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Alone Against an Empire:The Rebbe Rayatz’s one-man war on Stalin’s killing machine

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  | Magazine Feature |  By  Gedalia Guttentag   | February 3, 2026 Email Print All credit goes to GEDALIA GUTTENTAG and the Mishpacha Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Baltimore Sun The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe defied Stalin’s secret police to create an underground Jewish movement, then escaped to America and faced down assimilation on the way to creating today’s global Chabad. What lay behind Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn’s one-man stand? It was 1920, and after three brutal years of Soviet enlightenment, the writing was on the wall for Russian Jewry. L enin and his henchmen were still struggling to assert control of the massive empire of the czars, but in one area at least, they were making progress. The Communist Party’s Jewish Section — known as the Yevsektsiya — was well into its campaign to utterly destroy Jewish life in the USSR. The drive to turn Jews into the new  Homo Sovieticus  was led with an extraordinary degree of hatred by a group of Jewish reneg...
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Watch: Rav Hershel Schachter Calls Atzeres Tefillah “Utterly Ridiculous,” Says “Our Hashkafah Is More Normal”

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  All credit goes to Matzav.com and yutorah.org November 18, 2025 at 9:15 am 119 Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva >>Follow Matzav On Whatsapp!<< [Video below.]  A newly surfaced video of Rav Hershel Schachter,  rosh yeshiva  at Yeshiva Rabbeinu Yitzchok Elchonon (RIETS) of Yeshiva University and a leading  posek  for the Orthodox Union, features comments from him regarding the recent  atzeres tefillah  in Eretz Yisroel protesting the drafting of  yeshiva bochurim  into the army. In the video, Rav Schachter dismissed the large public gathering—attended by leading  gedolei Torah  and hundreds of thousands of people—as “utterly ridiculous.” “They just had in Eretz Yisrael, they had this whole  yom atzeret ,” he said. “I think it was utterly ridiculous. The country is at war and no one wants to go to the army? I think the whole thing was ridiculous. I don’t think anybody from YU would ever participate in ...
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The Changing Face of Ohr Somayach

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 All credit goes to www.rationalistjudaism.com Natan Slifkin Feb 25, 2010 Way back when I used to teach at Ohr Somayach, it was a relatively moderate, open-minded place. True, Rabbi Nathan Lopez-Cardozo was no longer teaching there. But there was still my good friend Rabbi Mordechai Becher (now at Gateways). Rabbi Dovid Orlofsky was teaching that the universe is billions of years old and Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb was saying that Chazal could have been mistaken in science. Most significantly, Rav Nachman Bulman,  ztz"l , an extremely special person (pictured here), was the  mashgiach . I had some discussions with him about Torah/science issues. He told me that Daat Emet, who had just started disseminating their anti-religious literature, was doing a service for the frum community in that they would force it to confront these issues. And he read my early writings on these topics, and encouraged me to publish them. Rav Bulman passed away before the ban on my writings, which,...
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