By all accounts, during his youth and until he became the Rebbe in New York, Menachem Mendel Schneerson was an assimilated Jew, who had abandoned the Chabad, the Hasidic, and the Jewish way of life. While in Europe, he obtained a technical degree in engineering from a second class college in Paris, at the age of 36. He never studied in any yeshiva, he never worked a day in his life, he never even attended synagogue while living in France, he was an alcoholic who spent lots of time in bars. His wife, Chaya Mushka, happened to be the daughter of the 6th Chabad Lubavitcher Rebbe, and since there was no one else to take the position, he became the 7th Rebbe after the 6th Rebbe died. This is why some people refer to him as “the accidental Rebbe”.
The days in Europe were his real life. When the war started and the Nazis invaded Paris, his father in law succeeded in bringing Menachem and Chaya to New York, where they no longer had a life. Menachem Mendel Schneerson arrived in New York at the age of 41, and he never had any children. His wife Chaya, did not like the idea that her husband became the 7th Rebbe, and she refused to be called Rebetzin, which is the proper way to call a Rabbi’s wife. Menachem Mendel Schneerson was never trained to be a Rabbi, and he was not a Torah Scholar. In fact, he was very ignorant of basic Jewish Law and tradition, just like his followers. His followers created a lot of false propaganda around him to make him look good, such as saying that the Rebbe had received a PhD from the Sorbone, but it’s all just a bunch of lies.
“The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson” is a biography of the Rebbe that was published in May 2010, and was written by Samuel Heilman, of City University of New York, and Menachem Friedman, of Bar Ilan University in Israel. This book angered many Chabad fanatics, as it greatly exposes the fraud and lies that Chabad has invented around their false Messiah. Basically, Menachem Mendel Schneerson was just an average person, and nothing more than that. But Chabad is all about money and power, and their “Rebbe” is just part of their scam.
The Double Afterlife of Mendel Schneerson
by Ben Atlas (May 29, 2010) Source: BenAtlas.com
I just read The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson by Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman. There seem to be a lot of “life” in these titles, the original biography by Shimmy Deutsch described the Rebbe as “larger than life”. Both titles tap into the unrecognized idea that the Rebbe indeed lived a double afterlife. His first afterlife was in Brooklyn and his second afterlife is the lasting legend and the legacy. Mendel Schneerson had his real life as a human being prior to coming to America and this very humanity that irks people who internalized the Rebbe in his “official capacity”. From that perspective any actual detail about the Rebbe’s life as a human being is historically inaccurate. It’s a sacrilege like a Mohammad cartoon. If mythologically speaking he attended the Sorbonne in his role as the Rebbe, he certainly did so as Mendel Schneerson in Paris.
Moreover when the idolized image is internalized as a part of an identity, any deviation from the iconic description is a personal attack (a note to the book’s detractors). The character known as the Rebbe is projected in both directions, into the future where he continues to live eternally and into the imaginary past where he is getting ready for his messianic role. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said that “we march backwards into the future”. There is the afterlife in Brooklyn and the literal afterlife of the Messianic redeemer “may he live forever and ever” after Brooklyn. To be sure the Ramash proved a willing participant in the mythology mongering. So naturally my interest was always in the years when the Rebbe was still a Russian refugee Mendel Schneerson, a human being so to speak. There are new details and the chronology in the book that complete this human picture at the backdrop of Dnepropetrovsk, Berlin and Paris, the “human period”.
Ohh so dear to the Rebbe himself contradictions, as I mentioned in my offbeat biography (see below). For the Rebbe his marriage to the royal family was his life and death. It’s astounding that the entire time while a nomad in the European capitals Mendel Schneerson never held a job or produced any income (40 years of his “real life” plus 10 years in Brooklyn!). This in itself perhaps is not that unusual for the aristocratic culture but what is surprising is that Mendel Schneerson managed to pull this off while going explicitly against the wishes of his benefactor, the father-in-law. Still if not for the connection to this family, to the Rayatz, most likely that Mendel Schneerson would perish in Russia or Europe. But this very connection eventually stripped him of his own humanity, and made him enter the “afterlife” while still in this world. This also true even for Mussiya Schneerson herself as she spent her years in Brooklyn entombed, buried alive in the self-imposed house confinement on the President St., surrounded by the very peasants she was so desperate to escape, lamenting as the book notes “her best years in Paris”. And the literal erasure when the famous Schneerson inbreeding infertility paid a tragic visit.
