Roza Melamed, reported to be the last surviving witness to the historic 10-day exile of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory—in Kostroma, Russia, passed away on Sept. 7 in Beersheva, Israel. She was 99 years old.
Melamed was just 12 when, following the commutation of the Rebbe’s death sentence to three years of internal exile, the venerable rabbi arrived at the home of her father, Rabbi Yerachmiel Kugel, in Kostroma, a city in the Ural Mountains about 500 miles southeast of the Rebbe’s home in Petersburg (then Leningrad).
Kostrama was not historically a Jewish city, and at the time of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s arrival, it no longer had its own rabbi (by the 1920s, there was none). The town did have a shochet (ritual slaughterer)—Melamed’s father, Rabbi Yerachmiel—and through a Chabad Chassid in Leningrad who knew Kugel, it was arranged that the Rebbe would stay at the shochet’s home.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak ended up staying for only 10 days—his three-year sentence suddenly and inexplicably commuted by Soviet authorities yet again on Tuesday, July 12, 1927, corresponding to the 12th day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz (5687). Due to a governmental delay the commutation was not official until the following day, the 13th, and these two days, 12-13 Tammuz, have been celebrated as festive holidays by Chabad Chassidim ever since, marked by public gatherings, additional study and prayer.
In a letter commemorating the first anniversary of his liberation, the Previous Rebbe wrote: “It is appropriate to establish this day as a day of festive assembly (hitva’adut)
and inspiration for the strengthening of Torah and Judaism in each and every place according to its characteristics.”
The Rebbe’s short stay in Kostroma left a deep impression on the entire Jewish community, especially on the young girl. She would proudly recount the experience often in the future.
“The Rebbe was a very good and kindly person, with a kind soul,” Melamed recalled in a previous interview conducted with Jewish Educational Media (JEM). “You understand, he really had something holy about him.
“The Rebbe blessed us all with health, and that we should never come to know the suffering he had endured,” she remembered. “When he spoke about what he had lived through, our hair stood on its end.”
An Era’s Influence on History
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s short exile in Kostroma is not merely a historical footnote, and Melamed’s memories are not just anecdotal documentation. When the Jewish community of Kostroma requested that the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia (Chabad’s umbrella organization in the country) send a permanent rabbi in the latter years of the 20th century, its legendary history played no small part in the decision-making process.
In 2002, Rabbi Nison Mendl and Ilana Shulamit Ruppo moved to Kostroma and have since greatly expanded Jewish life in the small city.
“When we make the decision to send a shaliach (emissary) to a city, it is because we think that the community is ready for one, based on a variety of factors,” explains Rabbi Berel Lazar, Russia’s chief rabbi and head Chabad emissary. “In Kostroma, we saw a very strong community not proportionate to its size, and that is clearly as a result of the 10 days that the Frierdiker (Previous) Rebbe spent there.”
Arrest, Condemnation, Exile
What Melamed lived through was a seminal moment in the history of Chabad-Lubavitch, a period that cemented the movement’s stated goal to stop at nothing to ensure Judaism’s survival in Russia and throughout the world.
In contrast to the many Chassidic courts in Poland and Hungary, Chabad-Lubavitch had always been a resolutely Russian strain, both geographically and temperamentally. World War I forced the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber, to leave his movement’s historic headquarters in the White Russian village of Lubavitch, relocating to Rostov-on-Don. The czar’s abdication, revolution and civil war followed; by 1920, the Bolsheviks were in power.
It was not long before the new Soviet authorities began working to implement the anti-religious agenda that was part and parcel of their dictatorship of the proletariat. Led by the particularly passionate agents of the Yevsektzia (the Jewish section of the Communist party), synagogues, yeshivahs and mikvahs were closed, and rabbis and Jewish activists were arrested. No longer would Jewish religious life be tolerated in the land that was its home for hundreds of years.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak had been building a network of underground Jewish schools and yeshivahs, and he quickly became a valuable Jewish target. On June 14, 1927, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak was arrested in a midnight raid on his apartment in Leningrad. Beaten and tortured in the bowels of the city’s Spalerno Prison, he was sentenced to death for counter-revolutionary activities.
