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Stories from As I Heard Them (Lesheima Ozen) by Reb Zalman Duchman · © The Duchman Family; please share this sheet as printed
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Stories for the week

Parshas Shemos

Boarding the Train to the Ohel Every Beis Nissan

As I Heard Them, Vol. 1, pp. 424-425, no. 13

Continued from the biography of R. Zalman Duchman:

Half a year later, on 2 Nis­san 5680 (1920), the Rebbe Rashab passed away in Ros­tov. Un­der­stand­ably, this was a dif­fi­cult pe­riod for R. Zal­man, who had been so con­nected to the Rebbe.

R. Zal­man’s in­tense love for the Rebbe Rashab drove him to make the long and ar­du­ous trip to the Ohel for the Rebbe’s yahrtzeit each year. Be­fore Beis Nis­san, R. Zal­man would board the train to Ros­tov, with­out know­ing what lay ahead of him. Com­mu­nist spies roamed the train look­ing out for “sus­pi­cious per­sons, ” and anti-Semitic thugs would reg­u­larly at­tack any­one they rec­og­nized as Jew­ish. But R. Zal­man’s burn­ing de­sire to be by his Rebbe on that spe­cial day made him ig­nore those fears.

HiskashrusMesiras NefeshPerseverance

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"History Will Record This Disgrace"

As I Heard Them, Vol. 1, pp. 263-265, no. 103

The Rashag, the Rebbe’s son-in-law, came for Shab­bos from Kos­trama, and, af­ter Min­chah, near the bal­cony in the large zal, told a few of us, in the Rebbe’s name, many ques­tions the in­ter­roga­tors had asked, the Rebbe’s re­sponses and, in gen­eral, what he had un­der­gone.

When he en­tered the in­ter­ro­ga­tion room an in­ves­ti­ga­tor with a stubby nose and a stut­ter was seated there. The walls were thin, made of ply­wood. Se­nior of­fi­cials sat fur­ther back in the room.

When Lulav and Nach­man­son came in, the Rebbe told them, “His­tory will record this dis­grace: who was ap­pointed to in­ter­ro­gate the Lubav­itcher Rebbe. ” When they be­gan to ac­cuse him of es­pi­onage, he re­acted sharply, “Re­tract this at once. Do you want to make an­other Beilis Af­fair?”26 And when they started talk­ing about dis­sem­i­nat­ing Torah, he said, “I am not a teacher; I salute learn­ing Torah. ”

Un­til they re­turned his tefillin he would not an­swer any ques­tions.

When the in­ter­roga­tor gave him a glass of wa­ter and he put on his hat to re­cite the bless­ing She­hakol, they said, “You think you’re so im­por­tant; you don’t think you can be shorter by a head?”

“The whole earth is filled with His glory,”27 he an­swered.

  1. Menachem Mendel Beilis was a Ukrainian Jew accused of ritual murder in the notorious 1913 blood-libel trial known as the “Beilis Affair. ” ↩
  2. Yeshayahu 6:3. ↩
Mesiras NefeshBittulEmes

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"What Do I Need Fingers For?"

As I Heard Them, Vol. 1, p. 267, no. 108

I also heard from R. Mi­choel Dvorkin that a day or two be­fore Yud-Beis Tam­muz, in the shochet’s court­yard and gar­den in Kos­trama, the Rebbe said, “Nearly a month has passed that I haven’t writ­ten about chil­dren’s ed­u­ca­tion. What do I need fin­gers for…?!”

Mesiras NefeshLeadershipZrizus

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