THAT’S WHAT MADE ME A CHABADNIK
RABBI TZVI GRUNBLATT
My mother fled from Germany to Argentina in 1940, and my father arrived there after the war, as a survivor of the Nazi labor camps. In Argentina they met and married and, although it wasn’t common there in those years, they built a traditionally observant Jewish home together.
My brother and I went to the Chofetz Chaim school in Buenos Aires, and attended Ezra, a religious youth group. Growing up at home, I would hear about different chasidic streams — like Karlin, Lizhensk, and so on — but the first time I heard about Chabad was at a Passover Seder, when I was eleven or so. My parents used to invite guests who didn’t have a Seder of their own, including non-observant people, and someone remarked that “Lubavitcher chasidim know how to talk to the non-religious, and to bring them closer to Judaism.” This, I understood, was what made Lubavitch unique.
The next year at school, I began studying with Rabbi Berel Baumgarten, who had moved to Argentina as an emissary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe about ten years before and was teaching at my school. It was 1967, before the Six Day War, and I remember how worried everyone was for Israel. They thought there was going to be another Holocaust, G-d forbid, and they wanted to do something to help. Rabbi Baumgarten spoke to us about the tefillin campaign the Rebbe had recently launched.
“For every Jew who puts on tefillin,” he said, “there’s a soldier in Israel being protected.”
When I heard, as a twelve-year-old, that a great Jewish leader had come out with such a clear message — there was something we could do, and the way to have an impact is through Torah and mitzvot — it ignited a fire in me. Together with a friend, I began going out every Sunday to help other Jews put on tefillin. This was my first real connection to the activities of Lubavitch.
A couple of years later, I was in high school, studying secular subjects in the morning and learning Torah with Rabbi Baumgarten in the afternoons. I really wanted to learn Jewish subjects for the entire day but my mother very much wanted me to finish high school. Leaving high school seemed impossible, but something pushed me to ask the Rebbe about it — I had a sense that he was someone that even a fourteen-year-old boy from Argentina could write to. So without telling my parents or Rabbi Baumgarten, I went to the post office and mailed off a letter to the Rebbe.
A month later, I got an answer, signed personally by the Rebbe. He didn’t mention anything about leaving school. He just encouraged me to be diligent in my fulfillment of the mitzvot, to “increase in the diligent study of Torah,” and to recite the daily portion of Psalms every morning after prayers. “This is the way to receive blessings in what you need,” he concluded.
I’m not sure how it happened, but by the end of the year, my parents decided to give me permission to go to yeshivah full time. My uncle went to New York to find a suitable place for me, accompanied by Rabbi Baumgarten. Initially, my father had them visit a few Hungarian-style yeshivas. But those charged high tuition and had all kinds of conditions and concerns
