Dovid Margolin
“We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood,” threatened Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser on May 8, 1967.
Only 22 years after the Holocaust, the world remained silent as Israel's Arab neighbours broadcast their plans to wipe the nascent country off the map and push its 2.5 million Jews into the sea. A sense of dread and fear spread over the Jewish people, in Israel and abroad.
“Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse any aggression, but to initiate the act ourselves, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland of Palestine,” added Syria's defence minister Hafez Assad two weeks later. “ . . . I believe that the time has come to begin a battle of annihilation.”
Cautiously, Israel began mobilising its troops. Civilians dug trenches, filled sandbags and taped their windows. At the direction of Israel's military rabbinate, municipal rabbis scouted fields and parks that could be repurposed as Jewish cemeteries. In America and around the world, fellow Jews donated money, collected supplies and prayed.
Then Egyptian military movements began. On May 18, 1967, Nasser formally requested that the United Nations Emergency Force—which had patrolled the Sinai Peninsula for the previous decade—pull out of the Sinai and Gaza. Within hours, U.N. Secretary-General U Thant announced that he would acquiesce. Egyptian forces immediately took over the U.N. positions.
“As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel,” gloated Radio Cairo.
With hundreds of thousands of Arab soldiers massed on three sides, what the world predicted would be a devastating war for the Jewish people was on its way.
Tensions were growing and frantic parents with children studying in Israel turned to the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—asking whether they should bring their children home. Others asked about delaying travel to the Holy Land. To each inquiry, the Rebbe responded with his assurance that everything would turn out well in Israel, insisting that students there continue studying and that travel plans remain unchanged.
The day after news of Nasser's blockade broke, the Rebbe sent an unexpected telegram to the rabbi and leaders of Kfar Chabad, the Chassidic village near what is today called Ben-Gurion International Airport (free translation):
“You have merited to be amongst thousands of Jews in the Holy Land, the land which G-d's eyes are constantly watching [Deuteronomy 11:12]. Certainly, the L-rd of Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. With G-d at your right side, G-d will protect [you] and all of the children of Israel . . . from now and forevermore. success and salvation in an added measure so that they may emerge—and they will emerge—from their current situation successfully. You have the unique privilege to help them. Every time you study one more verse of Torah, and through your performing another Mitzvah and another Mitzvah—without missing any opportunity to do so—and through “Loving your fellow as yourself,” influencing your friends and relatives to also use every opportunity to spread Torah and Mitzvos, then . . . it brings him G-d's increased blessing “I am anticipating hearing good news quickly.”
Menachem Schneerson
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department stepped up its warnings.
“We got two notices from the American embassy: 'War is imminent, transportation will not be provided, no responsibility will be taken, leave the country immediately,' ” recalls the late Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz in an interview with Jewish Educational Media (JEM). Known to generations of his students as “Schwarzie,” at the time he was an American studying in Chabad-Lubavitch's Yeshivat Torat Emet in Jerusalem. “After the second notice, I started to get nervous.”
Rabbi Shmuel Rodal, then a 22-year-old native of Montreal studying with Schwartz at Torat Emet, received a ticket home from his worried mother. “She said she has a few sons, but only one Shmulikel,” recalls Rodal, today a Chabad emissary in Milan, Italy. Parents of other students sent similar entreaties to their children.
The same day that the village of Kfar Chabad got their telegram, Schwartz, Rodal, Shmuel Langsam and Yehuda Leib Ives—the four foreign students studying in Torat Emet—received a Hebrew-language telegram of their own:
“In response to [your] telegram: Study with diligence and dedication . . . certainly the Guardian of Israel will neither slumber nor sleep, and you will report good news.”
News of the Rebbe's support in the face of otherwise dire predictions and mournful reports spread quickly throughout Israel, and were carried in every major Israeli newspaper, including Yediot Achronot, Maariv, Haaretz, Hatzofe and Davar. Even Al HaMishmar, a virulently anti-religious paper aligned with the socialist Mapam workers party, published the Rebbe's telegram. While the government had tried to calm nerves by blocking out news of the foreigners streaming out of the country—indeed, the airport was full of people leaving for home, or flying to Cyprus or Europe to wait out the war—it grasped onto the Rebbe's lone words of reassurance.
“Chassidim of the Lubavitcher Rebbe who are in Israel temporarily turned to the Rebbe asking if they are allowed to return to the United States at this time,” wrote Yosef Zuriel in Maariv on May 25, 1967. “The Rebbe responded to them in a telegram that it is their obligation to remain here and to assist if called to do so. In the same telegram he encouraged the community of Chassidim in Israel, and even described them as having a special merit.”
Chabad Chassidim certainly had their answer. But now, with the widespread publication of the Rebbe's blessings and assurances that things would turn out well, other non-Chabad rosh yeshivahs, rabbis and communal leaders felt they could advise their students to stay, too. As a result, many more Jews who had planned on leaving made the decision to remain with their brothers and sisters in Israel.
The May 28 Sunday New York Times carried a front-page headline announcing: “Cairo Prepares Economy for War.” It was also Lag BaOmer, which meant there would be a big parade marching down Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, N.Y., attended by the Rebbe himself. Addressing the crowd of 20,000 people at the parade, the Rebbe spoke in Yiddish of the situation in Israel, tasking those gathered, especially the children, with assisting their brethren in the Holy Land:
“Your brothers and sisters in the Holy Land, the Land of Israel, are currently in a situation where G-d is protecting them and sending them His blessings, for salvation and success. And then it will be fulfilled that which we read in yesterday's Torah portion: “You will dwell securely in your Land,” the Jews in the Land of Israel will dwell there securely. “And I will place peace upon the Land,” G-d will draw down peace upon the Holy Land. “And I will be your G-d,” G-d will be our G-d and the G-d of all Jews wherever they may be. “And you will be for me a people,” every one of you, and all of us together, and especially the Jews in the Holy Land, will be G-d's people, whom He will lead with His “full, open, holy, wide hand” out of all difficulties, and He will bring them peace and security in everything they need. And very soon will be fulfilled the verse of last week's Torah portion: “And I will lead you upright,” G-d will lead every Jew and all Jews in upright posture, with heads held high, very soon, in the true, complete and full Redemption through our righteous Moshiach, who will come soon and will take us—and especially the Jews in the Land of Israel—out of this exile.”
In the crowd stood Rabbi Yosef Wineberg, a prominent Chabad scholar and activist who for decades taught Tanya (the foundational text of Chabad philosophy) on New York radio. He was certain the Rebbe's words meant the impending Middle East war would result in a victory for the Jewish people. Later in the day, he came to the office at Lubavitch World Headquarters and found out that a tape of the Rebbe's words that day had been mailed out to Israel. Feeling that under the circumstances the people of Israel needed to hear the Rebbe's assurances as soon as possible, he grabbed a copy and dashed off to John F. Kennedy airport, searching for someone flying to Israel.
The El Al airlines gate was nearly empty, but there he saw Rabbi Dr. Chaim Soloveitchik, the son of Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, Dean of Yeshiva University and a renowned Talmudic genius known to many as “the Rav.”
