Title: Undaunted: How the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, Saved Russian Jewry, Reimagined American Judaism, and Ignited a Global Jewish Renaissance
By David Eliezrie
Toby Press
Reviewed by Noah Rothstein
At the age of ten, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn was arrested for the first time. He had stepped in to defend a Jewish butcher who was being beaten by a police sergeant in the marketplace of Lubavitch. The sergeant accused the boy of ripping the badge off his uniform and had him thrown into a dark jail cell. Alone and frightened, the boy did what he had been taught: he began to recite the Mishnayot he had memorized. When his father, Rabbi Shalom Dovber, returned to town and heard what happened, he praised his son. “It was a good thing that you did, to protect a decent, upright Jew, and if you suffered for a few hours – so what?”
That episode, which Rabbi David Eliezrie recounts early in his new biography, captures something essential about the man who would become the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. He would be arrested six more times over the course of his life, including a death sentence in the notorious Shpalerka Prison in Leningrad in 1927. He faced down czarist oppression, Soviet persecution, and Nazi terror. He was forced to start over again and again, in Rostov, Riga, Warsaw, and finally Brooklyn. Each time, he rebuilt. The title of Eliezrie’s book, suggested by his three granddaughters, says it plainly: Undaunted.
Undaunted is published by Toby Press under Koren Publishers Jerusalem (korenpub.com). Most Orthodox Jews today know of the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, whose shluchim can be found in nearly every city in the world. Far fewer know the story of his father-in-law, the man who made it all possible. Eliezrie, a Chabad shliach in Yorba Linda, California, spent years filling that gap, traveling to Russia and Latvia to visit the places where the Rebbe lived. He drew on seventeen volumes of the Rebbe’s letters, thousands of first-person accounts, and archival sources that previous historians did not have access to. The result is the first comprehensive English biography of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, known to chasidim as the Rayatz or the Frierdiker Rebbe. It is a work of Jewish history, not just Chabad history.
The book moves chronologically through the Rebbe’s life, beginning with his childhood in Lubavitch, the sma
ll village in White Russia that gave the movement its name. Eliezrie draws on the Rebbe’s own extensive diaries and memoirs, which he began keeping as a boy at the encouragement of his teachers. These early chapters are rich with stories of the chasidic world that existed before the First World War: the pilgrims who streamed into Lubavitch for the holidays, the elder chasidim who shared stories of previous Rebbes, the intense bond between father and son as the Rashab prepared his only child to lead.
The Rebbe’s father was frequently ill and away seeking medical treatment, leaving the young Yosef Yitzchak to find solace among elderly chasidim. “Due to my personal distress, I became a regular visitor to the room of Reb Chanoch Hendel, many times sleeping on a bench,” the Rebbe later wrote. He would sit with them through the night at farbrengens, absorbing their stories and their faith. That world shaped him. It also vanished. The German invasion of 1915 forced the family to flee Lubavitch, and they never returned. The town’s last synagogue was shuttered in 1936. The Holocaust erased the last Jewish presence there.
Eliezrie devotes significant attention to the Rebbe’s years of leadership in Soviet Russia. In 1920, after his father’s death, the Rayatz became Rebbe in Rostov. He was forty years old. The Bolsheviks were consolidating power, and the Yevsektzia, the Jewish section of the Communist Party, had launched a campaign to eradicate Jewish religious life. Synagogues were closed. Rabbis were arrested. Teaching Torah became a crime. The Rebbe responded by building an underground network of schools, mikvaot, and yeshivot. He trained young men and sent them across the Soviet Union to strengthen Jewish communities. He knew the risks. Many of those he sent were arrested, tortured, and exiled to Siberia. Some were executed.
The chapter on the Rebbe’s arrest in 1927 reads like a thriller. He was taken from his home in Leningrad in the middle of the night by armed agents of the GPU, the Soviet secret police. He was accused of counterrevolutionary activity and sentenced to death. International pressure, including intervention from Latvian and German diplomats, led to a commutation of the sentence to exile, and eventually to his release. On 12 Tamuz, the Rebbe walked out of prison. That date is still celebrated by Chabad chasidim as a holiday of liberation.
