Here’s My Story: That’s What Made Me A Chabadnik

Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt

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My mother fled from Germany to Argentina in 1940, and my father arrived there after the war, as a survivor of the Nazi labor camps. In Argentina they met and married and, although it wasn’t common there in those years, they built a traditionally observant Jewish home together.

My brother and I went to the Chofetz Chaim school in Buenos Aires, and attended Ezra, a religious youth group. Growing up at home, I would hear about different chasidic streams — like Karlin, Lizhensk, and so on — but the first time I heard about Chabad was at a Passover Seder, when I was eleven or so. My parents used to invite guests who didn’t have a Seder of their own, including non-observant people, and someone remarked that “Lubavitcher chasidim know how to talk to the non-religious, and to bring them closer to Judaism.” This, I understood, was what made Lubavitch unique.

The next year at school, I began studying with Rabbi Berel Baumgarten, who had moved to Argentina as an emissary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe about ten years before and was teaching at my school. It was 1967, before the Six Day War, and I remember how worried everyone was for Israel. They thought there was going to be another Holocaust, G-d forbid, and they wanted to do something to help. Rabbi Baumgarten spoke to us about the tefillin campaign the Rebbe had recently launched.

“For every Jew who puts on tefillin,” he said, “there’s a soldier in Israel being protected.”

When I heard, as a twelve-year-old, that a great Jewish leader had come out with such a clear message — there was something we could do, and the way to have an impact is through Torah and mitzvot — it ignited a fire in me. Together with a friend, I began going out every Sunday to help other Jews put on tefillin. This was my first real connection to the activities of Lubavitch.

A couple of years later, I was in high school, studying secular subjects in the morning and learning Torah with Rabbi Baumgarten in the afternoons. I really wanted to learn Jewish subjects for the entire day but my mother very much wanted me to finish high school. Leaving high school seemed impossible, but something pushed me to ask the Rebbe about it — I had a sense that he was someone that even a fourteen-year-old boy from Argentina could write to. So without telling my parents or Rabbi Baumgarten, I went to the post office and mailed off a letter to the Rebbe.

A month later, I got an answer, signed personally by the Rebbe. He didn’t mention anything about leaving school. He just encouraged me to be diligent in my fulfillment of the mitzvot, to “increase in the diligent study of Torah,” and to recite the daily portion of Psalms every morning after prayers. “This is the way to receive blessings in what you need,” he concluded.

I’m not sure how it happened, but by the end of the year, my parents decided to give me permission to go to yeshivah full time. My uncle went to New York to find a suitable place for me, accompanied by Rabbi Baumgarten. Initially, my father had them visit a few Hungarian-style yeshivas. But those charged high tuition and had all kinds of conditions and concerns about taking in a young boy from Argentina. When my uncle and Rabbi Baumgarten went to Crown Heights, the Lubavitcher yeshivah saw a boy who wanted to learn Torah, and decided to take me in without any conditions.

I arrived as an outsider, as someone with an appreciation for Chabad and its outreach work, but with a different background and a different set of customs. I would have remained that way, if I hadn’t started learning Chasidut. There, I discovered a new world and began to appreciate a new dimension of Judaism. That was what made me into a Chabadnik. I also began to attend the Rebbe’s farbrengens, and although I didn’t understand everything he said, I felt the atmosphere right away: It was like being in a world of spirituality.

Eight years passed, and I was still studying in 770, when Rabbi Baumgarten passed away. Rabbi Hodakov, the Rebbe’s secretary, called me and another Argentine yeshivah student to his office. He said that the Rebbe wanted us to contact the community in Argentina to find out the activities Rabbi Baumgarten had been involved in. Passover was two months away, so he especially wanted to see what had to be arranged to make sure that everybody had matzah.

Rabbi Hodakov also said that the community in Argentina should advise as to who should take over Rabbi Baumgarten’s place. They soon suggested me, so Rabbi Hodakov advised me to write to the Rebbe if I felt ready to accept the offer.

“If the Rebbe thinks that I am appropriate for this position and if this is the Rebbe’s will,” I wrote to him in a letter, then I was ready to devote myself to the position.

In reply, the Rebbe circled the part about being fit for the position, indicating his approval, and added: “Find a shidduch, and then go on shlichut.” First I had to get married, and then I could become an emissary.
Not long after that, a matchmaker suggested the name of my wife, Shterna Kazarnovsky, and we became engaged before Passover. The Rebbe sent me back to Argentina for the holiday, and after our wedding that summer, my wife and I had a brief audience with the Rebbe where we received his blessings and encouragement. We were still very young — I was twenty-three, my wife nineteen — but we were now emissaries of the Rebbe.

In those days, the Jewish community in Argentina was very warm, but there was a lot of ignorance about traditional religious observance. So we worked hard to promote Torah and mitzvot in the Jewish schools of Buenos Aires as well as in the provinces. We distributed matzot, we set up sukkot in the schools, and in 1980 we held a parade on Lag B’Omer for a thousand Jewish children.

People didn’t always recognize the work we were doing, however, which sometimes bothered me. A few years after we arrived in Argentina, there was a meeting of the religious members of AMIA (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina), a local communal organization. They were worried about assimilation among the Jews of Argentina, and a very prominent member of the group remarked that “nobody is doing anything about it!”

The next time I sent a report to the Rebbe describing all of our activities, I mentioned this incident, and how dispiriting that comment had been. “How could anyone say that nobody is doing anything?” I wrote. “We are doing so much!”

In his reply, the Rebbe addressed only this point, expressing his surprise that it had made me feel so down. “It is almost certain,” he wrote, that the reason they have woken up to the issue of assimilation is because they are “envious of your work. And this is easy to understand.”

In the years since we moved to Argentina, Chabad has had an impact on the entire Jewish community there, and others have adopted our approach to outreach — which I understand as a sign that we are on the right path. That is what the Rebbe was telling me: Instead of feeling bad that our work isn’t being recognized, I should recognize that others are being inspired by our efforts.

Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt is the director of Chabad in Argentina, which today includes approximately sixty institutions across the country. He was interviewed in October 2016 and November 2024.