Living Torah Archives

Mrs. Rochel Fogelman and her husband, Rabbi Hershel Fogelman, of blessed memory, have been Chabad emissaries in Worcester, Massachusetts since 1947. She remembers asking the Rebbe repeatedly for a blessing for her sister to find her match. Her sister seemed so choosy, it almost looked like there wouldn’t be anyone who’d meet her qualifications. The matter was on her mind again when she brought a group with her to the Rebbe from Worcester, Massachusetts in the 1950s. Thankfully, she finally received the blessing she was seeking when the Rebbe asked her to help someone else.

On the advice of her father, Chaya Cohen would often turn to the Rebbe for advice and guidance in her life. When the Rebbe advised her to start visiting friends for Shabbos meals, she knew something good would follow. (1970)

During a polio outbreak in the United States in the 1950s, Rabbi Yechiel Ziskind contracted the dreaded disease and found himself paralyzed in an iron lung. While doctors were losing hope, the Rebbe had bright plans for the future. (Mid 1950s)

Rabbi Nissen Mangel recalls that shortly after the Rebbe sent him to Lakewood, New Jersey, to teach chasidic philosophy in a non-chasidic yeshiva, he was approached by an impatient student eager to study Tanya – at one o’clock in the morning. (Late 1950s)

After becoming observant in college, Rabbi Meilech Leib DuBrow asked the Rebbe about marrying someone whom he had known during his student years. In an unusually long audience, he received the answer to his question, as well as advice on the basics of a Jewish marriage. (1971)

Reb Sholom Goldshmid was a student at 770 during the late 1940s and early 1950s. When it came time to start thinking about dating and marriage, it was the Rebbe who gave him the most important advice of all (c. 1951).

Rabbi Avraham Korf is head Shliach of the State of Florida. He recalls some of the Rebbe’s instructions to him as a young rabbinic student in Crown Heights during the 1950s waiting to go on Shlichus.

Mrs. Chana Sharfstein recalls one of her first private audiences with the Rebbe, as a young woman in her early twenties, when the Rebbe asked her about her prospects for marriage (1954).