Forced out of Russia, the Rebbe settled in Riga, Latvia, and then Warsaw. He continued to direct the underground network in Russia from abroad, sending funds and directives through secret channels. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he was trapped in Warsaw.
The rescue effort that followed is one of the most remarkable episodes in the book. American diplomats, working through back channels, reached out to a senior Nazi economic official who had connections to the German military. The request made its way to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence. Canaris assigned a team of officers, some of them of Jewish descent, to locate the Rebbe in the ruins of occupied Warsaw. German soldiers searched the bombed-out Jewish neighborhoods, asking after a chasidic rabbi while the city was still under siege. They found him. The Rebbe and his family were escorted out of Poland, through Berlin, to Latvia, and eventually to the United States. A Nazi admiral helped save a Rebbe. Eliezrie documents this story with care, drawing on interviews with descendants of those involved and historical research by German scholars. It is a reminder that even in the darkest moments, unexpected alliances can form.
The Rebbe arrived in New York in March 1940. He was fifty-nine years old, in fragile health, and had lost almost everything. The final section of the book covers his decade in America. He arrived in a Jewish community that was, in his words, racing down the highway of assimilation. Most American Jews saw Orthodoxy as a relic of the old country. The Rebbe saw something else. He believed that America offered an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild Jewish life on new foundations. He established yeshivot, sent young men to cities across the country to open schools, and laid the groundwork for what would become, under his son-in-law and successor, the global Chabad movement.
Eliezrie tells the story of Rabbi Sholom Posner, who was sent to Pittsburgh in 1943 to start a yeshiva. Posner was forty-two, spoke little English, and had no experience running a school. Local Jewish leaders told him there was no need for a yeshiva in Pittsburgh. He went door to door trying to enroll students. He wrote to the Rebbe about his struggles. The Rebbe responded, “You dig a hole and plant seeds, and I will water it with my tears.” By 1950, the school had one hundred students. Similar stories unfolded in Worcester, Buffalo, Rochester, and a dozen other cities. The Rebbe was planting seeds that would bear fruit long after his passing.
The book does not attempt to cover every aspect of the Rebbe’s life. It does not explore in depth his vast Torah writings, which fill over two hundred volumes. What it does is place the Rebbe in historical context, showing how he navigated the upheavals of the twentieth century while remaining rooted in the spiritual traditions he inherited. Eliezrie writes that the Rebbe “stood at the apex of history,” facing each era’s unique threat to Jewish survival with determination and faith.
One theme runs through the entire biography: the Rebbe’s boundless love for every Jew. Whether writing to a young girl in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, who had started a Shabbos club, or directing the rescue of Jewish children from convents in postwar Europe, he treated each person as if they were the only one who mattered. “I am a Jew who was instilled with ahavat Yisrael,” he once said, “and the idea that we must put our lives on the line for Judaism and for another Jew.”
Eliezrie closes with the story of the Rebbe’s yahrzeit in 1951, when his son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, finally agreed to become the seventh Rebbe. The passing of leadership from one generation to the next is described with restraint and dignity. The seventh Rebbe built on the foundation his father-in-law had laid, expanding Chabad into the largest Jewish organization in the world. Today, the two are buried side by side in Queens, and hundreds of thousands visit their resting place each year.
The book arrives at a moment when stories of Jewish resilience carry particular weight. The Rebbe faced circumstances that would have broken most people. He did not break. He adapted, rebuilt, and kept going. His example speaks across the decades.
Eliezrie quotes the Rebbe’s own summary of his life’s work: “I am my father’s disciple. He endeavored for forty years never to compromise on even the minutiae of Jewish ideals.” That is what it means to be undaunted. It is not the absence of fear. It is the refusal to let fear determine what you do.
For readers who know the Chabad movement primarily through its current presence in communities around the world, this biography offers essential context. It shows where the movement came from and what it cost to build. For readers interested in twentieth-century Jewish history, it offers a window into a world that was destroyed and a leader who carried its memory forward. And for anyone who has ever wondered what it looks like to hold onto faith through impossible circumstances, the Rebbe’s life provides an answer.