Here’s My Story: We Will Prevail
Zale Newman
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When I was thirteen, a Modern Orthodox boy studying at Toronto’s Etz Chaim school, I remember learning about Moses before he passed away. He approached G-d and said, “The people need a leader to take my role,” and so G-d told Moshe to appoint Joshua.
I can’t imagine that G-d would leave us without a leader today, I thought. So who is it?
And so, after looking around the Jewish world in the late ‘60s, I identified a number of great rabbinic leaders for the post-Holocaust generation. But only one addressed world issues, and spoke about matters pertaining to the White House, to Israel, and to every single Jew. This was the Lubavitcher Rebbe. I decided that I wanted to have some kind of relationship with him.
I began reading a weekly pamphlet that had the Rebbe’s teachings on the Torah portion. I also began writing letters to him, and I received many responses.
After graduating high school in the ‘70s, I became very involved with the National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY), an outreach program for unaffiliated Jewish teens in public schools. I also took part in a project called “Torah Tour” along with a group of storytellers and musicians. For two summers, we toured Jewish camps in Ontario and Quebec, doing kumzitz singalongs for the campers and staff, and giving out various Jewish souvenirs supplied by Chabad.
A few years later, I noticed that there weren’t any touring bands for Jewish children. So along with a few of those musicians, we created “Uncle Moishy and the Mitzvah Men,” which went on to produce 23 albums, 30 videos, and numerous world tours.
Through NCSY, I had met two music producers from New York named Suki Berry and David Golding, better known as Suki and Ding, who had made hit records for the chasidic singers Avraham Fried and Mordechai Ben David. So I gave them a call and they ended up coming to Toronto to work on the first Uncle Moishy album. We used the recording studio that belonged to Geddy Lee, a proud Jew who was also the lead singer of the Canadian rock band Rush, and the resulting Uncle Moishy album became the second bestselling Jewish music album in North American history.
Before we put the music out, we wrote to the Rebbe about the project, and he replied with a few suggestions. One of them was to make sure that the music spoke to little girls as well as boys. “Make sure that there are girls on the album cover,” he told us, “not just boys.”
But before then, in early 1978, while I was working at an NCSY retreat, I met a teacher named Rochel Hirschprung, and we got married that summer.
In the mid-eighties, my wife and I began planning to move to Israel, which had always been a dream of mine. We chose schools for our children, and I had plans to start a beginner’s minyan at the Kotel, in addition to a daily Torah study program for learning Mishna, Talmud and the works of Maimonides. My wife is a skilled social worker and therapist, so we knew she’d have work there.
I wrote an eight-page letter to the Rebbe, detailing our plans. I also wrote about all of the things I had been involved with in the Toronto community — I was on the board of this, the president of that, and was assisting various individuals — so I detailed how other people would replace me in each of these positions.
After that, Rabbi Leibel Groner, the Rebbe’s secretary, called me up.
“Please get your letter,” he instructed me, “and take out a pen.”
I took out my copy of the letter I had written and got ready to transcribe the notes the Rebbe had written on the copy I had sent to him.
“Cross out the first line,” he said. “And the second line. And the third line.”
And on it went, until the entire page was crossed out, and then almost the entire letter. He was telling me that the Rebbe had read every line and was saying, No, no, no. You should not move to Israel! He wanted me to continue my activities in Canada.
On the final page, I had mentioned a young boy and his mother — a friend of my wife’s — whom we had been in touch with. There, the Rebbe circled the boy’s name and wrote: “Bring him into the covenant of Abraham our Father.” In other words, the Rebbe was informing me that this boy, who was already nine-years-old, still hadn’t been circumcised, a critical rite of passage for every Jewish boy. Now he wanted me to make sure that this boy had a connection to Judaism — to the covenant between the Jewish people and G-d – and especially through this fundamental mitzvah.
This whole response was quite shocking, but the leader of the generation had given me a mission.
The mother and son both readily agreed. But it still wasn’t simple to accomplish because by Canadian law the father also had to sign off on a circumcision. He was estranged from his son and refused to do so.
Right around this time, the corporation I worked for suddenly asked me to head their Western Canada division, and they wanted to fly me out to Alberta — which was exactly where this mother and son lived — as soon as possible.
I flew out for Shabbat, invited the mother and son to the home of Rabbi Menachem and Rochel Matusof, who had just opened up a Chabad branch in Calgary, Alberta, and got everyone introduced. As the boy got older, he learned the Alef-Bet, and had a Bar Mitzvah. But when we wanted to take him on a trip to Israel for a few weeks in the summer, the father refused again.
After four years of this, I wrote to the Rebbe to say, “I don’t think this is going to happen.”
The Rebbe wrote back with four powerful words: “Sof sof, didan notzach — eventually, we will prevail.”
I understood that I should not be discouraged by this obstacle. We stayed the course and even went to court so that this boy could visit Israel. Together with his mom, they came to us in Toronto many times, and I took him on a couple of weeklong “Inward Bound” camping trips with a Chabad group from the Twin Cities. The mother also began a dialogue with the Rebbe, writing to him many times, and he would reply with long letters, telling her how proud he was that she was using her Hebrew name, or advising her on which profession to go into.
When this boy turned eighteen, he called me up. “I’m old enough to make my own decision now, and I’m ready to have a brit,” he told me. So he came to Toronto and my brother-in-law, a senior mohel and urological surgeon, performed the circumcision.
It was unbelievable. He eventually went to study in the Ohr Sameach yeshivah in Jerusalem for two years, and then moved in with us, while he went to school in Toronto. Thank G-d, we also helped him find a match for marriage and today, he and his wife have five children together. They are very committed Jews and are all sweeter than NutraSweet. He is a good father, a good husband, and a good Jew. The Rebbe was right: We prevailed.
Zale Newman is an educator and community activist, the former International Director of NCSY, and the founder of Bond Street Mercantile, a financial services company focusing on investment in Canada and Israel. He was interviewed in July 2025.
