My parents were both brought up in chasidic families — my father’s family was Vizhnitz and my mother’s Ger — and both came to America as children in 1920. I was born in 1941, and grew up in Flatbush, in an area that was almost entirely Jewish, but barely had a minyan of Shabbat-observant Jews.
My father, Zalman Aryeh Hilsenrad, began working for the Orthodox Union (OU) as a young man, and a couple of years before I was born, he became the first executive director of the organization. In a time when many Jews were uninterested in the old ways and were becoming more Americanized, he worked to revitalize observant Judaism.
In the 1940s and ‘50s there weren’t many chasidic courts one could attend in New York, and my father would go to many of them, but his closest connection was with Lubavitch.
For as long as I can remember, my father had a picture of the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe on his desk, and he would visit him regularly.
In 1949, when I was eight years old, my father took me along with him to a meeting with the Previous Rebbe.
Although my father was fluent in Yiddish, he had a hard time understanding the Previous Rebbe. As he explained to me, the Rebbe had a speech impediment, which was in some way connected to the suffering he had endured under the communists in Russia. Therefore, the current Rebbe was also present in order to act as an interpreter and to facilitate the conversation with his father-in-law.
I didn’t understand a word of Yiddish, and my father translated for me.
When we came into the room, the Previous Rebbe asked me something.
“The Rebbe wants to know if you wear tzitzit,” said my father. Tzitzit are the fringes we are commanded to wear on the corners of any four-cornered garment.
“Yes,” I replied. In fact, in the school that I went to at the time, I was probably the only boy who wore tzitzit. So it was actually somewhat unusual, and getting someone to continue wearing was an achievement.
“Do you know how many strings there are on the garment?”
I didn’t know, so the Previous Rebbe prompted me: “Well, each corner has eight strings, and there are four corners. How much is eight times four?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Ahh,” he said, and then he went on to draw out a message about the importance of wearing tzitzit. Lev, the Hebrew word for “heart,” has the numerical value of thirty-two. This meant, as he put it, that “if you want to always have a yiddishe lev,” that is, a Jewish heart, “make sure to always wear tzitzit!”
You can be sure that after hearing that, I never missed a single day of wearing tzitzit. Even if others did not, I knew that if I kept on wearing them, I would be in good shape.
After the passing of the Previous Rebbe in 1950, my father continued to visit the new Rebbe, probably a few times a...
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