought an explanation to the niggun’s secret.
The answer came in the form of a story—a Purim story that takes us back to post-war Stalinist Russia, a particularly dangerous moment in time for Soviet Jewry.
A Family on the Run
Yaakov Yosef (Yankel) Lepkivker was born in 1928 to a strictly Torah-observant family in a village in the Vinnitsa region of Ukraine, the second-to-youngest of eight children. His father, also named Baruch, was a fervent Boyaner Chassid who served the village as shochet, mohel and chazzan.
The previous decade had seen the Soviet Union’s frontal attack on religious life throughout the country, with the war on Judaism led, as unfortunately so often happens, by fellow Jews. Their organization, the Yevsektzia—the Jewish sections of the Communist Party—wielded tremendous power during the 1920s, confiscating synagogues, closing Jewish schools and hounding rabbis and clergy out of their positions with a gusto unmatched by their non-Jewish anti-religious colleagues.2
With the Yevsektzia constantly on their tail, Lepkivker and the dwindling number of religious functionaries still serving communities in White Russia and Ukraine were forced to move frequently. The more Jewish the town, the more powerful its local Yevesektzia. By 1930 the pressure was so great that the elder Lepkivker took his family and fled to Georgia, settling in the town of Batumi, where he continued working in the rabbinate. Jewish life in Georgia was somewhat easier than in the European part of the Soviet Union, and for the most part the central government left alone what they saw as the provincial Jews of Georgia, at least when it came to their religious observance.3
It was in Batumi that Lepkivker met the Lubavitcher Chassid Rabbi Nachum Shmaryahu Sossonkin, a well-respected rav known within Chabad as R’ Shmerel Batumer. “My grandfather saw R’ Shmerel and felt that these were his people,” Baruch Lepkivker explained. Sossonkin had until then been leading the city’s branch of the underground Lubavitcher yeshivah, Tomchei Temimim, but was preparing to leave Batumi. He asked Lepkivker to take responsibility for the yeshivah. “In Batumi my grandfather wrote a ksav hiskashrus [a written declaration of spiritual connection and devotion] to the Frierdiker Rebbe [the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory] and switched his nusach [text of the prayer book] to the Lubavitcher one.”
Yankel’s formal education began in this underground Lubavitcher yeshivah. Some time after the passing of their mother in 1937, the family moved to a second Georgian city, Kutaisi, home to more Lubavitcher Chassidim and a slightly larger underground branch of Tomchei Temimim. Yankel studied there until the end of World War II.
With the war’s end, he headed to Samarkand. Without knowing it, this move would strand him behind the Iron Curtain for an extra two decades.
The Window Closes
A few months after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union signed a treaty with the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland agreeing to a population exchange.4 At this time, the surviving members of the Lubavitcher community who’d avoided Hitler’s killing fields in White Russia, Ukraine and the Baltics were spread throughout the Soviet interior, with a nucleus having reconstituted itself in Samarkand. Yankel Lepkivker had gone there precisely because of the Chassidic infrastructure that had been established there by the Chabad refugees. For the duration of the war, these Russian Chassidim had lived side by side with Polish Jewish refugees. Now that the war was over, they watched their neighbors packing their things and heading for Lvov (today Lviv, Ukraine), from which they would cross into Poland. Why not them, too?
Beginning slowly in the spring of 1946, Lubavitchers made their way to Lvov, where they hoped they could make or acquire Polish identity papers and escape.5 This soon turned into a sophisticated and dangerous operation known as the Great Escape. Over the course of the year, the operation saw approximately 1,200 men, women and children illegally flee the Soviet Union by posing as Polish citizens. The largest single convoy left Lvov on Dec. 2, 1946 (9 Kislev, 5707), and carried 236 people on board.6
Though Yankel was in Samarkand, the majority of his family was still in Georgia. When his older brother in Kutaisi heard of the opportunity to leave the USSR via Lvov, he flew to the Ukrainian border city where he confirmed that the opening was real. He returned to Georgia, informed the rest of his family, and then headed on to Samarkand to convince his younger brother to come with them. Chassidim had written to the Sixth Rebbe asking whether they should leave or not, but his reply had not yet reached them in Russia. On the advice of some of the community’s Chassidic mentors, Yankel chose to wait. Some months later, a married sister of his living in Samarkand told Yankel she and her husband were also heading to Lvov. This time he agreed to go. A strapping 18-year-old young man trekking across the country together with a young family might have raised suspicions, so it was decided that they would travel there separately. Yankel’s sister gave him money for the journey, and they were off. Somewhere along the way, Yankel was robbed of everything he had, delaying his arrival in Lvov. By the time he got there, it was too late.