News of the important rabbi’s fate spread, drawing sharp words of protest from all over the world. Remarkably, on July 3, 1927, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s death sentence was overturned, and he was instead given six hours to return home, pack and make his way to the train station to begin his three years of exile in remote Kostroma.
Speaking from the train platform to the throngs of people in tears who had descended on the station to see the Rebbe off that summer evening, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak explained that it was not by the Jewish people’s free will that they had been exiled from the Land of Israel, nor would they return by the might of their own hand. It could be only G‑d Himself who would ultimately redeem them:
“This, however, all the nations of the world must know: Only our bodies were sent into exile and subjugated to alien rule; our souls were not given over into captivity and foreign rule.
“We must proclaim openly and before all that any matter affecting the Jewish religion, Torah and its mitzvot and customs is not subject to the coercion of others. No one can impose his belief upon us, nor coerce us to conduct ourselves contrary to our beliefs.”
Welcomed by the City
Kostroma did not have a very large or educated Jewish community. Its lone synagogue was a wooden one built in 1907. When the Rebbe’s destination became known, a Chassid named Reb Michoel Dworkin set off immediately, establishing a children’s cheder (elementary school) there and repairing the local mikvah ahead of the Rebbe’s imminent arrival.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s arrival was heralded in the city, by Jews and non-Jews alike. “Everyone respected the Rebbe,” remembered Melamed, “not only the Jews, but the Russian Orthodox, too …
“The local Jews were awestruck by the Rebbe. There was one Zelig Alekseyavich Rosenson, a watchmaker. He said, ‘I don’t have the right to even look upon his holy face.’ Others would climb our fence just to get a glimpse of him, but he received anyone who wanted to see him.”
Melamed remembered her mother cooking for the Rebbe, the Rebbe studying Torah and greeting guests, and then the grand procession following the surprise news that Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak would be allowed to leave after 10 days.
The Kugels having hosted the Rebbe in their home did nothing to endear them to the authorities. When Rabbi Kugel was arrested for Jewish activities in 1943, he was interrogated at length regarding his connection with the known counter-revolutionary rabbi who has stayed in his home 16 years earlier. Kugel went on to serve 10 years in Siberian labor camps before returning home to Kostroma in 1953. Until his last days, Jewish life quietly ran out of his home, and he passed away in Kostroma in the 1960s.
The Past Bolsters the Future
Rabbi Ruppo first met Roza Melamed when he was a rabbinical student in Moscow visiting Jewish patients in a Kostroma hospital. He says that when he later moved there, Melamed’s grown daughters were among the most active in the work of rebuilding the city’s lost Jewish life. Many of her descendants are in Israel today, and she lived with them during the last six years of her life. They all are active in Jewish life, with some of studying in yeshivah.
“I think that without this story having happened here, there would be no shaliach here today,” says Ruppo. “This is a small city, and the only reason there is a shul and active Yiddishkeit here is because of this.”
Ruppo describes the constant reminders of the city’s unique history. When minor construction in the synagogue kitchen unearthed a large pit, he quickly realized that must have been the synagogue’s filled-in mikvah—the very same one that Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak had used during his time there. The hunch was confirmed by the testimony of the daughter of the city’s last rabbi, and a campaign was launched to build a new mikvah, which was inaugurated in 2012.
“The [Lubavitcher] Rebbe [Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory] once said that the reason why Jewish life in the former Soviet Union is alive is because of the self-sacrifice people went through for Jewish education during those difficult years,” stresses Lazar. “When we first arrived here it was still the USSR, and in every city we would find one or two or more people who were practicing Jews. Their Jewish education was what they received years earlier in a clandestine cheder.”
“No question that Yiddishkeit is alive today,” he adds, “thanks to the generation that didn’t give up under communism.”
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