Mrs. Schneerson from President Street: A Life of Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson

The woman who shaped twentieth-century Lubavitch from a row house on President Street.She was the granddaughter who attended the dying Rebbe Rashab in Rostov. She was the daughter who held her father's power of attorney in Soviet Leningrad at twenty-three. She was the wife who warned her future husband at the door when the secret police came in June 1927. She was the woman who, in the panic of the German advance on Paris in 1940, pushed a fellow Jew out of the path of a falling shell and, when praised for the rescue, replied that for pushing a Jew one must do teshuvah.For thirty-seven years as the wife of the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Chaya Mushka Schneerson lived in a row house on President Street in Brooklyn. She did not attend the public farbrengens. She did not appear at the great gatherings. She introduced herself, when she telephoned anyone in the Lubavitcher community, as "Mrs. Schneerson from President Street," and most of her work was conducted on that telephone, in five languages, with women across six continents.This biography draws on the 2021 publication of her surviving correspondence, on hundreds of hours of oral history interviews, and on the recollections of those who knew her, to reconstruct the life of a woman who refused public visibility while becoming one of the most consequential Jewish women of the twentieth century. From her birth in Babinovitch in 5661 to her death in Brooklyn in 5748, the book traces the formation, the work, and the framework of hashgachah pratis that her father gave her on a park bench in childhood and that organized her operation in the world for the next eight decades.The chassidim, she said, were her children. This is the book of how she mothered them. Read more