The last successful illegal crossing took place on New Year’s Day, 1947 (9 Tevet, 5707). Three weeks later, on Jan. 24, 1947, a group of about 25 Lubavitchers, including R’ Mendel Futerfas, one of the organizers of the operation, boarded a train headed into Poland. Just over the border, in the Polish village of Medyka, every Chassid on the train was arrested by the Soviet secret police.7 Over the next few years, everyone involved with the Great Escape still in the Soviet Union, including young mothers and elderly women, was systematically hunted down, arrested and imprisoned.
“My father arrived in Lvov, but it was over,” Boruch Lepkivker said. Lvov was now an especially dangerous place for a Lubavitcher to find himself, and Yankel made his way to Moscow.
Two years later, in December 1948, Yankel and his friends set out on behalf of the Chabad community still stuck in the USSR to test the viability of what seemed to be a second route of escape from the Soviet Union. Using the Ukrainian city of Chernovtsy as their jumping-off point, the group smuggled themselves into Romania. While stopped for Shabbat in a village on the other side, they were caught by Romanian border police and placed under arrest.
For a more detailed look at both the Great Escape and the failed Romanian attempt, see ‘Memo to Secret Police Chief Reveals Hunt for Chabad’s Soviet Underground.’
The KGB’s Photo
The men were arrested on a Friday night and taken to a Romanian army base. There, a Romanian officer bluntly stated that their presence was more of a headache for them than anything else. True, the Soviets wanted them and the Romanians would be compelled to hand them over, but they also knew this episode would cause Romania problems with Western countries with which they wanted to maintain good relations. The officer began dropping hints—perhaps they could simply disappear?
That night, Yankel’s father, by this time in Israel, came to him in a dream: It’s a trap, he told him. If you try to run away they will shoot you. The next morning Yankel persuaded his fellow prisoners not to make the attempt. They ultimately agreed, and within a few days they were handed back to the Soviet Union. Moshe Chaim Dubrowski, the elder of the group, was separated from them immediately. Before long, the group found itself in the MGB prison in Kiev, where over the next year or so they were regularly interrogated.
Interrogation at the hands of the Soviet secret police can take many forms, the goal always being for the prisoner to sign an admission of guilt on the dotted line. Torture was regularly deployed and some interrogation protocols still contain visible traces of the victim’s blood. The most ingenious method they used, however, was the simplest: sleep deprivation. Under the hot glare of an electric floodlight, the prisoner would be made to answer question after question over a period of 10, 12, 18 hours straight. The conveyor method, in which interrogators were continuously switched out for well-rested replacements, could extend the process for days if necessary.
“After even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable,” Robert Conquest writes. “After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was ‘as painful as any torture.’ In fact, we are told, though some prisoners had been known to resist torture, it was almost unheard of for the conveyor not to succeed if kept up long enough.”8
This is what Lepkivker and his friends underwent, night after sleepless night of interrogation, to the point where all they could think of was sleep. It was not unusual for them to be brought back to their cells at 1 or 2 a.m., allowed to rest their heads for perhaps 15 minutes, before being awakened and taken for another round. It was against prison regulations to sleep during the day, which meant that when they were returned to their cells in the morning they could not lie down, or even close their eyes.
“My father told me that during this time he learned to sleep with his eyes wide open,” Lepkivker recounted. “He said that the years of the Gulag he experienced later were Gan Eden compared to the time he spent in the KGB prison.”
It was during one of these marathon interrogation sessions that Yankel was accused by his interrogator of being a Lubavitcher Chassid, a charge he vociferously denied. “You’re wrong,” the young man insisted. “I am an orphan of my mother and lost touch with my father. Over the last few years I became a bezprizornik”—a term common for the time referring to homeless and abandoned street children—“surviving by stealing. I heard there is more to steal in Romania, so I joined this group of people going there.”
The interrogator did not buy it. “For someone who claims not to know anything or anyone, what do you have to do with Mordechai Dubin, a major leader of this Chabad conspiracy?” Lepkivker had no idea what he was talking about. “On Purim of 1947 you were in Moscow, and you went to the chief rabbi’s home, and there you and Dubin were whispering with each other.” Yankel once again insisted he did not know what the interrogator was referring to. Then the interrogator pulled out a photograph.
