This letter was sent to R. Yitzchak Aharon Goldin.

B”H, 28 MarCheshvan, 5711
Brooklyn

Greetings and blessings,

With pleasure, I read your (undated) letter informing me of the beginning of a campaign for the Talmud Torah and the idea of the teachers visiting the students and studying with them in their homes.

Also, your letter from before Rosh HaShanah describing your life history in brief was duly received. Pursuant to this, I petition you with a doubled and redoubled request: since you mention that you were one of the attendants of my revered father-in-law, the Rebbe, הכ"מ, in Rostov in 5681 (1921), write down everything you remember from that period. I would be very, very thankful to you if you could fulfill this request of mine. The more particular your account will be, the more praiseworthy. I hope that the events are stored in your memory and that you will satisfy my request in full.

I will mention some points concerning matters mentioned in your letter:

a) At the conclusion of your account of your life history — may you enjoy long and good days and years — you write: “All the years of my life have been bad.” [Now] this comes in continuation to your writing that you studied for six years in Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim, that you merited to attend to the personal matters of my revered father-in-law, the Rebbe, הכ"מ (and even the personal matters of a collective soul are of a collective nature), that you merited to carry out the desires of my revered father-in-law, the Rebbe, הכ"מ, in communal activities, that you were then imprisoned for six years afterwards, and even then, [you served as a channel] through which my revered father-in-law, the Rebbe, הכ"מ, spread Torah, Yiddishkeit, and the actual performance of the mitzvos on the material plane. If, after all this, you write that all of your years were bad, I do not know what good is.

b) I derived much satisfaction from reading your letter from before the holidays regarding your work in Paris and in the city of Metz and its surroundings in kosher [Jewish] education, strengthening Yiddishkeit, and spreading the study of Chassidus, both qualitatively and quantitatively with regard to the number of students [studying] and the houses that are visited from time to time.

Therefore, it was with “a cry implanted in this side of the heart,”1 that I read in your letter which I received today that a cheder was opened and [only] eight students study there. It is, however, my hope that this is only very temporary and that in the immediate future, your efforts will be reinforced so that the number of students and houses [visited] will reach the number at which it stood at the end of the previous summer. It is self-understood that you should not remain content with this and that the number of students should increase even more. Thus you will bring gladness to me with good tidings; the sooner and the more that arrive, the more praiseworthy it is.

..Enclosed is a short letter2 to those who are involved in the holy work under your direction. If the content of the letter is appropriate to the situation, give it to them and notify me of this.

With blessings for proper health and success in your holy work; may it be vibrant and inspire vibrancy in others,3

Menachem Schneerson