Community’s Bold Plea Got a Reversal from the Rebbe

By Dovid Zaklikowski for Hasidic Archives

One day in 1966, Rabbi Chaim Gutnick arrived in Montreal with a request for Rabbi Leibel Kramer, the director of Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim – Rabbinical College of Canada.

The Rebbe had sent Rabbi Gutnick, a respected Australian rabbi and a leader in the Melbourne Chabad community, to ask Rabbi Kramer to choose six students to help him establish a beis medrash in the Australian city.

It was a new concept: the students would leave their own yeshiva in order to assist a smaller institution and a less established community far away in building a yeshiva. Ultimately, a group of older students from the Montreal and Newark Lubavitch yeshivas went to assist in establishing the Melbourne yeshiva.

For the next decade, young men would take part in this mission, with the yeshiva sending shluchim to Melbourne for two-year stints. It was a success. The American and Canadian students served as the foundation of the new institution and had a great influence on a generation of Australian students.

Before the fifth group was to return and a new group was being selected, the Rebbe wrote to the yeshiva that students would no longer be sent on his behalf. Borrowing a concept from Jewish law regarding carrying in the public domain, he wrote: “It has already reached the time that ‘a living thing carries itself.’”

This was devastating for the yeshiva. However, the Rebbe was saying that a yeshiva should be able to survive with local students and should no longer need to rely on support from abroad.

The community wrote to the Rebbe, explaining that the student shluchim strengthened not only the yeshiva but also had a profound impact on the entire Jewish community, something the younger students could not achieve on their own.

The Rebbe then gave the green light for the central United Lubavitcher Yeshivoth to continue sending shluchim.

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