Within weeks of his arrival in Riga, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak convened a meeting of the Committee to Strengthen Torah and Judaism in Russia. One example of his work during this period was the 1929 matzah campaign.

In the end of 1928 reports came from the Soviet Union indicating that the country was experiencing a harsh grain shortage. Pained by the terrible material and spiritual conditions of his Russian Jewish brethren, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak foresaw a looming crisis: the Jews of Russia would not have flour with which to bake matzah for Passover. In response, he set about mobilizing an international aid campaign to import matzah and matzah flour into the Soviet Union.

The shortages the Soviet Union was experiencing was not an accident, coming as a result of Stalin's new policy of collectivization. Still, even though Stalin had banned grain imports of any kind, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak mobilized world Jewry and organized the shipment of 28 train wagons of matzah and 5,689 packages of matzah flour into the Soviet Union, the first time Russia had allowed such a thing. This campaign, which cost the equivalent of $1.3 million, ensured the Jews of Russia would have an answer to their yearly question: “Will we find matzah this year?”

But circumstances in the Soviet Union were only getting worse. Mass arrests targeting Jewish religious figures began in 1930, and Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s followers, the vanguard of the Jewish resistance, found themselves targeted.

The much-publicized arrest of more than a dozen rabbis in Minsk, including Rabbi Menachem Mendel Gluskin and Avraham Baruch Pewzner, both Lubavitcher Chassidim, focused on their lengthy correspondences with Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, by then in Latvia.

They were “directly accused of receiving instructions from Riga from Rabbi Joseph Schneurson, the Lubawitscher Rebbe [sic] …,” the JTA reported at the time. “The G.P.U. asserts that it found at Rabbi Pevsner’s home a letter in Rabbi Schneurson’s handwriting containing instructions as to how to organize illegal rabbinical seminaries and Hebrew schools, and how to strengthen Jewish religious life.”

Similar sweeps took place in Leningrad, where Lubavitcher rabbis, including Shimon Lazarov, an active leader of the city’s Tiferes Bachurim Yeshivah, were arrested. Most of these rabbis were eventually released (although some, like Lazarov, died while still in Soviet custody), but they would not remain free for long.

Despite everything, Tomchei Temimim and Tiferes Bachurim continued to operate, and each time a member of the staff was arrested or forced to disappear, someone else was there to take their place.

Leningrad continued to serve as the base of operations for Lubavitch activities, headed by Rabbi Elchonon Dov (Chonya) Marozov. Rabbi Marozov, who had formerly served as Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s secretary, remained in charge of the underground Jewish network after the Rebbe was forced to leave the country. Connections with the Rebbe were maintained out of Leningrad, from which activities in the rest of the country were directed.

A New Terror

On the night of August 7-8, 1937, Rabbi Shmuel Neymotin was arrested. He was charged with being an “active Chassid-anti-Soviet and a Zionist, and maintaining connections with foreign Zionist circles.” He was tried, sentenced to death and executed.

A few months later, on one single night in February 1938, Marozov and nine other Chassidim were simultaneously arrested in Leningrad. All of them were brutally interrogated and charged under Articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the criminal code. The latter charge indicated that they were part of an underground anti-Soviet organization—a crime of the highest severity.

Knowing his own arrest was only a matter of time, Rabbi Yitzchak (Itche) Raskin, the Chabad mohel of Leningrad, said:

In the olden days, when they took a city by assault, the first ranks of the attackers would be killed, the corpses would fill the ditch, and the next wave would advance over the bodies of the dead. Only thanks to the dead could the besiegers reach the fortress walls. G‑d grant that there will be those who will march on over our bodies.

Raskin, Marozov and the others were tried and convicted, then shot and buried not far from Neymotin in mass graves on the outskirts of the city.

Similar arrests and executions took place in Moscow (where Medalia, the chief rabbi of Moscow, was one of the victims), the city of Gomel (where the city’s shochet, Rabbi Yitzchak Elchonon Shagalov, was executed) and in smaller cities throughout the country.

The sudden end of Stalin’s Great Terror in late 1938 did not bring an end to the persecution of Soviet Jews, nor did it spare the Chassidim spearheading its religious resistance.

The Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, was a case in point. The highest-profile rabbi in the Soviet Union to remain at his post—the rest of them having either been chased out of their positions or killed—Rabbi Levi Yitzchak pressed on despite the dangers.

In the early 1930s he led the Ukrainian rabbis’ refusal to sign pro-Soviet statements. From his pulpit in Dnepropetrovsk (as Yekatrinoslav was named during Soviet times), he called on his community members to keep their dedication to the Torah and its mitzvot. He collected funds to support the families of Jewish prisoners, ran a network of underground Jewish schools and oversaw the distribution of matzah he received from abroad. In 1936, he was involved with the construction of an “illegal” mikvah, and in 1939 refused to rubber stamp his kosher certification on matzah baked by the government, forcing them to follow his stringent kosher standards.

In early 1939 the NKVD, as the Soviet secret police was then called, arrested a slew of Chabad Chassidim in Kiev and Kharkov. On March 28, 1939, just days before Passover, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was himself arrested. Over the next 10 months, the 61-year-old rabbi was shuttled between secret police prisons in Dnepropetrovsk, Kiev—where the NKVD appears to have considered tying his case to that of the Chassidim from Kiev and Kharkov, ultimately deciding to prosecute them all seperately—back to Dnepropetrovsk, then to Kharkov and on to Alma-Ata, Soviet Kazakhstan—five prisons in all. He was deprived of sleep and beaten. Some of his interrogations lasted 15 or 16 hours, followed by a break of two or three hours before starting again. He was charged with being an imperialist spy, funneling money from abroad and conducting anti-Soviet provocations at home.

On October 4, 1939—Hoshana Rabbah on the Jewish calendar—Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was sentenced to five years of internal exile, to be served in the remote village of Chi’ili on the Kazakh steppe.