An Interview With Professor Herman Branover OBM

From the book of Rabbi Chaim Dalfin, Conversations with the Rebbe, JEP Press, 1995. Available at rabbidalfin.com

An Interview With Professor Herman Branover, Chasidic Scientist

World Renowned Scientist Beersheva University, Founder SATEC Industrial Company

CD: Professor Branover, your known as a world renowned scientist, a Refusenik and a Chasid. Can you describe the history of your path, your parents? What was it within you that got you searching for Yiddishkeit?

HB: I was born in Riga, Latvia in 1931.  My education was mainly in Leningrad, now called Petersburg.  I went back to Riga for the summers. My family was absolutely assimilated. My father was a atheist. He was killed right after the beginning of the Second World War, in 1941.

My grandfather used to take me to shul for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Pesach, that’s all.  I really had no exposure. There was no such thing as conservative and reform, but the house wasn’t kosher.  He wouldn’t let pork into the house, he tried not to actually work on Shabbos, but the fine points weren’t there. In his childhood he attended a Talmud Torah. I was educated in Soviet schools and Soviet University, so I was also atheistic. I began my search for G-d when one day I was beaten up in the street, I was treated to all kinds of unpleasant words, and I suddenly felt that I was different.  I couldn’t make peace with the fact that I am different and therefore I have to suffer.  There had to be a reason why.

It was 1948 and I had just become a student and the anti-Semitism  was intense under Stalin.  I wanted to know why I was treated so badly.  For many years I couldn’t find an answer. If someone knew, they wouldn’t tell, for fear of Siberia or something worse than Siberia. I studied by myself.  I found a Siddur with Russian translation, so old-fashioned I couldn’t understand the Russian.

As time went on I was involved in sensitive research, including military. In those circles it was very dangerous to be curious about Judaism, even though it was fifteen years after Stalin.  This was the 60’s and it was Brezhnev.

I started going to shul on Shabbos morning.  There is one shul in Riga which had survived Hitler and Stalin.  There was an upstairs shul, and in the basement,  Chassidim davened.  I went to the Chassidim, not because I had the slightest idea of what it meant, but because I felt safer, with less chance of being seen. One Shabbos morning I got a visitor in my corner of the shul, and he scared me to death because he told me he knows I am interested in Yiddishkeit. That was the first Chabad Chassid I met.

Later I went to his home, and I started for myself a new world.  He surprised me with all kinds of discourses about space and time and how G-d created the world, and how G-d is beyond time and space, and I was sure this man is a physicist, because he speaks about Einstein’s theory of relativity.  Then he first explained to me what the practical MItzvos are.  He literally forced me to put on Tefillin.  Although I had searched for Yiddishkeit for many years, I was not prepared for such material things. 

The Chassidim researched me.  It was months and months before they let me into a Farbrengen.  Then I first found out about the Rebbe.  I learned a Sichah.  It was handwritten.  A printed Sichah could not go through the mail, so someone in Kfar Chabad [Israel] wrote it out as a personal letter.  They began it with some personal remarks, and then came the material.  They continued this way in the subsequent “letters”.

Then I learned about the history of the thirties in Russia.  I couldn’t imagine that anyone had ever run a school, a Yeshiva, under Stalin.  It was worse than death, but they not only made schools, they did fundraising in a completely silent way.  I myself was involved later.  We went to stores, to the public market.  All we could say was, “We need money for something Jewish.”  We couldn’t disclose anything.  Surprisingly, people gave.

I was involved in Chabad for the last eight years before I left Russia.  After I started applying for my exit visa, around 1969-70, they kicked me out of the Academy [Soviet Academy of Sciences], I was jobless, hungry.  I started protesting, so they decided to put me in prison. 

At a certain stage, in 1972, I felt I could not suffer more.  I had just been released from jail, and was every day expecting to be arrested again.  I decided that I had to call the Rebbe himself.  I shared the idea of calling the Rebbe with my friends.  I couldn’t call from home, because my line was cut off by the KGB, so I had to go to the Post Office.

They told me I was crazy.  First, no one had ever done it.  Second, I would never get a connection, and third, if I do get one they will arrest me on the spot and that’s it.

I was very stubborn.  I got through in ten minutes, and I got one of the secretaries on the line.  I told him who I was, that I needed to talk to the Rebbe.  He said, “The Rebbe doesn’t speak on the phone!”   I said, “OK, I understand, but I am a special case.  I just got out of jail, I am probably going back in soon, and I have to talk to the Rebbe.  He ultimately transferred me to Rav Hodakov. Rav Hodakov told me the same thing.  I was arguing, and pushing, and suddenly I heard a second voice on the line, who spoke to Hodakov, not to me.  “Tell him he already has all the blessings, and he must be sure that he will immediately go out.”

Then I started waiting. In the visa office, they told me I had no chance, because I was in military research.  Maybe they will let me go when I forget everything I studied.  I asked them how many years.  They said they didn’t know, they had not gotten precise instructions, but their guess was maybe ten years, maybe fifteen.

I waited three weeks.  At the end of the third week I got an invitation to a certain office.  I went there  full of expectations, and I was very, very disappointed, because the same woman as before told me in a very angry voice, “Why are you making noise.  I told you, you have to wait ten-fifteen years.”  She was very angry. 

