Express Passport

It was 1947. At that time I was the manager of the Paris office of Vaad Hatzalah, the Jewish Rescue Committee. One day I was working in my office—we were trying hard to get Holocaust survivors into Israel, into North America, South America—and the Rebbe walked in.

Of course, he was not the Rebbe then. He was introduced to me as the son-in-law of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in America. He was young still, 45 years old at the time. I remember him like today. I asked what I could do for him, and he said that his mother was in Paris and that he needed to facilitate her immigration to the United States.

Fine. I didn’t know who his father was, I didn’t know who his mother was, so I asked for her name and for her papers. But it turned out that she did not have anything—no passport, no marriage certificate, no birth certificate, no death certificate of her husband, nothing showing where she had been born and where she had lived.

The Rebbe told me that he had come to bring her to America with him, but he couldn’t do it without these papers. So I said to him, “We are here to generate papers.”

That’s what we did. We didn’t forge them, but we had ways of generating papers fast. For example, we took two witnesses who knew the person and who could affirm when he or she was born. From that we made a birth certificate. So, I explained to the Rebbe what was involved.

And then he asked me a question which certainly surprised me. I actually thought I didn’t hear him properly. He asked me if this could be done quickly, without bittul Torah—wasting time from his Torah studies. Now, I had been dealing with hundreds of Jews, and nobody else ever mentioned bittul Torah—they all felt that their life was at stake, and they had to do what they had to do, to get where they had to go.

The Rebbe with, his mother, Rebbetzin Chana, in Paris, 1947

I said to him, “Rabbi Schneerson, don’t worry about bittul Torah. This will take two or three days, and everything will be fine.”

He thanked me and gave me the address where he was staying, and I got to work. To make a long story short, thirty-six hours later everything was ready. And I even said to him, “Do you need any help in getting her a ticket for America? Because the Vaad Hatzalah has money for that.” But he said no, he would not take money from us.

Years later, after I got married and was living in Forest Hills, New York, a friend invited me to go to a farbrengen at 770. I walked in, and I was still standing by the door when suddenly I heard my name being called. “Lerner, oyben un—Lerner, come up here.” The Rebbe was calling me up to the head table.

Six or seven years had passed, but he recognized me instantly and he remembered my name. And after he gave a talk, he also gave me lechayim. He was appreciative of the fact that I had helped his mother some years earlier.