On a personal note I can say that I hate reading these books as I nearly slipped into an afterlife following the after-living example of the aforementioned subject. And precisely the books that colorfully describe how Mendel Schneerson was once a human being make his almost posthumous betrayals, virtually vivid. If the Rebbe was indeed a neshoma klloly, a general soul, it was in the sense that post Gulag and post Holocaust, the post-traumatic trajectory ushered the dark age of fundamentalism, negating the promise of the fledglings enlightenment and in the case of the Menachem Mendel Schneerson rejecting his own essence as he succumbed to the agitprop of the totalitarian group-think representing his own afterlife. Hence his messianic urgency when he recognized that his first afterlife wasn’t a life or a life worth living for himself or for others and cornered begged desperately and frantically for the redemption.
The book notes that when Mendel Schneerson finally graduated from the ESTP in January 1938 (he was 36), he wasn’t able to find work as an engineer. His application for the permanent status in France was rejected on June 10, 1939 and he applied for Sorbonne possibly in hope of expending his student status. Although there is no record of him actually attending Sorbonne and soon thereafter the events of the war forced him out of the country. Germany attacked France on May 10, 1940. Paris fell in June, 1940. The Rebbe was granted a visa to the USA on April 17, 1941 in Marseilles.
The Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson
by Ben Atlas (Dec 2, 2009) Source: BenAtlas.com
On the subject of Vertical Axis in the Age of Kabbalistic Cosmology. Well, in addition to the noise surrounding this subject, a couple of overlooked diversions really. In the future, people who would undertake the thankless task of decoding the messianic eruption, these would be some interesting starting points.
Dnepropetrovsk: It wasn’t really a traditional Jewish city like the centers in Poland, Hungary and even Lithuania. To give you a little color. I have a high school friend, his grandfather was the Rebbe’s father, Shamesh (secretary). He was probably the second most religious person in Dnepropetrovsk, arrested together with Levi Yitzchok Schneerson. The shamesh didn’t even consider the possibility of his children remaining observant. This should give you some flavor to the environment where Mendel Schneerson grew up and should also explain why after his Bar Mitzvah Mendel Schneerson had bitter arguments with his father about secular science. Something his brother Leibel took for granted becoming openly an antireligious Trotskyite and eventually a physicist in Liverpool.
Rayatz, the father-in-law: There are two contradictory periods in the relationship between the previous Rebbe the Rayatz and his son-in-law Mendel Schneerson. The Rayatz was not a scholar comparable in stature to the Rebbe’s father. The Rayatz as a leader was a poor match to the cataclysmic upheavals of that era, abandoning most of his followers first in Russia and then in Poland. If he wasn’t saved from Warsaw in 1939 by the half-Jewish Nazi officer Ernst Bloch on the orders of Admiral Canaris, things would have looked differently. The Rebbe’s father Levik was considered an insubordinate to the Royal Court by the Chabad apparatchiks, this led to the common derision towards him from the fanatical Chassidim, on occasion even confrontations.
There were two contradictory periods in the Rebbe’s relationship to Rayatz. In Europe he openly disregarded his father-in-law, his opposition to University studies, etc. Mendel Schneerson annoyed his father-in-law with modern outfits during the wedding and generally stayed the heck away from the Jews, preferring instead the enlightened capitals of Berlin and Paris. He didn’t especially shadow the Rayatz like his older brother-in-law the Rashag. But when Mendel Schneerson came to America this disregard changed to the obsessive worship that continued after the Rayatz passed away. It’s hard to figure this one out.
Wife, Musiya Schneerson: The Barry Gourary saga was already exhaustively chewed up, enough. For sure a pivotal moment involving the closest kin and the impact on the Rebbe was immense. Which brings me to the defining role of his wife Musiya Schneerson, she was your classically educated Russian lady more at home in a Salon than in a Shtible. But she was the only person with whom Menachem Mendel Schneerson could be himself, a human. I remember going through the condolences line in the 770 and the look on the Rebbe’s face was the look of a person no longer in this world. After Musiya Schneerson passed away in 1988 the wheels came off the wagon big time for the Rebbe emotionally. This was the beginning of his apocalyptic messianic outburst that outlived his physical presence. The Rebbe came apart psychologically, the broken heart love story played out on a cosmic scale.