I came home, I didn’t know what to say.  It was about 3:15 in the afternoon.  Five minutes later a messenger came — they couldn’t call me because my phone was cut off. He told me to return to the office.  I should hurry up because they closed at five.

I rushed over, and the same woman told me with great anger, “The management has decided you can go.” 

What happened in the meantime.  I think they themselves didn’t know.  I would never be able to figure out what had happened.  This was the end of 1972, three weeks after the Rebbe’s blessing.

That was the first personal experience with the Rebbe.

Over the years  I accumulated dozens of invitations to lecture on Science outside the Soviet Union.  My managers had always told me to excuse myself for family reasons. Now, after I got to Israel, I wrote back to them and they told me that the invitations still stood, they would be happy to see me.

I applied for the necessary papers to go from Israel to NY.  I didn’t have to tell anyone the real reason I was going, but I knew it.  Soon after, I got my first Yechidus, which lasted two hours.

CD: What was the subject of the first Yechidus.

HB: The first Yechidus, first of all, I myself was in kind of a fog.  I had seen the Rebbe before at Minchah, and the Rebbe walked by and looked at me.  That was the first meeting, really.  That already made me tremble and shiver.  This Yechidus was late at night, I got in about 1:30 am.  I was last, because I was told that since I had come from Russia, the Rebbe didn’t want me waiting long. 

The amazing thing was that when I entered, the Rebbe gave me such a bright Sholom Aleichem, with such a smile.  The feeling was that we had been talking the day before, and the Rebbe was continuing it.  I felt that the room was somehow physically full of Ahavas Yisroel as if I could touch it.

Later on I started to understand better what the Rebbe is, but at the beginning I’m afraid I couldn’t figure out what the Rebbe was saying because I was so excited and so nervous. He spoke to me in Yiddish.  He started asking about dozens, maybe hundreds of families in Russia, everywhere, Russia, Siberia.  These were people I supposedly knew, but the Rebbe wanted to know details, and I knew about only a few.  The rest I just recognized the names, I didn’t know their family affairs.  It ended up with the Rebbe telling me about those families.  I was amazed.  He was telling me what the husband is doing, what the wife is doing, the ages of the children, what each of the children is interested in, the family problems.  It was amazing.  I was so confused.  I couldn’t understand how this, this burst of information, [came from one man’s memory].  It was the most phenomenal memory, a computer type of information.

Then I started paying attention to how he was speaking.  When he speaks about a certain Jew, a certain woman, a certain child, a certain man, the whole world doesn’t exist.  Only the Jew about whom the Rebbe is concerned at this moment.  I started making comparisons.  In Israel they had started shlepping me  to all the presidents and prime ministers, and famous writers, and famous this, and I had observed them.

In my memory I compared the way the Rebbe would speak and listen with the way they did it, and  immediately I perceived the difference.  A politician gives you 5%, 10%.  If he is tired, he falls asleep.  In most cases he is concerned with his party issues, his personal issues, how to hold on to his seat, and you can sense all this.

With the Rebbe you get unlimited attention.  If the Rebbe is speaking about a Jew somewhere in Siberia, the whole world is nonexistent.

Of course I was astounded about how the Rebbe spoke about science, and specifically about my field in science.  He was up to date, up to the last issues of specialized journals.  Even then I knew something about the Rebbe, but I couldn’t imagine him sitting and reading scientific journals.  He had better things to do.  Nevertheless he was on top of the last word in every science.  Also literature, education, and the so-called conflict between Torah and science.

The second Yechidus was also two hours, at the end of this first trip to NY.  In the meantime I went to universities, gave lectures.  At this Yechidus I had my first special instructions from the Rebbe.  I had already been accepted as a full professor at Ben-Gurion and also Tel Aviv universities, as a full professor, but they had no laboratories for magnetohydrodynamics.  This field had not been developed in Israel.

CD: What is magnetohydrodynamics?

HB: A certain field in physics, very advanced.  It deals with astrophysics, stars on galaxies.  On earth it is concerned with better and cheaper methods of generating electrical energy and so on.

At any rate, I was sure I would have to change fields, because there was no laboratory.  At the second Yechidus the Rebbe inquired about my plans.

I told him I had a few days in America.  Tomorrow I had to go to Philadelphia.  I was invited by a student organization for Soviet Jewry to give a lecture.  The Rebbe said, “Give the lecture, but, being in Philadelphia, don’t forget to look up a professor in your field.”

I was confused and surprised.  I followed the literature, and I knew where the work was being done, Tennessee, California. To the best of my knowledge there was nothing going on in Philadelphia.  Of course, I didn’t dare to ask, and the Rebbe didn’t give any names or places.

When I got to Philadelphia, I was met by Avreml Shemtov.  He wanted to know what had gone on in Yechidus, and I mentioned this request.  He had contacts at Temple University, so he arranged that at a certain time there would be a seminar by a scientist who had just come from Russia, on magnetohydrodynamics.  The plan was, that if there was such a professor, he would come! I gave the seminar, but all the professors of physics told me they enjoyed listening, they understood more or less, but it’s not their field.   