Yankel recognized himself in the photo, which had obviously been taken with a hidden camera. It showed him sitting at a table set for the holiday with an old, white-bearded man whispering into his ear. While he’d heard of Mordechai Dubin, the once-famous and powerful Chassidic member of Latvia’s parliament, it was the Soviet secret police who informed him of his interlocutor’s identity on that Purim day in Moscow.
The Invitation
Yankel continued denying that it was him. The photo was too grainy to pin it on him with certainty—this was probably the nature of hidden cameras in 1947—but he knew the truth: He was undoubtedly the subject in the photo. What was the story?
Early 1947, right after the Lvov escape route closed up, Yankel had decamped for Moscow. Assumedly, the young man felt that the capital was so big that though his presence there was illegal—one had to have a propiska, a residence permit, wherever they resided in the USSR—he could survive by remaining in the shadows. For the next few months he lived somewhere on the outskirts of the metropolis.9 He certainly never went to synagogue, any one of which was sure to be crawling with informers. Came Purim, though, and Yankel needed to hear the megillah. The only place he could do that was in shul.
Purim that year fell out on March 6. Lepkivker headed to the domed Choral Synagogue.10 He heard megillah on the first night of Purim and then returned the next morning for the day-time reading. As Yankel later recalled it, an announcement was made in the synagogue following the megillah reading that everyone was invited to the chief rabbi’s home for the holiday feast, one of the four mitzvahs of Purim.
Rabbi Shlomo Schleiffer was the chief rabbi of Moscow at the time. Following the arrest and execution of his predecessor in 1938, the position of rabbi of the Choral Synagogue had been left vacant.11 By 1944, the Soviet Union’s Western allies in the battle against Hitler were regular visitors to Moscow. The man filling the rabbi’s seat on the platform in the synagogue was the chairman of the Jewish community, an ignorant boor who lined his personal pockets with donation money and was a known secret police informant. The Soviets were happy for this arrangement to continue as long as it worked for them, but it was an embarrassing look in front of their American friends. Suddenly, they needed an actual rabbi.
According to Schleiffer’s son-in-law, Immanuel Mikhlin, the authorities briefly considered Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, father of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, for the position. Though Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was a great man of international stature—something the Russians desired for their rabbi—they ultimately could not have a Schneerson in that position.12
And so they came upon Schleiffer. Born in Ukraine in 1890, Schleiffer studied in the yeshiva in Lida founded by Rabbi Yitzchak Yaakov Reines, originator of the Mizrachi movement, and subsequently married the rabbi’s granddaughter. During the decade preceding the Russian Revolution, he served as rabbi of one Ukrainian town and then another, stepping down in the wake of the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919. He then moved to Moscow, where he worked as the secretary of the Choral Synagogue, switching to an accounting job in a government factory when the anti-religion campaign hit its crescendo in 1929. In 1944, the government decided that despite his lack of name recognition, the respectable-looking Schleiffer would become the chief rabbi of Moscow.
Not everyone was happy about this, including R’ Berel Levertov, an influential Lubavitcher Chassid living in Moscow. “Father knew Rabbi Schleiffer only as a Torah-learned layman, employed for many years as a bookkeeper, who seemed unlikely to have the extensive Torah expertise required for a rabbi,” recalled Levertov’s son, Moishe Levertov, in his memoir. “He also had no idea of Rabbi Schleiffer’s inner convictions—for all he knew he might be an NKVD agent … .”
Indeed, the position was an impossibly difficult one to hold. Every Soviet chief rabbi was regularly called in and questioned by authorities, knew his phone lines, home and office were tapped, and was forced to make certain public statements that they wouldn’t have in freedom. Yet the people needed them; they needed their Torah knowledge, their advice, their wisdom. Though always underappreciated—at times even mocked—by those living in freedom abroad, Schleiffer and his immediate successor, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin, bore these responsibilities to the best of their abilities.
“Later, Father admitted to us that his suspicions had been unfounded,” Levertov writes. “Rabbi Schleiffer was indeed a giant in Torah knowledge, experienced in the entire spectrum of halachic ruling, and deeply faithful to the Torah. In that frightening era, aware as Rabbi Schleiffer was of the fate of so many other rabbis, it was an act of tremendous courage and true self-sacrifice for Yiddishkeit even just to accept such a position. Rabbi Schleiffer served the Jewish community with outstanding devotion until his passing in 1957.”13
Though Lepkivker recalled everyone being invited to the rabbi’s house that Purim afternoon, Mikhlin writes that they’d quietly and purposefully invited only 15 people. Times were dangerous, and the dining room exceedingly small—150 square feet. But word quickly spread. “The time of the Purim feast came and the family and invited guests gathered round,” Mikhlin recalled. “Suddenly, uninvited guests began to seep into the room, one after another.” Before long dozens of Jews filled every corner of the apartment.
