The Rebbe was rumored to be telepathic, and I could certainly vouch for the fact that as far as I was concerned, he certainly was.
By GREER FAY CASHMANMENACHEM MENDEL SCHNEERSON, the beloved Lubavitcher Rebbe.(photo credit: ZEV MARKOWITZ/CHAIARTGALLERY.COM)
At one stage in my life, I was closely involved with Chabad in Melbourne Australia, and was a frequent guest in many Chabad homes including those of American-born Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, the most senior of Chabad emissaries in Australia; and Jerusalem-born Rabbi Binyomin Klein, who went on to New York to study and shortly after his marriage to Laya Shusterman some five years later, was sent to Melbourne as an emissary, but unlike the dynamic Rabbi Groner, not as a permanent emissary.Klein, who was essentially an educator, was among the founders of Chabad’s prestigious Yeshiva Gedolah in Melbourne.His stay in Australia was relatively brief. After two years, he and his wife returned to New York, where he served as a long-time personal assistant to the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and was also his liaison to Israeli political leaders as well as to Israelis who were prominent in other fields.I had been corresponding with the Rebbe for a couple of years before visiting New York for the first time. It was my earnest desire to meet him, but being a young female, with no money and no influence, I doubted that it would be possible.Still there was no harm in trying.I got in touch with Klein, who said he would make inquiries and get back to me. To my great joy and surprise, he said that if I came to Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, after midnight on a particular date, the Rebbe would receive me.Of course, I arrived early, and waited and waited and waited. It was close to 3 a.m. before I was admitted inside the building.Rabbi Leibel Groner, the brother of Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner, who for more than 40 years served as personal secretary to the Rebbe, screening everyone who was to meet the Rebbe personally, asked for my kvitl – the note stating the subject of our conversation.I didn’t have a kvitl. Klein had omitted to mention that I should write one and bring it with me.We were already outside the Rebbe’s room when Leibel Groner, who died this past April, asked for the kvitl. When I said I didn’t have one – aside from which anything I had to discuss with the Rebbe was of a personal nature – Leibel Groner said that if I didn’t have a kvitl, I couldn’t go in.
The Groner brothers had booming voices, and apparently the Rebbe heard him, because he instructed him to let me in anyway. Then he asked if I preferred the conversation to be in English or in Yiddish.THE REBBE’S chair at 770, Chabad world headquarters in Brooklyn. (Mendy Hechtman/Flash90)I thought momentarily of my paternal grandfather, an Alexander Hassid whom I never knew who had been murdered in Auschwitz. His spoken language had been Yiddish, although he was also well-versed in Polish. So when the Rebbe asked about the language in which to conduct our conversation, it was obvious that I would opt for Yiddish, which was the language in which my father had spoken to me as a kind of memorial tribute to his own father.AMAZINGLY, THE Rebbe knew exactly what I wanted to talk about, and launched into four subjects related to my life. Leibel Groner kept poking his head around the door to bring the meeting to an end, because it was going on for longer than the allocated time, but the Rebbe, gently waved him away.There was actually a fifth subject that we never got around to, but the following day, Klein called me with the message: “The Rebbe said that the answer to your last question is….”When I came outside, there was a large cluster of Chabadniks waiting to hear anything that anyone who had been with the Rebbe had to say.They crowded around me, careful not to get too close, and mostly in Yiddish asked “Vos hot der Rebbe gezogt?” (What did the Rebbe say?) There was really nothing I could share with them. We had not discussed religion or politics. It had all been personal.But it had been a truly memorable experience to meet so great a man, and to realize some of the legends about him were not myths, but were actually true. The Rebbe was rumored to be telepathic, and I could certainly vouch for the fact that as far as I was concerned, he certainly was.Today, we are living in an era of cynicism and hostility in which the media is among both the assailants and the victims. Thus I feel it appropriate to quote from a meeting that the late David Landau, the founder of the English language edition of Haaretz, had just a few days before Purim in 1989, when he was still the diplomatic correspondent and managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.Landau was introduced to the Rebbe as “a very important Jew who works as a reporter in Israel.”“Why do you mention he’s a fine Jew?” asked the Rebbe. “Of course he is,” he assured all those present, and asked Landau to see to it that all the readers of The Jerusalem Post would be fine Jews as well.“I try,” replied Landau.“It’s not enough to try,” said the Rebbe. “You have to try at least 101 times.”Landau, who was preparing to take a year off to write a book about Orthodox Jewry in Israel and around the world, asked the Rebbe for a blessing in the hope that he would publish a proper book.The Rebbe not only gave him a blessing, but also one of his famous dollar bills as a gift for Purim and as “an investment” in the book which the Rebbe said should be written promptly so that Landau would have time in which to write his next book.