Then we started searching the University of Pennsylvania, hours and hours but no success.  It was completely dark, I had to go to my main lecture.  We had one building left to search.  Someone told me that he thought that in the next building there was a professor who had just moved from California.  His name was Professor Yeh, of Chinese origin, and it seemed to this person that his field was magnetohydrodynamics.

We rushed to the other building, and found this Yeh, who was locking his door at that moment.  He told me that he knew me from my books and articles, he was not in a rush.  We talked for a half an hour, it was very amazing.   He invited me to go to Stanford university in Palo Alto to present a paper to the All-American Conference in magnetohydrodynamics.

I told him I thanked him very much, but I was soon going to Israel. I wrote to the Rebbe, telling him I had met Professor Yeh and gotten this invitation. The same day, I got an answer, “If your university will allow you [the Rebbe was considerate of everybody], and if  El Al will agree to postpone your ticket, it is very important that you stay and go to this conference.”

I went to the conference, and I was immediately met by two or three people who introduced themselves as representing the American Navy, The Office of Naval Research, and that they had come especially to see me.  They wanted to offer me a contract.

I explained that I had nothing, no laboratory.  At that time I hardly knew what a contract is — in Russia we had no such thing as contracts.  They said OK, you have no laboratory, we’ll give you money and you can build a laboratory.

That contract was renewed for seven subsequent years!  It enabled  me to build what today is the most advanced laboratory in the world in this field magnetohydrodynamics.

It’s a real Baal-Shemske story.  The Baal Shem Tov would tell someone to find a shoemaker somewhere in Timbuktu and the person would just blindly go there and find him!

CD: What was the interest of the Office of Naval Research?

HB: First, I came from Russia.  They needed to know what the Russians had accomplished.  Secondly, this also applies to power stations on ships.  They wanted to utilize my experience.

CD: Have you ever thought about how the Rebbe knew about this Chinese professor?

HB: That’s the real Baal-Shemske element in it.  I have no explanations.  Listen, this man had just moved a month earlier from California.  I knew about research in California , but Philadelphia no.  The Rebbe knew.  I don’t know how.

I was in close contact with Yeh for years. Several years later, I’ll never forget, I was at another magnetohydrodynamics conference, I think it was in Pittsburgh. Usually they have a banquet, preceded by a reception.  I went to the reception to see people, and then, before they went to the tables, I started to go away, because I had nothing to do there.  Suddenly I heard this Yeh shouting, “Professor Branover, why are you leaving?”  I said, “I’m eating kosher, so I can’t stay for the meal.”  He said, “Of course!  I took care of it! We ordered it from the airlines.  Come!” 

CD: In that Yechidus and others, did the Rebbe give you an approach to the reconciliation of Science and Torah.

HB: Quite a lot.  That was one of the main topics each time.  I wrote a book a few years ago about some of the things I learned. It is called Mah Rabu Maasecho, it is written in Hebrew.

The Rebbe is the only one who makes the unequivocal statement that the many assertions in the Tanach regarding the structure of the world have to be taken literally.  If the Torah says that the Earth is standing still and the sun is going around it, then it is true, even though any first grader in any school will tell you the opposite.  The Rebbe is stressing the point that maybe 100 years ago, in the time of classical science, there were questions, but now, in the era of modern science, Einstein, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, things have changed completely.  This is turn Is an additional proof that we are in Moshiach’s era, because even the world, the material world, is ready for Moshiach.  Even something which is derived from the material world, which is science, cold and detached science, is also converging back to Torah. The exact opposite of what used to be 100 years ago.

One of the exams is the structure of the world.  In 1973-74 when I had just come out of Russia, Dr. Tzvi Feier, who used to be the secretary of the Organization of American Orthodox Jewish Scientists, a physicist himself, was the publisher of their magazine, Intercom.  He wrote a letter to the Rebbe, asking many questions with respect to the reconciliation of Torah and Science. 

He got a very detailed answer, and two or three days later the Rebbe wrote him another additional letter.  Tzvi was very pleased, and he gave me the Rebbe’s answers to read.  He asked the Rebbe for permission to publish this in Intercom, which the Rebbe gave.  Tzvi published it.  The entire paragraph, that there was no scientific problem with the earth standing still, was not in the printed version.  I called him up and asked him.  He told me he was very uncomfortable including it.  He said, “I think I did a good service to the Rebbe not to publish it.”

I said, “Tzvi, you shouldn’t have done that.  The Rebbe gave you permission to publish it.  The Rebbe put it in the letter for the purpose that everyone should read it!”

“Yes, but you know, that would cause all kinds of unpleasant comments, and I appreciate the Rebbe too much to involve him in this.”

“Don’t you think the Rebbe knows better?  How do you dare to interfere?”

We made some seminars in Crown Heights for people whose education was in physics.  Some of them could learn [Torah, including chasidus] well also.  Each session was a few hours.  We were digging and digging, and we couldn’t find where is the real proof.  At Yechidus I told the Rebbe we had difficulties.  He said, “You are going too far and too deep.  It is on the surface.  Look on the surface of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.”

