Here’s My Story: The Accidental Interpreter

Rabbi Noson Grunblatt

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In the late ‘60s, my father served as the president of Achdut Israel, the German-Jewish community in Buenos Aires, where we lived.

Together with my mother, he had a business working with the art departments of various advertising agencies in Argentina. In the days when artists still worked with ink and paper, annual collections showcasing the best advertisements of the previous year would be published in countries around the world, so that people in the industry could follow the latest trends and innovations. My parents used to get these imported books from Europe and then go from agency to agency, selling them to their art departments.

very morning, my father would load up those books and various design samples and models in the back of our car. He’d drive to the center of town, and stay with the car — there was never any parking available — while my mother went to meet with different art directors and designers.

Now, Argentina’s economic and financial history has always been like a carousel, constantly going up and down. In 1971, the government was trying to fix its economic problems, when one day, they suddenly decided to stop importing all goods into the country. So the next day, my parents had nothing to sell.

They waited a little, but there still was no forecast for when imports would open up again. A few weeks passed, and still no change was on the horizon. And so, although he was not a chasid at the time, my father wrote to the Rebbe, introducing himself, and explaining how he and my mother had found themselves with no livelihood.

Sometime before all of this happened, my parents had traveled to Israel. They had seen an apartment for sale in a building that also had a storefront available for rent on the ground floor. And so he wrote in his letter that maybe it was time for our family to move to Israel: “We’ll buy the apartment, rent the store, and I’ll put a grocery in there,” he proposed. “I will be able to pray with a minyan three times a day, study Torah, and settle down.”

He didn’t realize that since he had mentioned his role as the Achdut Israel community president, there was no way that the Rebbe would approve of his plan to leave the country.

He sent the letter off. A month passed, then two, and then three — but there was no answer. Every so often, he would call the Rebbe’s secretaries, yet six months passed and there was still no answer.

One day, the telephone rang. It was the Rebbe’s secretary who said that the Rebbe had answered and that he would deliver the message over the phone. “No, not at this time,” the Rebbe had said, adding that he would keep my father in his prayers.
The day after that phone call, Argentina opened its doors to imports once again. Apparently the Rebbe knew when to answer.
We came to learn something else about the Rebbe’s attitude towards communal work: If you tell the Rebbe that you are an important part of the community, he will not agree for you to leave it.

In the mid-’70s, on a rare trip to New York, my parents had a private audience with the Rebbe. This was after I had already left Argentina to further my studies; first in the Lubavitcher yeshivah on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, then in Morristown, New Jersey, and then in Jerusalem. Back in Argentina, various people had asked my mother to request the Rebbe’s blessings on their behalf, so she had prepared a long note with the names of each person, and the question or issues each person wanted her to ask the Rebbe about.

These audiences were normally very short, as there were countless people who wanted to meet the Rebbe. When Rabbi Leibel Groner, the Rebbe’s secretary, saw the size of her note, he didn’t allow her to bring it in: “Just write their name, and nothing more,” he instructed her. It would be too taxing on the Rebbe’s time to go through so many issues.

Now, my mother was German, and so when she received an order, she followed it. She rewrote her note. When my parents went into the Rebbe’s room, she asked if they could speak in German, to which the Rebbe agreed — “Sicher” he said — and she gave him the note.

The Rebbe took a look at the first name. “What’s this person’s story?” he asked.

My mother explained what the issue was, and then the Rebbe instructed her on how the person ought to deal with it.

Then he went on to the second name: “And what’s with —?”

By this time, the audience was already taking longer than usual, and Rabbi Groner was getting nervous. He began turning the door handle as a signal to my parents, but of course they weren’t going to get up and leave while the Rebbe was talking to them. Rabbi Groner opened the door and walked into the center of the room, but the Rebbe gestured for him to leave, continuing on to ask about each name, “What’s with him? What’s with her?” — until the Rebbe had asked about every single name on the list.

In 1980, my wife and I had only been married half a year when we had our first audience with the Rebbe. There was a huge crowd that traveled to spend the Tishrei holidays with the Rebbe that year, and the Rebbe had personal audiences with the visitors for three nights in a row.

On the second night, I was asked to go along and translate for a Sephardic lady from Argentina who was afraid that she wouldn’t understand the Rebbe.

The woman wrote a note with a question about some medical issue, and at the bottom of the paper I wrote why I had come with her. The Rebbe read the note, and then spoke to me, in Yiddish, advising her to do so-and-so.

I had intended to translate after the audience, but instead the Rebbe stopped and looked at me expectantly: “Presumably you’re going to translate…”

I hadn’t dreamed that I would be translating the Rebbe’s words right in front of him, so I tried to think of a clever way to get out of this stressful situation. “Now or later?” I queried.

“Now!” replied the Rebbe, raising both hands.

I had no choice. Shielding my mouth with my hand, I turned to the lady and told her that the Rebbe had said to do so-and-so.
But she was of a different opinion. “No,” she said. “What about this-and-that?”

“My G-d,” I thought. Now I had to turn around and tell this to the Rebbe.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” replied the Rebbe, once I had translated, and then he repeated his advice.

Once again, I put up my hand to my mouth, and translated, before adding “— and stop arguing!”

Once the Rebbe saw that everything was quiet, he took a dollar out of his drawer and gave it to the woman for her to give to charity after traveling home, and then he gave another one to me.

The next day, I came back, together with my wife, for our audience. The Rebbe gave us a beautiful blessing but before that, as we came into the room, he looked at us and asked: “Do both of you understand Yiddish?”

Later on, I thought about this question: Obviously he hadn’t forgotten that I know the language — I served as the translator just the day before. He wanted to know whether my wife spoke Yiddish. But since asking her directly might make her feel uncomfortable, he asked whether we both understood.

Rabbi Noson Grunblatt is the director of Editorial Kehot Lubavitch Sudamericana, the Chabad publishing house in Argentina for Spanish-language material, and he has worked as a translator and publisher of Jewish literature for over 40 years. He was interviewed in November 2025.