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Legendary Buffalo Campus Rabbi’s 50 Years on the Job

Twenty-five-year-old Rabbi Nosson Gurary had been married for two years and now wanted to join the growing number of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries around the world. The Rebbe pointed him to Rabbi Chaim Mordechai Aizik Hodakov, his chief-of-staff and director of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the educational arm of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

Memo to Secret Police Chief Reveals Hunt For Chabad’s Soviet Underground

On June 6, 1950, Maj. Gen. Mikhail Popereka, a deputy minister of the Ukrainian branch of the MGB Soviet secret police—the precursor to the KGB—drafted an 11-page memo on the status of the ongoing investigation into the case of the “Chassidim” and sent it to Viktor Abakumov, minister of state security (MGB) of the Soviet Union. Marked with a hand-written “Top Secret,” the report synopsized information gathered by the MGB over the course of its investigation into “the Schneerson anti-Soviet organization” via foreign agents, informants and interrogations.