Rabbi from Warsaw

On a Manhattan pier, one day last week, 75 cantors chanted. Five hundred rabbis, 500 pious Jewish laymen craned at a stout, full-bearded man in a fur hat debarking from the Swedish liner Drottningholm. From his long wanderings in Eastern Europe's ghettos, great & good Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn at 60 had come to make his home in the U. S.

Rabbi Schneersohn is head of a Hasidic sect (150,000 in the U. S.) called the Habad. Hasidism is the faith which Baal Shem Tob, Polish mystic and healer of the 18th Century, offered to downtrodden Jews who had turned away from the dogmatic formalism of their rabbis. The Hasid sang, danced, took joy in his faith, felt himself close to God. At his worst a dreamy, soft-handed, mystical fellow, the Hasid became the butt of many an Eastern European joke. After the time of Baal Shem Tob there arose a Habad ("rational") Hasidism, which urged men to be intelligent in their piety. The Habad leader was Rabbi Schneer Zalman, first of a line which took the name Schneersohn and the title Lubavitcher Rabbi--from their home town in Smolensk Province, Russia. Joseph Isaac Schneersohn is fourth in this line.

Head of a Yeshiva (seminary) in Tsarist Russia, Joseph Schneersohn tried to keep religious Judaism alive under the Bolsheviks, was arrested and sentenced to death in 1927. He was released at the behest of Senator Borah, other potent outsiders. Rabbi Schneersohn moved to Riga, then to Warsaw, where he became Chief Rabbi and founded ten Polish Yeshivoth. He was still in Warsaw when the German bombers came over last autumn. He left the building he had lived in for six weeks just before a direct hit demolished it. The Germans let him leave Poland, but the bombing left the Rabbi shellshocked. To his friends among the 1,000 Jews who welcomed him to Manhattan last week, the Lubavitcher Rabbi could scarcely speak.

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