In August 1939 Stalin and Hitler signed the Non-Aggression Pact, its secret protocols carving up Eastern Europe between the two evil empires. A little more than a week later the Germans invaded western Poland, launching World War II. A few weeks after that, Stalin’s forces invaded the eastern lands granted to the Soviet Union, bringing with them widespread arrests and an immediate assault on religion. Then, in June 1941, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union. The Germans and local collaborators would kill some 1.5 million Jews in the Soviet Union.

Many of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s followers in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and the Soviet Union were murdered by the Nazis. His own immediate family were among the victims: His son-in-law and daughter, Rabbi Menachem Mendel and Rebbetzin Shaina Horenstein, were deported to German concentration camps, where they were murdered. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s successor as Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, likewise lost family members to the Nazis: his maternal grandmother was murdered by the Germans in Nikolayev, while his younger brother, Dovber, was killed in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.

Aside from the Holocaust by bullet suffered by the Jews of White Russia and Ukraine, many Jews perished in places like Leningrad, to which the Nazis laid siege for nearly 900 days, along with hundreds of thousands of others. Leningrad until that point had been an important center for Chassidic Jews in the Soviet Union, and many were among the victims, having stepped out onto the streets of the starving city and never returning.

There was a spark of hope, however. As the Germans advanced into the USSR, many Jews managed to flee eastward, away from the onslaught. The Chabad community was a relatively tight-knit one, and news soon spread that many Lubavitchers were gathering in Soviet Uzbekistan, the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand in particular. Among them were Lubavitchers like the Zaltzman family from Kharkov. Amid the hardships and scarcities of war, the Chassidic community managed to flourish, complete with yeshivahs, cheders and synagogues. With the war against Germany top of mind, and Soviet authorities to an extent encouraging expressions of religion in the general populace, they turned a blind to this Jewish religious flowering in Samarkand. Although many died due to disease and lack of medicine and food, for the first time Judaism was able to emerge somewhat from out of the shadows.

These Lubavitcher Chassidim did not just care for themselves but actively recruited Jewish children to study Torah, many for the first time in their lives. The children, who were cared for materially as well, drew from the widest background, and included local Bukharian Jews, Polish refugees and members of the Soviet nomenklatura. Among their students was even a 16-year-old relative of Stalin acolyte Lazar Kaganovich. As a detailed June 6, 1950, memo to the head of the Soviet secret police put it:

According to SCHNEERSON’s directives, the Chassidim intensified their anti-Soviet activities and created illegal schools in the cities of Samarkand and Tashkent, in which Jewish youth who fell under their influence studied in a religious and nationalist spirit.

The Great Escape

A few months after the war, on July 6, 1945, the Soviet Union signed a treaty with the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland agreeing on a population exchange. Ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Lithuanians would have their Polish citizenship exchanged for a Soviet one, while ethnic Poles and Polish Jews who now found themselves in the Soviet Union would be repatriated to Poland.

The Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland, formerly called the Lublin Committee, was a pro-Soviet puppet entity that Stalin was using to outflank the Polish government-in-exile in his plan to transform post-war Poland into a Communist satellite state. Whatever Stalin’s reasons for allowing this Jewish exodus, Polish repatriation presented a limited window of opportunity to leave the Soviet Union.

For the duration of the war the Lubavitchers in Central Asia and other places of evacuation in the Soviet interior had lived side by side with Polish Jewish refugees. Now the Polish Jews were heading to Lvov, on the far western Soviet border, to be repatriated back to Poland, from which they could go on to Mandatory Palestine, the United States or other countries in the West. As Soviet citizens, the Lubavitcher Chassidim were ineligible to leave, but by the end of 1945 the idea of somehow taking advantage of this window began to percolate.

In the beginning of 1946, a Chabad yeshivah student named Leibel Mochkin arrived in Lvov to scout out the town. With the help of his older brother, Shmuel (Mulle) Mochkin, and the former Latvian-Jewish parliamentarian Mordechai Dubin, who was by then living in exile in Moscow, he connected with the chairman of the Lvov Jewish community, who in turn opened doors necessary for the operation’s success.

With the Sixth Rebbe’s blessings, from the spring of 1946 until New Year’s Day 1947, approximately 1,200 Lubavitcher Chassidim procured false or doctored Polish citizenship papers and fled the Soviet Union. This sophisticated and dangerous operation came to be known as the Great Escape.

