Dr. Yehoshua (Evsey) Neymotin, a nuclear physicist and a university dean in the former Soviet Union, whose father and grandfather served as faithful frontline soldiers in the spiritual battlefield behind the Iron Curtain, passed away on April 26. He was 75 years old.
Neymotin was both the son and grandson of devoted Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidim, faithful followers of the sixth Rebbe—Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory—and his successor, the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—and he maintained a long relationship with the Rebbe both during and after his time in the Soviet Union.
Neymotin was born on Feb. 24, 1943, in Alma-Ata (today Almaty), Kazakhstan, where his father, R’ Chaim Yosef Dovid Neymotin, uncle, and grandmother had been exiled following Joseph Stalin’s 1937 arrest and execution of R’ Yosef’s father, R’ Shmuel Neymotin. R’ Shmuel was brutally beaten and tortured before being shot and buried on the outskirts of Leningrad, today S. Petersburg.
In 1939, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, the Rebbe’s father, was exiled to the distant and dusty village of Chi’ili, Kazakhstan, where he was joined shortly by his wife (the Rebbe’s mother), Rebbetzin Chana. The village, home to only ethnic Kazakhs and thus no other Jews, was frigid in the winter and scorching in the summer, and painfully primitive. Finally, towards the end of his life, an ailing Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was allowed to relocate to the Soviet republic’s capital city of Alma-Ata. There, the revered rabbi and kabbalist was cared for by, among others, R’ Yosef Neymotin, who also took part in preparing Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s body to be buried after the latter’s passing. Later, he assisted Rebbetzin Chana in safely leaving Almaty and making it to Moscow during her escape from the Soviet Union. Just prior to her leaving Kazakhstan, following the death of her husband, Rebbetzin Chana made a special request to R’ Yosef’s wife, Tzilya.
“When the Rebbe’s father died, his mother came to visit my mother, and my mother was just pregnant with my brother,” Dr. Neymotin said in a 2008 interview with the Columbus Jewish Historical Society. “And the Rebbetzin told to my mother: ‘Your son has to be named after my husband, after Levi Yitzchak.’ So my brother is the first Levi Yitzchak in the Lubavitcher community.”
In 1950, R’ Yosef was arrested by Soviet authorities for having attempted to leave the country illegally four years earlier, and imprisoned until 1956. For the next three decades after his release back to Alma-Ata, he cared for Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s resting place, making sure it was clean and well-tended.
R’ Yosef and Tzilya later built a mikvah in their home. Being the only one among the three neighboring Soviet republics, it was frequented by women who flew in regularly. The couple served as pillars of Jewish life in Alma-Ata throughout the bulk of the post-war Soviet era.
Their son, Yehoshua, earned a Ph.D. in physics and became a leading nuclear engineer, eventually appointed as dean of Kazakh State University. But Soviet state-sanctioned anti-Semitism being what it was, his high position did not stop his peers and superiors from targeting him, and he decided it was time, together with his parents, to apply for exit visas. The Neymotins were refused visas by the government for five years, thus becoming refuseniks, and Dr. Neymotin began to consider joining the Soviet Jewry protest movements. That’s when he received a message from the Rebbe in New York discouraging his doing so.
“The Rebbe didn’t want me to start a fight with the government,” Neymotin recalled in an interview with Jewish Educational Media (JEM). “I was ready to start going to demonstrations, but the Rebbe said, ‘You will get the permission at the right time and in the right way.’ ”
Not long thereafter, the Neymotins received invitations to come to America personally signed by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Dr. Neymotin eventually settled in Columbus, Ohio, where he worked as a nuclear scientist for two decades.
Upon their arrival in the United States in 1979, the family attended the Rebbe’s farbrengen gathering at 770 Eastern Parkway. There, with the Neymotins in attendance, the Rebbe spoke of what R’ Yosef had done for his parents, saying it was what he should have done himself. At a private audience the family had with the Rebbe shortly thereafter, the Rebbe again personally thanked the family.
“When we were leaving the Rebbe’s office, he suddenly approached my daughter Ita, who was 6 years old,” recalled Dr. Neymotin in his interview with JEM. He “bent down to her, and he told my daughter, ‘Spasiba tibya,’ I remember this, he said in Russian ‘Thank you.’ ”
The Rebbe expressed his thanks to the Neymotins in more way than one, most publicly in 1991, when R’ Yosef passed away.
“When we came with the casket to 770,” recalled Dr. Neymotin, “the Rebbe came out and he was walking with us to say goodbye to my father. He really appreciated what he did, and he loved my father.”
Neymotin, who was hospitalized two months ago, is survived by his wife, Margarita (Chaya); children Ita, Freida and Benjamin; and many grandchildren. He is also survived by his brother, Levi Yitzchak Neymotin.
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