80 Years After Mystic’s Passing in Kazakh Exile, His Legacy Lives On

by Dovid Margolin – chabad.org

Kazakhstan has always been the land beyond. “Alexander the Great had crossed the great Central Asian river, the Oxus, but he never penetrated into Kazakhstan,” writes the British journalist Christopher Robbins. “Marco Polo saw the country’s towering mountain peaks on his travels, but he never crossed them.”

Ruled for centuries by warring tribesmen, the territory eventually came under Czarist Russia’s control, which, in 1854, established a military outpost at the foot of the massive Tian Shan mountain range to guard the fringes of its sprawling empire, naming it Verny. It grew into a city which, together with the vast surrounding region, quickly became a favorite place for the Czars to exile their undesirables. This system was perfected by the Bolsheviks, who renamed it Alma-Ata in 1921. In his Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that at one point during the Stalinist era, exiles and prisoners of the Gulag labor camp system made up half of Kazakhstan’s population.

It was there that the great mystic, Kabbalist and Halachic authority Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, father of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, was sent by Soviet authorities, and there that he passed away 80 years ago, on 20 Av, 5704 (1944). In honor of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s 80th yahrtzeit this weekend, thousands of travelers and locals are converging on Alma-Ata, today known as Almaty, to visit and pray at his holy resting place.

“The Rebbe’s father suffered tremendously when he was here, in exile, just him and the Rebbe’s mother, Rebbetzin Chana, alone,” explains Rabbi Yeshaya Cohen, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Kazakhstan and the country’s chief rabbi since 1994. “Coming here to honor Rabbi Levi Yitzchak is a way of saying his sacrifice was not forgotten, to thank him for everything that he gave us, most of all for his son, our Rebbe.”

“We have guests who come here from all over the world, and it always reminds us that we are really one big Jewish family,” says Albert (Shlomo) Shimoni, president of the Jewish community of Almaty. “Jews from America, from Europe, from Israel and from Kazakhstan are all connected, a connection made visible through Rabbi Levi Yitzchak.”

‘Sacrificed His Very Life’

Born in 1878, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak became the chief rabbi of Yekaterinoslav, Ukraine, in 1909, leading the community, together with his wife, Rebbitizin Chana, for three decades. With the onset of Communism and the establishment of the Soviet Union, Jewish religious life came under sustained attack, but Rabbi Levi Yitzchak continued his work unabated and unafraid. (Yekaterinoslav was renamed Dnepropertovsk in 1926, and more recently, Dnipro). Following the departure from the USSR of the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, in the aftermath of his 1927 arrest, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak became the preeminent Jewish religious leader in the Soviet Union.

“My father remained the only direct descendant of the first Chabad Rebbes to assume responsibility for disseminating Judaism in Soviet Russia, becoming, in effect, the spiritual leader of that country,” Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s son, the Rebbe, explained on one occasion. “Jews turned to him for advice and guidance in serving G‑d. In the end, my father sacrificed his very life for upholding this spiritual mission.”

Around 3 o’clock on March 29, 1939, agents of Stalin’s secret police, then known as the NKVD, arrested Rabbi Levi Yitzchak. After months of imprisonment and brutal interrogations, he was sentenced to five years of exile in barren, distant Kazakhstan. The authorities wanted to ensure he would have no further impact on his fellow Jews, and so dispatched him to the tiny village of Chi’li (Shieli) in Kzyl-Orda province deep on the Kazakh steppe. There he was joined by his devoted wife, Rebbetzin Chana. In 1944, with the help of devoted followers who supplied authorities with substantial bribes, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was finally allowed to relocate to Alma-Ata, a bigger city with a semblance of Jewish life. The couple arrived there just after Passover, but by this time Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was gravely ill, and these proved to be the last months of life. On 20 Av, during the waning heat of August, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak passed away and was buried in the Jewish section of Alma-Ata’s cemetery.

