Mrs. Batsheva Shemtov
My parents, Eliezer Gershon and Menucha Lazaroff, were both from Russia, where their fathers had both been Lubavitcher rabbis, but I was born in Georgia. It was in the middle of the Second World War, and conditions there were better for Jews than in other parts of the Soviet Union. When I was just six months old and my mother was expecting her second child, my father was taken away to join the army. Unfortunately, he never came back.
Once the war was over, and my courageous mother learned my father’s fate, we managed to get permission to leave the Soviet Union. After wandering through Europe with a group of Lubavitcher refugees, we made it to Paris, where we remained for three years.
From there we joined a group of Lubavitchers who moved to Israel. We settled in the town of Lod, and then moved to Jerusalem in around 1952, when I was ten. By this time, the Previous Rebbe had passed away and was succeeded by his son-in-law. It is interesting how we felt a connection to the new Rebbe right away. Even though my mother knew him from a visit he made to Paris in 1947, I had never seen him at all. There were no videos in those days, and very few pictures, yet we knew that there was some type of tie between us.
My mother would write to the Rebbe all the time. One thing she asked him a few times was about moving to the United States. Things were hard for her in Israel, and her brothers who were already living in North America thought that it would be easier for her to make a living there. For a time, the Rebbe advised her to not come, explaining that the education was better in Israel. Only in 1958 did he tell her that it was okay to come — perhaps because my brother and I were already older, and the Jewish community in America was more established.
So, from age ten to sixteen, I grew up in Jerusalem, attending the Beis Yaakov girls’ school. Now, shortly after the Rebbe had assumed his leadership in 1950, he began encouraging his chasidim to spread Judaism to those who were less observant. In those days, many religious Jews objected to this. How can you mingle with people who do not observe the Torah? they wondered. If you send young people out of the community, you are putting them at risk! Eventually they saw what this kind of work accomplished and they started to do many of the same things, but back then the Rebbe came under a lot of criticism.
Throughout the 1950s in Israel, there were large numbers of Jewish immigrants arriving into the country, being placed in absorption centers and transit camps,
