The House to Where the Previous Rebbe was Exiled

Tonight the 12th of Tammuz is the birthday the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn of Lubavitch (1880-1950). This is also the day on which he was liberated from exile to the Soviet gulag 47 years later.

On this day he was officially granted release from his sentence of exile to Kastroma in the interior of Russia.

More in the Extended Article!

Twenty-seven days earlier, the Rebbe had been arrested by agents of the GPU and the Yevsektzia (“Jewish Section” of the Communist Party) for his activities to preserve Judaism throughout the Soviet empire and sentenced to death, G-d forbid. International pressure forced the Soviets to commute the sentence to exile and, subsequently, to release him completely. The actual release took place on Tammuz 13, and Tammuz 12-13 is celebrated as a “festival of liberation” by the Chabad-Lubavitch community. (Chabad.org)

In honor of this day we are posting, for the first time, a rare picture of the house that the Rebbe resided in Kostrama. Residing with the Rebbe in this house were his son-in-law Rabbi Shmaryahu Gurary, Rabbi Eliyahu Chaim Althaus (a close frind of Beis Horav) and the Rebbe’s daughter Rebetzin Chaya Mushka obm.

The house was destroyed 40 years ago. It was situated on 3 Nikotaskia St. in Kostrama. Rabbi Nisson Ruppo, the shaliach in Kostrama today who sent the picture to Shturem received it from the grandaughter of the Shochet Rabbi Yerachmiel Kugel in whose house the Rebbe stayed then.

Rabbi Kugel’s daughter, Mrs. Rosa Melamed, who is still alive today (she is 92 years old) says she found the picture many years later and in 1927 when the Rebbe stayed at their house she was a girl of 12 years old. But she still remembers very vividly the Rebbe, his family and chasidim.

Mrs. Melamed told Shturem.net: “I remember when the Previous Rebbe arrived in Kostrama there was much excitiment in the town. Even non-Jews came out to greet this ”divine man.“ I remember people standing on the rooftops and fences. Our house hosted the Rebbe and his entrouge. We had a big house and the Rebbe was given a special room there.

”I even remember how all the Jews wanted to see the Rebbe and one even managed to have a “yechidus” with him. Following his release on Gimmel Tamuz he was granted a large compartment in the train that brought him to Kostrama. Later the KGB interrogated my father about his hosting the Rebbe and his entrouge. The interrogation appears in the files of the KGB, and he was “punished” for it and sent to exile in Siberia for 10 years.“

Mrs. Melamed also spoke of life under the Communist regime: ”My father was a Lubavitcher chosid, a Shochet and Mohel by profession who was sought out often by Jews in Leningrad and Moscow to perform a Bris. When they closed down the shul in the city the services took place in our house despite the fact that they confiscated the Sifrei Torah.”

KGB files dealing with the Rebbe in Kostrama

Rabbi Yerachmiel Kugel, the shochet in whose house the Rebbe resided while in Kostrama

The house in Kostrama where the Rebbe resided