Though Rabbi Levi Yitzchak spent very little time in Alma-Ata, his impact on the local Jewish population was inestimable. He never left his city of exile, where he remains to this day. In the 80 years since his passing not only has the fire of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s spirit not been forgotten, it has only grown brighter—both in Almaty and around the world.

‘They Are Our Family’

Rabbi Yeshaya Cohen first arrived in Almaty on Passover of 1994. The Rebbe was ill at the time, and Cohen and a friend resolved to open a new Chabad center in the Rebbe’s merit. They pulled out an atlas, marked the countries with an existing Chabad presence, and noticed a massive tract of land in Central Asia without one.

“I knew of Almaty, of course, as the place where the Rebbe’s parents had been, but I didn’t even know what country it was,” Cohen recalls. “That’s when I learned it was called Kazakhstan.”

The trek to Almaty is arduous even today, forget about the post-Soviet 1990s. Cohen’s itinerary took him from New York to Moscow, there to Tashkent, and Tashkent to Almaty. Upon arrival, he headed to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s resting place and resolved to remain in Kazakhstan until the coming of Moshiach.

Difficulties abounded. Obtaining kosher food was difficult, some items impossible, and the level of Jewish knowledge among many of the local Jews was little even compared with other parts of the former Soviet Union. The first Jews to arrive in what became Almaty had been Cantonists, Jewish boys snatched away from their families at young ages and forced into 25 years of compulsory service in the Czar’s military. They were later followed by Soviet Jewish engineers and professionals sent to help build the city, exiles and then, during World War II, Jewish refugees, 200,000 of whom found a temporary haven in Kazakhstan.

Still, besides pockets of organized Jewish life, Almaty never had any formal Jewish community and infrastructure. Indeed, when Cohen petitioned the government to formally return the incorporated Jewish community to the Jews of Almaty, the organization he was granted—the Jewish Religious Community of Alma-Ata—was the one originally established by the Cantonists.

And there were successes as well. That first summer they opened Camp Gan Israel of Kazakhstan, and 25 Jewish boys entered the covenant of Abraham by having a brit milah. “The Jews here had a tradition of doing whatever they knew, but they just didn’t know very much,” Cohen explains. “One young Jewish man here was asked why he had changed so much and become observant. He answered, ‘I did not change at all. I always did what I knew, but before I didn’t know enough about Judaism. Now that I come to synagogue and learn I know more, so I fulfill that.’”

After that first summer, Cohen married his wife, Chana, and the couple returned to Almaty in the spring of 1995. Two years later they were joined by Cohen’s younger brother, Rabbi Elchonon Cohen, a trained mohel, who directs Chabad of Almaty today. Three decades later, there are 12 Chabad emissary couples in Kazakhstan, with centers in Almaty as well as in Pavlodar, Astana, Kostanay, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Karaganda and Shymkent, where a brand new mikvah opened earlier this summer.

Albert Shimoni, the community’s president, is himself a good example of the story and trajectory of Kazakhstan’s Jews. Born in Almaty in 1971, Shimoni is ethnically an Iranian Jew, a descendant of migrants who had settled in Georgia in the early Soviet period. On one winter night in 1950, Stalin had this entire community arrested and deported to Kazakhstan, many of them dying along the way. When they arrived in Almaty, the temperature was 58 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

“Growing up, our community was very dedicated to Judaism, and we did as much as we knew,” he explains. One towering figure on the Jewish scene was Rabbi Hillel Liberow, a Lubavitcher Chassid who arrived in Alma-Ata in 1944 and served the community as a shochet and rabbinical leader until his passing in 1982, never leaving his responsibilities there. Those were Soviet times, of course, when Jewish life was persecuted by the government, but Liberow kept the embers burning. “I remember Rav Hillel, he was very central to the survival of our community here.”

Communism fell in 1991, and with the formal opening of Chabad three years later, the face of Judaism in Almaty and Kazakhstan in general changed forever. “That’s when the spiritual revolution here began,” says Shimoni. He began attending Chabad right from the start. His father had passed away earlier that year, and he was saying kaddish, but the synagogue was open only once a week, on Shabbat. When Cohen arrived and revitalized the synagogue, Shimoni started coming every day. He’s never looked back.

