about taking in a young boy from Argentina. When my uncle and Rabbi Baumgarten went to Crown Heights, the Lubavitcher yeshivah saw a boy who wanted to learn Torah, and decided to take me in without any conditions.
I arrived as an outsider, as someone with an appreciation for Chabad and its outreach work, but with a different background and a different set of customs. I would have remained that way, if I hadn’t started learning Chasidut. There, I discovered a new world and began to appreciate a new dimension of Judaism. That was what made me into a Chabadnik. I also began to attend the Rebbe’s farbrengens, and although I didn’t understand everything he said, I felt the atmosphere right away: It was like being in a world of spirituality.
Eight years passed, and I was still studying in 770, when Rabbi Baumgarten passed away. Rabbi Hodakov, the Rebbe’s secretary, called me and another Argentine yeshivah student to his office. He said that the Rebbe wanted us to contact the community in Argentina to find out the activities Rabbi Baumgarten had been involved in. Passover was two months away, so he especially wanted to see what had to be arranged to make sure that everybody had matzah.
Rabbi Hodakov also said that the community in Argentina should advise as to who should take over Rabbi Baumgarten’s place. They soon suggested me, so Rabbi Hodakov advised me to write to the Rebbe if I felt ready to accept the offer.
“If the Rebbe thinks that I am appropriate for this position and if this is the Rebbe’s will,” I wrote to him in a letter, then I was ready to devote myself to the position.
In reply, the Rebbe circled the part about being fit for the position, indicating his approval, and added: “Find a shidduch, and then go on shlichut.” First I had to get married, and then I could become an emissary.
Not long after that, a matchmaker suggested the name of my wife, Shterna Kazarnovsky, and we became engaged before Passover. The Rebbe sent me back to Argentina for the holiday, and after our wedding that summer, my wife and I had a brief audience with the Rebbe where we received his blessings and encouragement. We were still very young — I was twenty-three, my wife nineteen — but we were now emissaries of the Rebbe.
In those days, the Jewish community in Argentina was very warm, but there was a lot of ignorance about traditional religious observance. So we worked hard to promote Torah and mitzvot in the Jewish schools of Buenos Aires as well as in the provinces. We distributed matzot, we set up sukkot in the schools, and in 1980 we held a parade on Lag B’Omer for a thousand Jewish children.
People didn’t always recognize the work we were doing, however, which sometimes bothered me. A few years after we arrived in Argentina, there was a meeting of the religious members of AMIA (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina), a local communal organization. They were worried about assimilation among the Jews of Argentina, and a very prominent member of the group remarked that “nobody is doing anything about it!”
The next time I sent a report to the Rebbe describing all of our activities, I mentioned this incident, and how dispiriting that comment had been. “How could anyone say that nobody is doing anything?” I wrote. “We are doing so much!”
In his reply, the Rebbe addressed only this point, expressing his surprise that it had made me feel so down. “It is almost certain,” he wrote, that the reason they have woken up to the issue of assimilation is because they are “envious of your work. And this is easy to understand.”
In the years since we moved to Argentina, Chabad has had an impact on the entire Jewish community there, and others have adopted our approach to outreach — which I understand as a sign that we are on the right path. That is what the Rebbe was telling me: Instead of feeling bad that our work isn’t being recognized, I should recognize that others are being inspired by our efforts.
Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt is the director of Chabad in Argentina, which today includes approximately sixty institutions across the country. He was interviewed in October 2016 and November 2024.
