Rabbi Shalom DovBer Levine is an author, historian and researcher, who has published many books pertaining to the Chabad Movement and its leadership. He serves as the director and curator of the Chabad-Lubavitch Library. He was interviewed by JEM’s My Encounter three times, in the years 1994, 2007 and 2023.
As a young man, I came to the United States from Israel to study at the Chabad yeshivah in New York and to be near the Rebbe. However, after several years, my visa was about to expire and I was told that, once it did, I would have to return home. I did not want to leave, so I wrote to the Rebbe explaining my problem, but I did not receive a reply.
Meanwhile, Rabbi Yisroel Jacobson, the spiritual mentor of the yeshivah, got me a job as a Hebrew teacher at a school in New Jersey, which qualified me for a green card, and eventually for U.S. citizenship. Only a year later did I learn that the Rebbe was behind this solution to my problem. Even if he didn’t reply to my letter, he thought about me and asked Rabbi Jacobson to find a way to help me. So I knew then that my place was here, and that the Rebbe wanted me to stay.
In 1976, three years after my wedding, the Rebbe offered me a job looking after the central Chabad library, creating a catalog and organizing what was already an enormous collection, comprising some fifty thousand volumes. (Today it numbers more than a quarter million volumes.)
Toward that end, I oversaw a staff that was needed to inventory this huge collection, which included not only books but also handwritten letters and manuscripts. The first effort resulted in an old-fashioned card catalog, which even back then – in 1978! – the Rebbe wanted to put on a computer, but the technology was not yet sufficiently developed. Eventually, we got an expert to write a special program for us so the card catalog could be digitized, and we spent four years inputting all the entries. Today, of course, everything is on the web, where it can be accessed by anyone.
The other part of my job was editing new publications.
Among the first works that I edited was a book of the Halachic responsa (teshuvos) of the third Chabad Rebbe, the Tzemach Tzedek. Many of his rulings had already been published, but the library had acquired even more of his handwritten letters and notes, so the Rebbe asked me to gather them all together, edit them, and prepare a manuscript for print.
Another book – the chasidic discourses (maamarim) of the Alter Rebbe, the 18th-century founder of the Chabad Movement – quickly followed. After that, more teshuvos and maamarim came my way, and, to date, I have edited over 100 volumes of letters, writings and lectures of the Chabad Rebbes over the generations.
In the early 1980s, it became difficult for the Rebbe to walk back and forth between his home on President Street and the Chabad Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. During the week he would be driven by car, but on Shabbat, he and his wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka, would stay in a section of the library, which was next door to 770, at 766.
As things progressed, it became clear to me that this situation – where the Rebbe had to sleep in the library on Shabbat – was not comfortable for him or the Rebbetzin, nor was it comfortable for the workers in the library who would have to invade the Rebbe’s personal living quarters during the week. So, I and Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, the Rebbe’s secretary, decided to move the books out. We did not ask the Rebbe because we knew he wouldn’t want us to go to the trouble, but we thought it was best to do so.
We had all the books taken out, and shelves built for them on the second floor, and then the space was quickly renovated so it would be nice for the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin by the time they returned on Erev Shabbat. But when they came, they were not pleased at all. As Shabbat was beginning, I was summoned to see the Rebbetzin in the library.
“Why did you have to do this?” she remonstrated. “We could have managed. We didn’t want the whole library rebuilt because of us.”
I tried to explain that we didn’t do it just for them, but for us – because we, the library workers, were uncomfortable invading their personal space, and I was the only librarian who would enter the room to access the books there, which was an inconvenience. She understood. But the Rebbe required more explaining.
When I heard that the Rebbe was still upset, I wrote a letter assuring him that we did not spend unnecessary funds to make him more comfortable; rather, we did it for the library, which needed more room in any case. He answered that if this was true, then he would accept it, although I had the feeling that he was not completely mollified.
When it came to his personal comfort, the Rebbe would not allow us to spend any money, even as he authorized the expenditure of thousands of dollars to rescue precious Jewish manuscripts from foreign hands and make them available to Jewish scholars. He was such a great yet such a humble man.
