By Dovid Zaklikowski for COLlive and Hasidic Archives
After the Bolshevik Revolution, wealthy individuals were punished and even executed. If someone owned a million ruble, they were killed; someone with half a million ruble was sent to Siberia, and someone with a quarter-million was sent to prison for up to ten years.
The Rebbe Rashab, Rabbi Sholom Dovber Schneersohn, called a meeting of Jewish lawyers to discuss ways to save the wealthy Jews from this fate.
At every future meeting, the Rebbe would ask, “How many Jews did you save today?”
Once he posed this question to Oskar Gruzenberg, the prominent Russian Jewish defense attorney who was the chief counsel of Mendel Beilis in the infamous case of blood libel.
Gruzenberg proudly answered that on that day he saved 10 Jews from death.
The Rebbe told him, “You do not only need to calculate your successes; you need to calculate how many you could have saved, and what efforts you made to do so.”
Find Hasidic Archives latest books on HasidicArchives.com Story Bites: Short Stories to Savor and The People’s Rabbi: The Life & Legacy of Rabbi Leib Kramer, also available on Amazon Prime.