Lack of space was only half the problem. “What was happening in the room constituted a people’s gathering, the participants numbering in the dozens, a communal event, outside the walls of the synagogue, without any permission at all—and the rav certainly had no permission to host such a gathering,” Mikhlin writes. Who knew which among the guests would go straight to the authorities the next day? As he’d later learn, their fear was not unfounded.
But Lepkivker wasn’t yet among the revelers. He’d only gone to the synagogue to hear megillah, knowing the rabbi’s home would be an even more dangerous place for him as a Lubavitcher student living without papers in Moscow. Moreover, his entire family had illegally escaped the Soviet Union. Following the megillah-reading Lepkivker left.
On the street outside the synagogue, Yankel met a friend of his, Mottel Kozliner. “Tell me, Yankel,” Kozliner whispered to him. “What are you doing for the feast?” Lepkivker shrugged.
“I have a bottle of vodka, my aunt has an apartment nearby, and she is away. Let’s go and farbreng,” suggested Kozliner.
So they went.
The Niggun
Kozliner’s aunt was a non-religious member of the Communist Party. Perhaps that’s why she had an apartment in central Moscow. The two sat down, opened the bottle, and proceeded to say l’chaim. Even for a country renowned for its bread and milk lines, the post-war era was a time of deep privation in the Soviet Union. Kozliner’s aunt had no food in her home—not no kosher food, no food at all. The young men finished the vodka without anything to chase it down with. Now fortified by the spirit of Purim, as well as the spirit of the spirits, Lepkivker and Kozliner rethought their decision not to go to Rabbi Schleiffer’s home. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
They were probably disappointed to discover that there was no food left in Schleiffer’s house, either. Whatever the case may be, the 19-year-old Yankel proceeded to make a loud tumult at the gathering. The truth was, everyone in the packed room had drunk in the Purim spirit, “but one of them”—a young man Mikhlin describes as having a pleasant face and a sprouting beard, clearly an underground yeshivah student—“had gone further than anyone else.”14
That’s when an older gentleman sat himself down next to Lepkivker. “I remember my father describing him as a very hadras panimdiker Yid,” Baruch Lepkivker said. “A distinguished, presentable-looking gentleman with a long beard.” The old man cupped his hand around Yankel’s ear and whispered: “Ah treifer bochur darf zich halten ruhik,” he said, “An illegal young man should keep himself quiet.”
Dubin had once been a wealthy and powerful man, serving in Latvia’s parliament for the duration of its existence and leading the Riga Jewish Community for decades. He’d helped thousands and thousands of Jews with their livelihood, their families and their very lives. Arrested by the Soviets after their annexation of Latvia, Dubin had been through a brutal imprisonment and was only released with the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt following the U.S.’s entry into World War II.15 Dubin’s wife, son and daughter-in-law were murdered by the Germans, while he remained a prisoner in the Soviet Union—one does not need to be behind bars to be imprisoned in Russia. Ostensibly free, after the war Dubin lived in Moscow, sleeping somewhere among the benches of the Choral Synagogue, a regal, ghostly apparition. We can safely assume that Dubin was among the dozen guests actually invited by Schleiffer to the meal.
Having lost literally everything, here Dubin was once again, trying to help a young Jewish man putting himself at grave risk. But his initial exhortation didn’t help. Lepkivker continued to carry on, and the old man returned. “Tell me, if I teach you a niggun will you be quiet?”
“I don’t know how Mordechai Dubin knew it, but my father had a life-long love of niggunim,” said Baruch Lepkivker. “My father immediately agreed.” Dubin once again cupped his hands around Lepkivker’s ear and began singing to him a long and complicated niggun. This was the scene the MGB or their informant surreptitiously captured on camera, and it was the high point of this tune that Lepkivker would forever recall.
Post-Script
In the late 1990s, a collection of Chabad niggunim began to come out under the label of Heichel Haneginah (“Chamber of Song”). One of the melodies, Baruch Lepkivker saw, was titled “Mordechai Dubin’s Niggun.” He bought a tape and played the song. It was indeed long and complicated, and there, at the highest point of the tune, he heard it: The single tenuah his father had sung for all those years.
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