Still we couldn’t understand.  A few days later we found in Barnes and Noble’s bookstore, a book first published in 1926 by one of Einstein’s closest disciples, Hans Reichenbach.  This was the English translation.  The title was “The Philosophy of Time and Space.”  He analyzes there, on a very popular level, the whole question, and shows that the heliocentric and geocentric hypotheses are equally acceptable, and that as long as Einstein’s theory is accepted, science will never be able to decide between them. If both versions are acceptable, and Chumash, Gemorah, and Rambam choose one of them, why jump to the other?

Let me explain a little more.  According to Einstein’s theory,  there is no absolute space and no absolute movement.  All science can do is establish the relative velocity between two bodies.  It can never say which one is moving and which one is standing still.  It can never say which is on the center and which is on the periphery.  That is not in the details.  That is the basic concept on which the Torah is built.  When we made ourselves crazy analyzing equations and more equations, it didn’t help, because we went too deep.

The whole discussion of evolution, Darwin, the Rebbe shows the weakness of extrapolation, that it is not really science, just speculation which can produce any results one wants.

One area which nobody except the Rebbe has brought up, more important than all of the others from a philosophical point of view, is quantum physics.  There the Rebbe always stresses the uncertainty principle, which is the opposite of all the classical science which came before.  The nineteenth century science stressed that the world is deterministic, with a chain of causes and effects, and that knowing the history of a system makes it possible to completely know the present state.  That whole system contradicted the basis of Yiddishkeit, which is based on free will.

According to the classical approach, Laplace wrote 200 years ago that, given the position and condition of every atom, everything could be calculated, including human behavior.  For him a human being is only a machine, which obeys the laws of chemistry and physics.

The Rebbe points out that today, with Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty and the laws of quantum physics, there is no more determinism.  There is a very profound parallelism between Torah and the conclusions of quantum physics.  Particularly, according to quantum physics, the material universe can only exist if there is a man who perceives it.  Physicists, knowing nothing about Torah, particular the Nobelist Eugene Wigner, who was Jew’s but knew nothing about Judaism, concluded that only a human being with free will could perform this function of observing a physical object.  Otherwise it disappears and becomes an assemblage of waves of probability.

There are articles in the scientific literature like this.  For example, Physics Today in April 1985 published a big article, “Is the moon there when nobody looks.”  The author, by the way, was the head of the theoretical physics department of Cornell University.  The answer is no — if nobody looks, scientifically, the world is not there.

Of course, we know otherwise, because the Torah tells us, “In the beginning the Lord created the heavens and the earth.”  But scientifically, based on perception and logic, it shouldn’t exist. It comes into existence because there is a man possessing free will.  Why free will?  Wigner explains that free will is the only entity which is not subordinate to the laws of nature.  To bring nature into existence, you need something which is higher than nature.

The Rebbe says, “Look at the parallelism with Chazal [the Jewish sages].”  In the Talmud, not just the new moon, but many, many things are established by the testimony of two witnesses.  The Rebbe stresses in many of his Sichos, it is not that the testimony is derived from nature, merely a function of natural occurrences..  The moment the testimony is accepted by the Jewish court, it governs nature, not the other way around. The Torah is not derived from the world, the world is derived from Torah.

CD: Have you tried propounding Reichenbach’s explanation?  Is it accepted by authentic scientists today?

HB: I tried it on many physicists.  It’s a mixed reaction.  First they say no, because that’s the ideology they’ve been brought up in.  When you ask them to go back to the theory [of relativity] in which they have been educated for most of their lives, and to take in account this and that, they say, “Yes, the principle is true, but we’re used to so and so.”  That just shows that even a professional in relativity is indoctrinated by things he learned before he became a specialist. If you push them to think it through, there is no way they cannot accept it.

CD: Have you published this? Also, did the Rebbe actually get into the scientific details of your work?

HB: In scientific journals there is nothing to publish.  I can’t publish something that was said by scientists 60 years ago, because it is elementary.  The real novelty is from the Torah point of view, to demonstrate, as the Rebbe did, that science is converging back to Torah.

I could give you an example in practical science.  Not philosophy, but the work I have been active in.

Around 1980 we invented in my laboratory a new method for generating electricity, cheaper and cleaner environmentally.  We registered patents, and I made presentations at many universities.  I made a small model and demonstrated it and everyone was happy.

Then, at Yechidus, the Rebbe asked me about it.  I gave him a brief answer, and the Rebbe smiled and said, “No, no.  I want the presentation as you give it at universities.”  I felt very uncomfortable.  To stand in front of the Rebbe and speak of turbulence, of magnetic fields, equations… it’s irrelevant.  Of course there was no blackboard and chalk, so I had to just say the equations, I couldn’t write them, but everything else was the same.  I tried to shorten it, but it still took at least 20 minutes.

When I finished, the Rebbe said two things.  First, he told me that the method could be improved even more if certain things were changed in the mode of preparation.  Nobody, not myself, my assistants, or my audiences, very distinguished people, had caught this point.

Secondly, the Rebbe said that two numbers, the system efficiency, and the two-phase flow velocity, are not compatible with each other.  The Rebbe said, “You are the expert — I must believe you.  But by me, these two numbers don’t go together.” 