In Poland, the Chassidim connected with members of the underground Bricha (B’riha), a Zionist organization that smuggled Jewish Holocaust survivors into British-controlled Palestine. “The B’riha men were amazed at [the Lubavitchers’] ingenious escape from Russia and deeply impressed by the discipline, the sense of solidarity and the reverence for their Rebbe in New York which held the Hasidim together,” former Bricha commander Ephraim Dekel would write in his memoir, B’riha: Flight to the Homeland. They were secretive, he noted, and cooperated with the Bricha strictly on their own terms. “The ‘Lubavitchers’ were, in fact, running an underground network of their own….”

On Jan. 24, 1947, a group of Lubavitchers including one of the operation’s organizers, Mendel Futerfas, tried crossing once again into Poland. Just over the border, in the village of Medyka, the train was stopped by Soviet border guards and Futerfas and the rest of the Chassidic would-be Polish refugees arrested.

The Doctors’ Plot

Futerfas, whose family had preceded him to freedom, was interrogated, tortured, and tried, ultimately serving nine years in the Gulags. In fact, over the next few years, the Soviet secret police would hunt down and arrest nearly every person involved with the Great Escape who had remained in the USSR. Yona Kahan (“Poltaver”) was arrested in 1949, perishing in the Gulag the next year; Mordechai Dubin was arrested in 1948 and died in Soviet custody in 1957; “Mumme” Sarah Katzenellenbogen was hunted all the way to Soviet Georgia, where she was arrested in 1951, dying in prison a year later. The list goes on.

This was a renewed period of persecution of the Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1948 Stalin ordered the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization of Jewish writers, actors and intellectuals created during the war to rally foreign aid to the Soviet Union’s war-efforts. Shortly thereafter, its prominent members, including Peretz Markish, Itzik Fefer and David Bergelson, were arrested. Over the next few years they were tortured, interrogated and, after a sham trial, sentenced to death; 13 of the 15 defendants were executed on Aug. 12, 1952.

In January 1950, 10 Shevat on the Jewish calendar, the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, passed away, being succeeded by his son-in-law the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. The Rebbe would continue and expand upon the Sixth Rebbe’s efforts, championing the plight of Soviet Jewry abroad while directing a network of underground activists within.

During this same period, Stalin began laying the groundwork for a massive action against the Jews. In the beginning of 1953 Soviet newspapers revealed “The Doctors’ Plot,” a falsified conspiracy that doctors, mostly Jewish, were poisoning government officials. A sense of dread spread through the country’s Jews.

Whatever Stalin was planning was cut short on Purim 1953, when the tyrant suddenly fell ill and died.

Jewish Life Underground

At the same time, many Chassidim and Chassidic families remained. These included families who did not manage to get papers in time, did not learn of the development until it was too late, or felt their mission was to remain with their Jewish brethren, who would need them now more than ever.

Small communities of Chassidim formed, some in small cities such as Chernovtsy, and in the large city of Moscow and its suburb, Malakhovka. It was Samarkand, however, that remained the largest Chabad community in the USSR, the city housing a functioning mikvah, minyanim, a cheder and yeshivah.

At the same time, individual Chabad Chassidim remained sprinkled throughout the Soviet Union. From Kharkov to Zaporozhia to a village in Crimea; Gomel, Rostov to Alma-Ata, these graduates of Tomchei Temimim served as the official or unofficial rabbis, shochets or mohels of cities and towns spread throughout the empire, ensuring Jewish life was never extinguished. This Jewish underground would survive until the fall of Communism in 1991.

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A defining event of this period took place while World War II still raged. In 1939 the Rebbe’s father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, was sentenced to five years of exile in the village of Chi’ili on the Kazakh steppe. Shortly after Passover of 1944, the regime allowed the great rabbi and Kabbalist to relocate, together with his wife, to Alma-Ata (today’s Almaty, Kazakhstan), the capital of the Soviet republic. Even during this short period of time he succeeded in having a major impact on the Jews of this remote city, barely 200 miles from the Chinese border.

On 20 Av. 5704, (Aug. 9, 1944) Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson passed away in Alma-Ata, where he was buried. His tragic fate of seemingly endless exile in a spiritual desert would be shared over the next decades by his brethren, the millions of Jews of the Soviet Union.