When the Rebbe launched his campaign to encourage people to observe kosher, it became a personal project for me. Unlike helping someone put on tefillin or put up a mezuzah, going kosher is a much longer, more time-consuming process. In the evening, even though I had been working all day and had nine kids at home, I would go to people’s houses to help them make their kitchens kosher.
One year around Purim time, I got a call from Rabbi Chaim Mordechai Hodakov, the Rebbe’s senior secretary, who was a no-nonsense kind of person.
“It says that a person should go into exile in order to study Torah,” he began. “Accordingly, every year, there are hundreds of yeshivah students who go away from Montreal to study Torah in other cities. Passover is a time when they all come back home, so it would be appropriate if, during Passover, you brought them all together for a Kinus Torah.” By this he meant to arrange a Torah conference, with a lineup of speakers and lecturers, for all of these students to attend.
I strongly resisted the idea. “First,” I told him, “I work for a living.” I just didn’t have the time to put on something like this, and Passover was only a month away. “Second, how am I supposed to find all these hundreds of yeshivah students?” Montreal is a big city: It has a sizable Chabad community, several other big chasidic communities like Satmar and Belz, as well as a large non-chasidic Lithuanian community and a Sephardic community. They all have teenage boys going to yeshivah, but I didn’t know any of their names, or where they learn, or whom to call. “How am I going to do this? It’s not for me,” I concluded.
“What do you mean you can’t do it?” he exclaimed.
“With all due respect,” I replied, “but do you know how much work this is? I’m only flesh and blood, with two hands, and this is beyond my abilities. I don’t have a Chabad House, a workforce, or an office behind me.”
And then I added: “I can do it if I know the Rebbe himself is behind this. If the Rebbe says to do something, then mountains can move and I’ll find the strength to pull it off. So tell me, was the Rebbe the one who selected Mayer Plotkin for this task?”
The phone went quiet, and then all of a sudden, I heard a cough. I jumped. I knew that cough; I would recognize it if I heard it in the middle of the Sahara Desert or atop the Himalayas. The Rebbe was on the line and could hear our conversation. As a rule, the Rebbe did not talk on the phone. But it was well known that he would occasionally participate in key calls by picking up the receiver in his office. This time, subsequent to my question, he chose to make his presence known.
“So what should I tell the Rebbe?” Rabbi Hodakov asked me.
“Tell the Rebbe that I need the Rebbe’s blessings to be able to accomplish this, and I hope to put it together to his satisfaction.”
I don’t know how, but I ended up pulling the event together, and it was exceptionally successful. A yeshivah student who is today a respected rosh yeshivah, Rabbi Avraham Gerlitzky, chaired the conference; several of Montreal’s most prominent rabbis and heads of yeshivah spoke; and a few yeshivah students delivered talks on the Talmud.
Afterwards, I wrote all of this to the Rebbe. In his reply, the Rebbe told me how pleased he was. He quoted the saying of our Sages that “one who has one hundred wants two hundred,” concluding, “May G-d help you that next year, it should be even more successful.”
Rabbi Mayer Plotkin is a Montreal-based businessman who has directed many Chabad activities in the area for decades. He was interviewed three times, in the years 2010, 2011, and 2022.