I didn’t know what to say.  I explained how we got those two numbers, the theory, the calculation, but the Rebbe insisted. I went home and I asked my assistants to check all the calculations.  It was exhausting, just one of the intermediate results took 15 minutes of mainframe computer time.  Finally we found the mistake.  I had a new doctoral student, who had to make himself familiar with all the work which had been done.  One morning he came to me and said he had difficulty understanding something.  In the process of clarifying, we found that one term in a certain equation was written erroneously.  When it was corrected we got completely different results.

Everyone asks me, “How did the Rebbe know?”  The Rebbe didn’t have a computer, that’s for sure.  The Rebbe didn’t even use a pencil and paper.  In a second, he knew.

CD: Did these two numbers make a difference in the practical application?

HB: Absolutely yes.  All we did in those two years wasn’t correct.        That’s in the field of pure applied science.

The greatest thing which I was privileged to hear was the prophecy about Russia, which goes back to April 1985, one week after Gorbachev took office in Moscow as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and later President.

I was at that time on Sabbatical, teaching at NYU here in Manhattan.  Suddenly I got a call that the Rebbe wanted to see me.  He spoke to me at the door of his room.  It was a short Yechidus, a few minutes.  The Rebbe told me I should try to reach by phone all of my contacts in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities, and tell them that they should be assured that from now on the situation in Russia will improve.  Not immediately, it will take time, but that the whole thing will fall apart and communism will come to an end, and that whoever wishes to leave will be allowed, and anyone who wishes to stay will be able to practice Yiddishkeit.

For me it was wonderful.  I was full of joy, even though I couldn’t see how this could come.  In our conception, Communist Russia was eternal.  No power in the world could destroy it, but the Rebbe is the Rebbe.

On the way back, I stopped to buy papers.  The NY Times had headlines proclaiming that the new leader in the Kremlin will be worse than the previous ones, and these will be difficult times, the Post likewise.  OK, all the experts are on one side and the Rebbe is on the other side.  At that time it didn’t surprise me already.  I had plenty of experience.  I went to make the calls.  I spent two days, it was very difficult at that time to get through, but I contacted maybe a dozen people.  They were very encouraged, but at the same time they felt skepticism.  One told me that his wife had been taken to the KGB for interrogation three days before and had not come home yet.  A second told me that a KGB car is standing at his door day and night  — “If the Rebbe says so it’s wonderful, but we don’t see it.  It’s getting worse.”

I wrote a note to the Rebbe. I got an answer, “Yes, it can’t be seen yet, but the process is already on its way.”  He instructed me to call them again and reassure them again.  I did this, and everyone knows what happened later.  All the so-called Sovietologists were absolutely wrong.  It collapsed.

The end of the story is that three years ago, which is seven years after this instruction I got, Gorbachev visited Israel.  One day he was a guest of our university, and, as I speak Russian, they asked me to be in charge of his reception and so on.  I used the opportunity to tell Gorbachev and his wife about this great leader, this great Tzaddik in NY who told me all this.

Gorbachev told me it was impossible.  I told him, “How can you say that to me?  I have the first-hand information.”

He said,  “I will explain.  In April 1985 I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to do.  I had no plan.”  He told me that even though he knew about the Chabadniks, and it was possible they could have penetrated his office, it wouldn’t have helped, because there were no papers and no conversations to spy on, simply because there were no ideas.  A year or two later, he had a plan, but he never implemented it. The changes in Russia were leading to the exact  opposite of what he wanted.  He wanted an improved version of communism, which no one accepted.

To me, this is not a forecast, not a prediction.  It is Nevuah, real prophecy.  This is something that could not have been figured out rationally, because it was not in anyone’s head.  This the Rebbe predicted precisely.

This was prophecy of a global scale.  It influenced not just Russian Jews, or Russians in general.  It changed the whole world.

CD: From 1973 to 1985, did you and the Rebbe correspond regarding Russian Jewry?

HB: Very much.  First, the Rebbe instructed us to revive Jewish culture in the Russian language.  We founded Shamir [publishing], which has by now published over 50 books, a huge library, with more than 5 million copies published.  They are mostly in Russia, but also in America and Israel.  The Rebbe went into the tiniest details.  We had questions of translation, the language to use, editing.  The modern Russian language, after 70 years of Communism, didn’t have words relevant to spiritual concepts.  You could hardly say “G-d”, “miracle”, “spirit”.  If you did it sounded so old-fashioned it gave an erroneous conception.  The Rebbe, mainly orally in Yechidus, went into a whole investigation of how to do this.

When we translated the very first book, we sent a copy to the Rebbe.  I was shocked.  The Rebbe did a full editing and proofreading job in Russian.  It’s unbelievable.  On every page, and many times more than once on a page, several times, corrections in grammar, spelling.  I cannot imagine the Rebbe sitting and doing this.  It was a big book of several hundred pages typewritten.  We got it out with all the corrections.

