Levi Yitzchak Schneerson

Forgotten Alter Rebbe's Einiklach

I keep publishing those until it turns into a joke. You have read one, you read all of them. One thing is clear, Schneersons overweeningly acculturated and turned into Communists, Zionists or both, like most Russian Jews. Even in higher numbers due to their wealth. If this is not a typical story, I don’t know what is. Thousands of them, all have the same 4–5 names.

Levi Yitzchak Schneerson

Hadera: Transnational Migrations from Eastern Europe to Ottoman Palestine and the Local Origins of the Zionist-Arab Conflict

Roy Marom; Department of History, UC Berkeley

Hadera: Transnational Migrations from Eastern Europe

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By Roy Marom

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“The Jews in Hadera maintained their Russian way of life. A prime source to
understanding the early history of Hadera is found in Mepi Rishonim (loosely translated as ‘According to the Founders’) [LOL], a volume of interviews conducted by Levi Isaac Schneerson(1888-1975) with the founding members of Hadera, narrating daily life in the early years of the colony's existence. Schneerson compiled early drafts of the book in the 1930s and 1940s, but only published it in 1963. The interviewees devoted considerable place to pre immigration stories about their life in the Russian Empire, revealing the importance they attached to this formative period in their life. Many colonists were elderly or adults with families at the time of their settlement in Hadera. They cherished their Russian acculturation; sipping tea in the evenings from the samovar, reading imported Russian literature, enjoying Russian cuisine. The immigrants used Russian agricultural implements, which proved ill-suited to the conditions in Palestine. In the published edition of the book, recollections of the persecution in Russia before immigration are commonly conflated with the colonists’ interactions with their non-Jewish neighbors in Palestine. This fact suggests that the persecutions in the Russian Empire were a key prism by which the colonists perceived their interactions with neighboring populations.

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Many of Hadera’s residents migrated back and forth between the Russian and Ottoman Empires and were influenced by the political and social developments in both realms. Schneerson provides an illustrative example. Born to a wealthy family in a small estate near the town of Pskov¹, Schneerson’s parents immigrated to Hadera when he was still a child. According to Yair Auron, Schneerson ‘had literary ambitions even in his youth and wrote poetry and essays in Russian. As an adolescent, Schneerson returned to Russia to face the official matriculation examinations in Petrograd. Schneerson became embroiled with the anarchist-individualist movement’, and had to hide with relatives in Dvinsk. After falling ill, Schneerson’s doctor advised him to seek reprieve in hot countries, for which purpose ‘no better place existed than Hadera’. On his return voyage, Schneerson attended the Zionist Congress in Hamburg. As Auron shows, Schneerson's ‘spiritual and linguistic affinity for the Russian culture continued even after he [re]settled in Eretz Israel.

Schneerson was one of many returnees escaping the political unrest in the Russian
Empire. Hadera’s population expanded in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom (1903), and of rising antisemitism after the 1905 Revolution in Russia. This ‘Second Aliyah’ included significant numbers of Socialist pioneers, veterans of Russian-Jewish trade unions and radicalized political parties such as Po‘alei Tsion.”

Update: Levi Yitzchak Schneerson - Take Two.

1. Nevel is in Pskov oblast, district. But who the hell knows.