The Chofetz Chaim would relate the following story. In 1794, R' Yaakov Kranz, known as the Dubno Maggid, once met a blind widower strolling with his son in the streets of Vilna. While most people didn’t pay much attention to them, the Dubno Maggid greeted them warmly. They opened up to him telling of their great poverty and the lack of heat and food in their home. As a result, the Dubno Maggid welcomed them into his house so they could warm up and eat dinner.
He also hired a tutor to teach the son Torah, and he himself would learn with the boy the aggadic (i.e., non-legal) parts of the Torah, meeting with him in regular Friday night sessions. From then on, they became part of the Dubno Maggid’s family. He continued to care for this child after the child’s father, R' Yehuda Aharon, Rav of Komarow, passed away, before the age of 40.
This child ended up becoming the great Torah personality, R' Shlomo Kluger.
The Chofetz Chaim would say that many people saw the blind pauper walking with his son and felt bad about their predicament. But whereas for them, that’s where it ended, for the Dubno Maggid it began. He showed concern, welcomed them, fed them and paid for a tutor for the child. If the Dubno Maggid had not reached out to them, the Jewish Nation would have been bereft of a great Torah personality. The Chofetz Chaim would conclude, “How many more Shlomo Klugers are out there that we just pass by?”
Another incredible account is told, this time with R' Nachman of Breslov. An old tzadik once confided to R' Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) that in his younger years he was all alone with no one taking an interest in him. He said, “Had someone encouraged me during those years, I would have been a different person. I could have accomplished ten times more in my lifetime.”
Interestingly, in his work Chochmas Shlomo, Even Ha'ezer 1:1, R' Kluger analyzes whether one fulfills the mitzvah to “be fruitful and multiply” through adoption.
It is interesting to note that R' Nachman of Breslov (as well as the Baal Shem Tov) was a descendant of the Maharal. Another intriguing fact is that at times R' Dessler, the Mashgiach of Ponovezh, quotes R' Nachman of Breslov (see for example Michtav M’Eliyahu 3:177).
In the diary of Emanuel Ringelblum, he describes a description of life in the Warsaw ghetto. “In the prayer house of the Breslov chassidim on Nowolipie Street there is a large sign: ‘Jews, never despair!’ The chassidim dance there with the same religious fervor as they did before the war.”
In 1979, former President Jimmy Carter saved R' Nachman Breslover’s kever from being buried by a Soviet high-rise building project. R' Nosson Maimon, co-founder of the Breslov Research Institute and former head of the Breslov World Center, said that the story began when Mrs. Zabada, the woman in whose backyard the kever was located, told Breslovers of the Soviet plan to build high rises over the mass grave of victims who died in a 1768 massacre where R' Nachman was buried. R' Maimon said, “She had been informed by the local authorities that all the houses there, including hers, were to be replaced by nine-story buildings. ...It was her concern for her garden and her chickens that really moved her, and she used the importance of the shrine in her backyard.” Israel-based Breslov leader R' Michel Dorfman held an urgent meeting in Yerushalayim where he noted that since the building plan was not local but part of a Soviet five-year plan, the best course would be to have the American government intervene. R' Dorfman flew to the United States, where the Lubavitcher Rebbe instructed activists to enlist the help of R' Pinchas Teitz of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who had invited Jimmy Carter to speak in Elizabeth during his election campaign. As a result, R' Teitz had a letter from Robert Lipshutz, Jimmy Carter’s liaison to the Jewish community, stating, “Should you ever need to call on the White House, you are welcome.” A detailed cover letter explaining the situation in Uman and the importance of the kever was submitted to Lipshutz at a meeting arranged by R' Moshe Sherer of Agudas Israel. Shortly after the 1979 Vienna Summit, where President Carter and Russian President Leonid Brezhnev met, the Russian ambassador said that Brezhnev had personally received the request. The high-rise project was to go ahead with the exception of R' Nachman’s plot at 1 Belinski Street on the corner of Pushkina Street, which was to be declared an international shrine.
Many times R' Chaim Kanievsky would personally give a person a small sum of money like 100 shekel toward printing a future sefer of theirs (if he felt they were a capable Torah scholar of authoring a sefer) as a show of moral support.