Later we always got advice on what to publish, how to distribute to books in Russia, approaches in editorial philosophy and halachic points.  The tiniest, tiniest details.  When we started to translate the Chumash, how to translate the various names of G-d,  Hava’ye and Elokim.  We did this completely different from the way others are doing it, because the Rebbe’s approach was completely different.  This was so that the Russians who read it would perceive everything properly.

CD: Can you please give an example?

HB: I’ll have to use Russian words.  For example, for Elokim, the Rebbe gave a whole explanation that this name indicates forcefulness, and therefore we have to use the Russian word  “Disilne”, about equivalent to “The most powerful”.  It was never used in theological literature  in Russian, but in our Chumash we use this term. 

The Rebbe told us that most of the publications, including chasidus and the Rebbe’s Sichos, have to be translated in what he called a “journalistic modern language, a newspaper language”  so that it would be easy to read.  The exception would be the Chumash and the Siddur, where the language should be a little archaic so people should perceive that this is a special book.

Then of course, there were instructions on the more physical aspects, how to help bring people closer to Yiddishkeit, how to deal with the education of children. The Rebbe said the first step is to deal with the physical side of things, to become a good friend, help them in material things.

Then, when we started sending Shluchim in to Russia, years before Gorbachev, there were similar instructions on what to do and what not to do.  Such a person in those years was not only endangering himself, he was putting in danger those who might visit him, and the Rebbe told us how to overcome these problems.

We spoke before about elevated philosophy, and miracles.  Sometimes the Rebbe acts on the level of the spiritual authority, but sometimes he is acting on the level of a real manager, a practical manager.  An unbelievable combination.

CD: I heard that the Rebbe was not so much in support of the Soviet Jewry demonstrations in the 70’s.  Did you discuss this?

HB: Yes, many times.  The Rebbe explained that the harm of noisy demonstrations is not only that it could anger the Soviet authorities.  He wanted to maintain peace with the Soviet authorities because so many Jews were living there, totally dependent on them.

This is no contradiction to his pointing out that under the Soviet constitution the Jews are allowed to study the Torah and teach their children and so on, and that in speaking to a policeman one should take out a copy of the Russian constitution.  The Rebbe wanted to be firm and strong, but merely to anger the authorities was counterproductive.

He also explained more than once that this is not the only reason, or even the main reason, why he is opposed to demonstrations.  He told me once in Yechidus that when you have a huge rally here in NY, a quarter of a million people, they go out on a nice Sunday morning, good weather, they take a walk, they feel very good about themselves, and then they go home and feel they did their best.

It’s bad enough that this demonstrations did more harm than good.  It’s even more harmful that this person went home with the feeling that he did his best and contributed.  If, after this, you will approach this person and ask him for a hundred dollars to send a parcel to Russia with clothes which [when sold] will sustain a family for a month or two, he will say, “Go to someone else.  I already demonstrated.”  This happened!  I myself had the experience many times.

We see that ultimately it was Hashem who helped, not the demonstrations, or the call for demonstrations.  In retrospect it looks silly.  Jews came out in masses not because of any demonstrations, but because the Soviet Union fell apart.

CD: Did the Rebbe have any contact with officials of the Russian government in those years?

HB: Maybe, but nothing I know of.

CD: There was a Lag B’Omer parade in the Eighties when the Rebbe began to speak in Russian.  At that time he also spoke about the Russian Constitution.  Was there any event at the time that may have spared this?

HB: The Rebbe wanted to say two things.  First, to explain to Russian Jews that without Torah, Jewish life is not a life, and that they had to give some Torah knowledge to their children.  Secondly, he wanted to encourage them, and let them know that according to the Constitution they are permitted.  The inertia of being scared outlasted Stalin for several decades.  Under Stalin, what could you do, but under Brezhnev people could do it, they just didn’t dare to do it.  The Rebbe told them not to be scared, take the Constitution, speak to the policeman, speak to the clerk.  I know some people who did do it and Baruch Hashem nothing happened to them.

CD: In other words, they were allowed to do it under Brezhnev’s rule.

HB: Yes.  When I was in Russia most of the people wouldn’t even dare do something toward the education of their children.  Some religious people sent their children to the public schools.  They didn’t want to fight, they even sent children to school on Shabbos.  A very few others spoke openly and boldly to the principal of the school, “We are religious.  Our religion does not permit the child to go to Shabbos, and I will not send him.  I am not going to make excuses and pretexts.” 

I know examples where it worked.  The only problem is that school starts on September 1.  There is one Shabbos and then another where the child does not show up at school, and suddenly he disappears for several days.  The principal got angry and called the father, “what happened now.  It’s not Saturday?”  He says, “Now it’s Rosh Hashanah and Sukkos…”

CD: What happened in 1987 when the Rebbe said a special sicha for you and Rabbi Shlomo Maidanchik?

HB: This was two years after he had predicted, with his prophetic vision, that change was on the way, but it was well before the mass emigration.  There had been a few changes, but the mass emigration began in 1989.  The Rebbe said a very special Sichah, Shabbos Hagodol.  He mentioned that there were certain subjects which he did not want to discuss on Shabbos, and there would be another Farbrengen Motzoei Shabbos.  Then he spoke of the necessity to build a Chabad town in Jerusalem, with a Jewish style, and a Jewish approach.  He made hints that it was for Russian Jews, who would begin coming in greater numbers.  He developed this quite at length.