The change we can’t believe in: There is another psychological contradiction that is the key to the understanding of his personality and ethos. He disliked any change intensely, especially after he came to America. He didn’t want a new car, new appliances in his house, bitterly opposed the community move from Crown Heights, disliked going anywhere, refused to accompany the Rayatz to Israel, even refused going to a hospital after his heart attack, more importantly he stayed uninvolved in conflicts, had a hands-off attitude towards management and governorship. I am sure this wasn’t the result of him being conservative or pious ascetic, in fact he disavowed the ascetic life in numerous speeches. This was more like a phobia, an emotional aversion to any change, an internal blockage. On the flip side of this was the messianic, let’s change every corner of the world rhetoric. I believe the two are connected. The Jungians have this idea, every person has a weak and a dominant side of personality. Often the weak side is the deeper side, connected to the subconscious. When a person evokes his weakness, he feels a high, the subterranean forces, the confrontation with the numinous. By nature the Rebbe was an introverted recluse, afraid of change and his high was talking up the visions of the grand revolutions, he was trying to overcome himself.The Life (and Death and Life) Of the Rebbe
By Allan Nadler (June 2, 2010) Source: The Forward
Most Jewish New Yorkers vividly remember the Crown Heights riots of August 1991, four horrendous days of attacks on Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jews that resulted in the brutal murder of Yaakov Rosenbaum, a young Chabad scholar from Australia. The riots were denounced as a pogrom, the first ever in the United States, by former mayor Ed Koch and then mayoral hopeful Rudy Giuliani, and were subsequently classified by historian Edward Shapiro, in his book on the riots, as the “worst anti-Semitic episode in American Jewish history.” However, what far fewer people remember about those infamous events is the particular incident that triggered the riots.
An out-of-control vehicle driven by a Chabad Hasid accidentally killed a five-year-old black child, Gavin Cato. That vehicle was part of the speeding three-car motorcade that, along with a police escort, regularly escorted the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, from Brooklyn to Queens to visit the grave of his father-in-law, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, whom the Chabad Hasidim to this day tellingly dub “der frierdiger rebbe,” the previous Rebbe, with whom he regularly “communed.”
In their lively and provocative new book, “The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson,” respected scholars Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman depict those inspirational cemetery visits, during which Schneerson clairvoyantly sought counsel from his predecessor, as a central feature of the Rebbe’s leadership when addressing problems whose resolution eluded even him. Schneerson, who had become “possessed,” after the Holocaust, by the belief that the frierdiger rebbe would not die before ushering in the messianic era, taught that he had not really died in the conventional sense and regularly told his followers that his presence was still active among them. The trips to the Queens graveyard to seek counsel from his predecessor were, indeed, the Rebbe’s only departures from his Brooklyn base over the many decades of his leadership of Chabad. In a particularly rich chapter, entitled “Death and Resurrection,” the authors document the pathos, frequency and centrality of this manner of religious leadership, one that has not only outlived Schneerson, but has taken on a life of its own (so to speak) since his death.
As the book notes, when the passing of his wife, Moussia, in 1988, plunged Schneerson into a life of profound personal isolation, those visitations became increasingly frequent. By that time, the Rebbe had thousands of worshipful followers, but not a single confidant. In the authors’ stark depiction, “There he remained, the man who was to lead the generation to redemption, all alone in the world inside his house, bereft of the last person for whom he was not just a Rebbe.”
His own failing health and desire to usher in the messianic age added to the urgency of these visits. And so, when not urging his Hasidim to chant feverishly what had become the Chabad anthem, “We want Moshiach now, we don’t want to wait”, he spent more and more hours in isolation inside the frierdiger rebbe’s mausoleum.
One of the central themes in this eye-opening account of the Rebbe’s “life and afterlife,” alluded to in the book’s subtitle, is precisely the blurring of the borders between this living world and the imagined next one, a confusion rendered all the more urgent after the Rebbe himself was silenced by a massive stroke on March 2,1992. It was an avertable tragedy that occurred, ironically enough, while he was isolated inside the frierdiker rebbe’s tomb for almost three hours. His disciples waited outside long after he audibly collapsed, afraid to disturb his seance with the dead.
The dissonance between this life and the next became positively desperate over the next two years, until his death on June 12, 1994, following a long hospitalization. After that June, the confusion became something far more extreme: the denial of Schneerson’s death and, in some circles, his deification.
In an interview conducted on Israeli television shortly before the Rebbe suffered the debilitating stroke, the towering Orthodox Israeli philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, was asked what he thought of the Rebbe’s messianism. Leibowitz’s response was characteristically comical and icy:
Chabad Lubavitch Rebbe Psychopath or Charlatan?
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