Here’s My Story: The Week of My Wedding

Rabbi Yehuda Leib Dubov

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In 1947, when I was twenty-one, I came to New York from England because I wanted to learn Torah in the yeshivah of the Previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn.

I arrived just before Shavout and, shortly after the holiday, I had my first private audience with the Previous Rebbe, who was in very frail health by then. I don’t remember much from that meeting, but I do vividly recall one piece of advice he gave to me. He said that the focus of both my spiritual and material life must be kabbalat ol, the acceptance of the yoke of the Torah’s commandments, and that I would learn the full meaning of kabbalat ol from my teachers in yeshivah. This I remember till this very day.

At that time, I did not meet Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — the Rebbe’s son-in-law, who four years later would become the Rebbe — because he had gone to Europe to meet his mother. She had just arrived in Paris after having fled the Soviet Union, and he went to escort her to the United States. When they arrived, I was there at the port with a group of people who greeted them as they disembarked from the ship, and he spoke to me for the first time then, identifying me as the son of Rabbi Yitzchok Dubov, with whom he had maintained a regular correspondence.

Subsequently, much of my communication with the Previous Rebbe was through the future Rebbe, who was referred to as the Ramash at the time.

He was the head of the Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, Chabad’s educational outreach arm, and although he was very busy, he made himself very accessible to us — we could come up to him and ask him anything we wanted. We would ask him about Yiddishkeit, about Jewish law or Jewish customs, and even about politics — he was always willing to engage.

I’ll never forget the time when one of the older students, Berel Chaskind, asked him why we needed Russia in the world — what was the value of Russian communism? His answer was very insightful. He said that in America, we are focused on possessions — we must have a house, a car, a refrigerator, this and that. In Russia, you don’t care about accumulating possessions because you are just satisfied with your existence. This goes to show that in the world there must be opposites, and that this is part of G-d’s plan for creation.

We all understood that he was a person of great intelligence and vast Torah knowledge, and we saw that he worked very hard and had many responsibilities. One of these was publishing Torah books — seforim — and I heard him say that before the Previous Rebbe came to America, there were few Lubavitcher seforim. There was no Siddur, no Selichot, only incomplete Machzorim, and little by little he published everything, with annotations regarding our customs. He also began to publish the discourses of the Previous Rebbe, which were voluminous.

The respect he had for the Previous Rebbe was enormous. Just to give a personal example: The Previous Rebbe gave me a blessing to become a shochet, a kosher ritual slaughterer, or a mohel, who performs circumcisions. I became a shochet, but the income from this was minimal, and I asked him later, when he became the Rebbe, if I should change my profession. His answer was: “If my father-in-law told you to become a shochet, that’s what you must be.” In other words, there was nothing discuss. I did that work for twenty-five years, teaching a little on the side to make ends meet, and then I became a mohel.

In 1950, I got married — it was on Wednesday, January 25th. Officiating at our wedding, as per the existing custom, was the older son-in-law of the Previous Rebbe, Rabbi Shemaryahu Gurary, known as the Rashag, with the Ramash reciting the first two blessings under the chuppah. He left early because he had a standing lesson every Wednesday night and every Friday night with the Previous Rebbe which he would not miss.

Three days later — on Yud Shevat, which was Shabbat, January 28th — the Previous Rebbe passed away.
During the week of shivah, after the morning prayers, the Ramash used to tell a short story from the life of the Previous Rebbe. He did that multiple times. Then when the week was over, everyone went to the Ohel, the Rebbe’s gravesite. The Maaneh Lashon book — which contains passages from the Zohar as well as certain psalms which are customarily recited at the gravesite of a tzaddik — was not yet printed, and people didn’t know what prayers to say. So the Ramash told everyone to recite psalms and said he would recite the passages from the Zohar. But there was no copy of the Zohar around, so he did it from memory. This I witnessed and remember distinctly.

A few days before that, during the week of shivah, he had also gone to Ohel with a large group of chasidim; among them was my father, who had come for my wedding and stayed for the funeral and shivah. Now my father had a straightforward way of speaking, of coming directly to the point not always diplomatically, and I heard him say to the Ramash, “Now you have to take over.” I then heard the future Rebbe answer, “How can I take over if he’s still living?” To which my father replied, “This applies to all the Rebbeim,” meaning they are all living in a spiritual sense, “but we need a Rebbe we can converse with.”
There the conversation ended, and I had the impression that nothing more needed to be said — that each understood the other’s meaning.

The Ramash did not formally take over for a year. During that year, many people pressed him to assume the mantle of leadership and become the Rebbe, but he always replied, “In the past I would converse with the chasidim and the yeshivah students, and I will keep doing that.”

What caused him to relent? So many things happened during that year, but what stands out in my memory is the day — on the first anniversary of the Previous Rebbe’s passing — when Rabbi Shlomo Aharon Kazarnovsky submitted to him a three-page list of all the chasidim who wanted him to be the next Rebbe. That day, he went to the Ohel, and I witnessed him crying bitterly. And then he accepted the leadership upon himself.

Rabbi Yehuda Leib Dubov, a shochet and a mohel, who was a long-time resident of Crown Heights, passed away in July 2017. He was interviewed in December 2001 and August 2011.