After the Farbrengen, Shlomo Maidanchik and I got a call from the Rebbe’s Secretariat, saying we should come for Yechidus.  The Rebbe gave us details.  In the Sichah he had spoken in general terms, without giving technicalities.  In the Yechidus he told us that we should go to certain Government ministers, to the Prime Minister, and explain these details.  The Rebbe also told us that there is an argument in Israel about the phenomenon of those Jews who come out of the Soviet Union, and drop out of Aliyah in Rome, to go to the United States or other countries. 

The Rebbe said that his advice to every Soviet Jew who is already on his way is that he should go to Israel and never leave Israel.  The Rebbe asked to publicize this.  He stressed that this project is a kind of a pilot project.  It should be done very fast.  It should be large, but it is much more important to have it ready within half a year.  The minimum was to build fifty houses.  Also, employment was a necessity.  Since the majority of Soviet Jews are scientists and engineers, it is necessary to provide them with work in their profession.

It looked impossible in practical terms.  To build in Eretz Yisroel, or anywhere else for that matter, takes at least a year, from the start, plans, permits.  We had more meetings, because the government wanted to give us space outside Jerusalem, and the Rebbe wanted it to be inside the borders of Jerusalem.

I came from several meetings with city officials, the Ministry of Housing, and others, and I brought maps of Jerusalem to show him the places they offered us.  I took out the maps.  I remember the detail the Rebbe brought in discussing the neighborhoods. This place, if the husband has to go to a convention in Binyanei HaUmah, it will take him so much time, and if the housewife wants to go shopping in the city center she will have to pass such and such streets.  I am in Jerusalem two or three times a week and I have no idea of most of those streets, and everyone knows the Rebbe never was in Yerushalayim.

The time factor looked impossible, but we find a block of 52 houses which had almost been finished by a contractor.  We purchased them, and established the SATEC industrial company which today employs more than  a hundred immigrants from Russia. 

Unfortunately, we could not go beyond this.  The Rebbe had told us to give an example, and that we did fulfill.  Nobody in Israel, the Minister of Housing, of Absorption, at that time they did not speak of immigration, and here, suddenly, Chabad is building a whole neighborhood, a small one but a neighborhood, especially for Russian Jews, with employment. Suddenly all these officials were running around, looking for more builders.  The Rebbe’s encouragement reached all.

We were able to appreciate what the Rebbe had said, that small but fast was better than large and slow.  It became an issue all over Israel.

Then we wanted to build a second, much larger building, and we got into endless bureaucratic problems. Ultimately they passed a law which denies giving any areas to private initiatives to build neighborhoods.  That was years later.

The big thing is that it made a big impact on the whole mood and attitude of the people concerned with immigration, to alert them that a large immigration was to come and what they had to do for it.

Ultimately, I was nominated by Yitzchak Shamir to the Prime Minister’s commission on the employment of immigrants, of which I am to this day.

CD: What exactly is SATEC?

HB: Shamir Advanced Technology Engineering Center.  Now we also have ONT, which is Olim Negev Technology.

CD: Do you have plans for the future?

HB: The whole idea at the beginning was that it’s only a prototype.  More were supposed to come.  On the other hand, I don’t think that the Rebbe intended for it to be an absorption center for the whole 600,00 Jews who were going to come.  As Maidanchik and I understand, I think we fulfilled the Rebbe’s conception.  We reported positively, but he never pushed for more, so I assume that the idea was to provide an impetus and set a certain standard to be copied.

As a matter of fact, our industries together employ about 130 people.  A drop in the sea.  But it created a model, and the plan which we presented to the Prime Minister for absorbing all the Russian Jews became totally accepted by the experts as the solution.  They figured that if Israel could establish 500 industries like that, it would take car of all the population of immigrants.

CD: What is your opinion of the current situation of these 600,000 immigrants?

HB: Nowadays the situation is very tough regarding the immigration scene.  This is an anti-Jewish government.  It doesn’t care about the Jews, just wants to be nice to the Arabs and get all kinds of international awards.  They don’t care whatsoever.  You cannot move them.  It seems absolutely hopeless, and that’s one of the tragedies.  Immigration started on its high level in 1989.  200,000 people in one year.  The subsequent year also, then it started going down and down.  Now it’s at its lowest, not only in numbers, but in quality, who is coming.  Younger people stopped coming, now we are getting only pensioners.  This is also good, they are also Jews, but for the economy of the country it’s a burden.

People with ten, twenty, thirty years left in their working lives, have stopped coming.  I get statistics from reliable sources.  From 1989 till now Israel got 60,000 engineers.  Before the immigration Israel had 29,000 engineers.  It tripled the number of engineers, and it doubled the number of scientists.

Out of the 60,000 engineers, only 12,000 are working in anything close to their profession.  All the rest are either getting subsidies, or they are sweeping streets and washing dishes and wasting completely their talents.  They brought in to the country more than 100,000 patents, inventions, projects, because in Rebbe the government encourages this.  They pour in money, endless, billions and trillions.  These people are bringing these things and asking to use them.  Nobody cares.