“My wife was educated in Chabad’s Jewish school here, our family has grown closer to our heritage in every single way. And not only our family; there are hundreds,” he says. “What we learned with Rav Yeshaya and with all of the shluchim [emissaries] of the Rebbe is that a rabbi does not only do ceremonials. They are involved with every part of life, from medicine to education to personal issues, the sad occasions and, G‑d willing, the happy ones. They are not our rabbi and rebbetzin; they are our family.”

Shimoni notes that one of the emissaries in the city, Rabbi Saadia Liberow, is a great-nephew of Rav Hillel’s, thus connecting generations of Kazakh Jewry.

That the Rebbe’s father was buried blocks away from where he grew up, he did not know until after the end of the Soviet era. It had been a place closely watched by the KGB, and known only to a small number of people. Nevertheless, he believes that the existence of so great a spiritual magnet in their midst has served both Almaty’s Jews as well as the country at large in good stead. “Look, even today, there are wars, or were wars in every part of the former Soviet Union, but for Kazakhstan,” he says. “Here we have peace and tolerance, we have a growing economy and a bright future. I am sure this is due to Rav Levi Yitzchak’s presence here.”

Honoring the Rebbe and his Father

When Rabbi Levi Yitzchak passed away in 1944, there wasn’t even a mikvah for those participating in his funeral to immerse themselves in. The closest body of water they could use was a dangerously rapid mountain river, known as an aryk in Kazakh. The first mikvah built in Alma-Ata was the one constructed illegally circa 1958 by Reb Yosef Neymotin, a Chabad Chassid who’d recently returned from serving six years in the Gulags. It was hidden under the floorboards of his home, and he maintained it for decades. The first legal mikvah was built by Cohen in 1998, a beautiful tiled pool located on Chabad’s central campus just a few blocks away from Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s resting place.

Cohen says that building a new mikvah was one of his first goals when he arrived in Almaty, but the old and decrepit existing synagogue, really just a small wooden house, did not even have the sewer access to make it possible. A new synagogue was needed. In 1996 he petitioned the city to grant the Jewish community land to build a new center. That year, on 3 Tammuz, the anniversary of the Rebbe’s passing, he visited the Ohel, the Rebbe’s resting place in New York, and asked for a blessing for success, vowing to make a groundbreaking by 20 Av.

He was still in New York when he received a call from Almaty: The municipality was offering them a choice of three different locations in the city for a new Jewish center. Looking at a map, Cohen realized one of them was within a kilometer of the entrance to the cemetery where Rabbi Levi Yitzchak is buried. “I knew right away that this was to be our place,” he says. “What greater thing could we do for the Rebbe, for Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, than build a place of Jewish life nearly within eyeshot of where he was buried in a place devoid of Judaism, in the place of his exile?”

The groundbreaking did indeed take place later that year. Aside from the mikvah, the complex’s multiple buildings host a synagogue, kitchen and dining hall, preschool and extensive lodging for the many visitors, both from within Kazakhstan and abroad, who come to this holy place.

Close to 1,000 Jews are visiting Almaty this weekend to pay their respects to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, whose burial place was named a Kazakh National Heritage site in 2020. “It is a tremendous merit for us to host all of these visitors,” explains Cohen. “It has a very big impact on all of us here, on the Jewish community, and Kazakhstan at large. It is invigorating to see so many people travel across the world not for themselves, not for business, but for the simple reason of honoring the Rebbe and his father.”

“I believe that all the Jews of the Soviet Union are the spiritual descendants of the Rebbe,” says Shimoni. “Here we have the extra merit of being connected with the Rebbe’s father, of having this direct familial connection. We, like Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, did not come here of our own volition, but we are carrying on his work of bringing the redemption of Moshiach in this corner of the world.”

“My father passed away and is buried specifically in his place of exile,” the Rebbe noted in 1991. “For it is specifically from the very lowest of places that the greatest heights are reached, symbolizing the completion of his lifework in a way of everlasting impact.”