Here’s My Story: The Hallway Was His Classroom

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Munitz

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As a boy back in Russia, my father, Rabbi Yisroel Meir Munitz, would study Torah very diligently, and every Thursday night — even before his Bar Mitzvah — he would study all night. One Thursday, he had a headache and couldn’t concentrate, so he decided to go home from the study hall. It was a cold winter night, and on his way home, he heard singing; he was passing by a gathering of chasidim celebrating the Chabad holiday of Yud-Tes Kislev. He decided to go inside, and as he would often say, once he entered, he never left.

He became a real chasid, studying Chabad teachings, and praying at great length, and he even taught Torah to children when it was against Soviet law.

At one point, after a close call with the KGB while teaching Torah, he and his friends resolved to one day open a yeshivah of their own. And in the 1950s, once they were living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, they did.

Oholei Torah, as it was called, started off in the home of one of those friends, Reb Elya Chaim Roitblat, who taught alongside my father, while the other friend, Reb Michoel Teitelbaum, took care of the administration.

I was born a little before this, though, in 1951. We were still living in the Lower East Side, but for the brit, my father wanted to bring me to Crown Heights. That way, the Rebbe — who had only recently assumed the position — could serve in the honorary role of sandek, by holding me during the ceremony. My father wanted to name me after the Previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, as well as after a relative whose name was Yosef.

At a farbrengen just before the brit, my father asked the Rebbe whether it is proper to also have this relative in mind while giving me the Previous Rebbe’s name.

The Rebbe replied that “the name of a tzaddik,” meaning a truly saintly figure like the Previous Rebbe, “should not be mixed with those of other people.”

Later, it emerged that this long-lost relative was actually alive — which was another reason, according to our tradition, not to name me after him!

By the day of the brit, my mother still wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t travel to Crown Heights, so it took place in the Lower East Side, and the Rebbe sent three yeshivah students to represent him at the event. As they were emerging from the subway on their way back, they saw the Rebbe coming out of 770.

“Are you coming from the brit?” the Rebbe inquired.

“What is the name?”

“Yosef Yitzchok,” they replied.

“The name of a tzaddik,” remarked the Rebbe.

When we moved to Crown Heights, we lived in an apartment on New York Avenue — just down the road from where the Rebbe and his wife lived at the time. As children, we tried to figure out the time that the Rebbe would be walking to 770 in the morning, and we would wave to him as he walked by. The Rebbe would make sure to look up at us and wave back.

Before my Bar Mitzvah, I had a special audience with the Rebbe, along with my father, and after that, I would have an audience with the Rebbe each year on my birthday. The custom was that you would write a note with anything you wanted to say, and when you came to the Rebbe, he would read it, and, almost at the same time, respond to everything you had written. One year, while reading in my note that I was turning 17, he took a pen, circled my age, and wrote “tov.” That is to say, the Hebrew word for “good” has the numerical value of 17. As he gave me a blessing for the year ahead, with a small smile, he picked up the paper and showed me what he had written.

When my father started to get too old to keep teaching in Oholei Torah, the school was planning to suggest that he retire. But when they wrote to the Rebbe about it, he replied that it would be worth keeping my father there, if only for the students to see his face in the hallway.

And so, my father was given the responsibility of sitting in the school hallway — and any kids who were misbehaving in class would go out and spend time with him. I later heard from many Oholei Torah students that they would try to get sent out of class so that they could study together with my father — especially when they had a test coming up!

In the late ‘70s, I moved to Pittsburgh to serve as a Chabad emissary under the direction of Rabbi Sholom Posner, who founded the local Chabad yeshivah. It was just after my father had passed away, and he took me in like his own son.

At first, we moved into a house that had belonged to one of the teachers in the local school and was being sold. It was barely livable; there were broken windows and doors, and the heat didn’t work. It was so freezing in the winter that we had to move out, but the search for a replacement was difficult. When we did find something that we could afford, I didn’t know if it would be large enough for our family.

So I wrote a letter about the apartment to the Rebbe, to which he replied: “As is well known — it is preferable to buy.”

I could barely afford the rent, and now the Rebbe was telling me to buy a home! When I got the reply, I ran straight to Rabbi Posner. “How could I possibly do this?!”

“The Rebbe said to buy a house,” Rabbi Posner replied. “So find a house that is for sale, and you will buy it.”

But when I found one, the price was exorbitant — there was no way I could afford it — and so I went back to Rabbi Posner. That’s when he told me, “I’ve bought much larger properties without any money.”

Rabbi Posner knew some of the members of the local Federation who might be open to supporting a community educator, and he advised me to approach them. “But if you ask for a thousand dollars, they’ll only give a hundred. Ask for ten thousand.”

I thought that was too much, so I only asked the Federation for seven — and they gave me all seven.
“You should have asked for twenty-five!” Rabbi Posner chided me.

Eventually, a free loan society in Crown Heights gave me enough money to cover the rest, and the Jewish owners of the house agreed to let me rent the house until I had done so.

And so, as impossible as it had seemed when the Rebbe first raised the idea, we ended up buying the house and living there for nineteen years, until we moved to open the Mesivta Menachem yeshivah in Buffalo, New York. Along the way, Rabbi Posner taught me a lesson: When the Rebbe tells you to do something, you do it! You’re worried about material considerations? You don’t have enough money? Worry about those things later — G-d will help.

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Munitz is a mashpia (chasidic mentor) in the local community and a part-time teacher in the Ohr Temimim yeshivah of Buffalo. He was interviewed in June 2025.