CD: What about your programs in Russia, are you able to continue printing books and disseminating Judaism?

HB: Of course we continue. Books in great number, all kinds of books.  Fundamental material like Chumashim with commentaries, Shulchan Aruch, Siddur, Rambam.  Also books about Yiddishkeit like Herman Wouk’s The Synagogue Chaim Donin’s To Be a Jew,  A Jew in his Home  by Kitov.  Also books for youth, some fiction if it has a Jewish content. 

We are running two day schools, a tremendous burden but also a tremendous accomplishment.  Our school, which is recognized by the government, is a real Jewish Day School, up-to-date.  In Riga there is a governmental school which is called “The Jewish School”, but it’s secular.  We reached an agreement with the government that we would provide Jewish teachers for all grades, 1 to 11 —  there are 11 grades in Russia.  We teach Jewish history, tradition, holidays and so on.  We also provide kosher lunches in both schools, for all 800 kids.

A new project is an encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, which was initiated with the permission of the Russian government and the Russian Academy of Sciences.  It is amazing how far it changed.  Something for which one could have been shot or sent to Siberia for life, instead the government has asked me, knowing that we are the biggest publisher of Jewish books in the Russian language, to become the editor in chief.  This will be a seven-volume work.

In another project in Moscow, about 200 historians and scholars are researching the archives that were opened up, from the KGB, the Communist party, etc.  They are very nice to me.  I was thrown out and treated as a traitor, now they beg me to agree to be elected to the Academy.

CD: Are financing all the 200 people?

HB: Not the whole thing.  With money they are always not very good.  But they participate.  They gave us the permission, they opened the archives, and they gave some money, but most money still has to be raised.

CD: I’ve heard a story many times about you and the Rebbe concerning solar energy.

HB: That was the story I told you.  The invention had to do with electric power, it  had a broader scope, but at that time the main interest was to generate electricity from solar heat.  Maybe I didn’t mention that. Because, looking retrospectively, it’s not just for solar, it’s for any source of heat.

CD: Did the Rebbe speak to you about personal issues, family issues? Did he give you guidance in your personal Yiddishkeit also, as an individual, not just science?

HB: Of course! Every time. He gave Brochos and advice. Also, in our discussions on Torah and Science, at certain moments he would stop himself and say with a smile, “Don’t think that I am so interested in your science!  For me it’s important that through your science one more Jew will put on Tefillin.” That happened several times.

Mainly it was through discussing the Torah books in the Russian language, of which in many cases I was the editor.  Inevitably it went into all sorts of Jewish issues, how to understand the basics of the Torah and Rambam etc.

CD: Tell us a little about your feelings toward the Rebbe.  How do you see him as a global leader?

HB: I perceive the Rebbe as alive.  I just have to make an effort to stay close with him, and I believe that depends on the individual, on his faith and conviction.  That is what he has to accomplish.

I am always saying, that when I and others reach a degree of confidence which will be equal to our degree of confidence, for instance in the fact that tomorrow morning the sun will rise…  Actually here we should have greater confidence, because the rising of the sun is an empirical fact.  The Rebbe always stresses that a Jew puts seeds in the ground not because of empirical evidence, but because he believes in G-d.

I believe in the sun rising because experience teaches us.  As far as the coming of Moshiach we have the words of the Rebbe himself, when he spoke of prophecy, when he spoke of the seventh generation, going back to the demand of the Baal Shem Tov to spread out the wellsprings of Chasidus, and no one, in all the generations, spread them out more than the Rebbe.

No question it’s difficult, because we still stick to our rational thinking, and we are surrounded by this world, especially now, with computers and plans.  There is a tendency to believe in what we see and experience, and not what we should take into consideration.

CD: Is there a scientific analogy to something existing on the spiritual and physical planes at the same time?

HB: In this science is converging to Torah.  I could suggest those things I just spoke about to scientists, which are very symptomatic.  Just a few months ago, two remarkable books were publishes.  One was in Moscow University, formerly a hotbed of atheism, by professor Yuri Vladimirov.  In Fundamental Physics of Religion.  Of course he’s a Christian, it’s not for us, but according to their approaches he shows the validity of religion in view of modern fundamental physics.

More interesting is a book by Frank Tippler, an American physicist, published in America by Doubleday, called Physics of Immortality.  The subtitle is “Modern Cosmology, G-d, and Resurrection of the Dead”.  It’s about 700 pages, about 200 pages of pure mathematics, equations and so on.  His conclusions, which include the Deity, resurrection of the Dead, Divine Providence, Free Will, he writes that he came to them not by religion, he used to be a confirmed atheist, but just through analyzing laws of physics and so on. He speaks not only of scientific possibility of Resurrection of the Dead, but inevitability.

You ask me how it can be reconciled.  The mere appearance of these books shows something.  No publishing house ten years ago, even five years ago would dare to publish such a book.  No physicist would dare to write it, because they would be ostracized by the other physicists.  Nowadays the world is already different. I’m not saying there are no exceptions but the general outlook Is different.

Going back to the question which you raised, even science, which is so removed, so cold, so rational, so distant from us, is coming to the same conclusions.