“Unlikely Allies: The Shocking Nazi Mission to Rescue a Jewish Leader that Shook History”
From Riga, Rebbe Schneerson and his entourage travelled by plane to neutral Sweden, landing in Stockholm before sailing to Gothenburg where they boarded the ocean liner SS Drottingholm. Finally, on March 19, 1940, six months after the German invasion of Poland, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, arrived in New York City to great fanfare. The following year, the Rebbe succeeded in extracting his son-in-law, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, from Marseille in Vichy France before the borders were closed down.
In 1944, Major Ernst Bloch was ousted from the Abwehr on suspicion of involvement in the July 20 assassination plot. He joined the Volkssturm or national militia and was killed in the spring of 1945 while defending Berlin against the Soviet Red Army. Due to his role in saving Rebbe Schneerson and other Jews during the war, in 2010 Israeli rabbi Baruch Kaminsky and Harvard scholar Dan Orbach petitioned the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to be recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations – gentiles like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg who helped protect Jews from Nazi persecution. However, they were unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, Rebbe Schneerson settled in the Crown Heights neighbourhood of New York City and, despite his failing health and the skepticism of his followers, worked tirelessly to build up the Chabad movement and Orthodox Judaism in North America. He founded the first Lubavitcher Yeshiva or seminary in New York City and established numerous printing houses to publish and distribute his own voluminous religious writings and those of his predecessors. In 1948 he established a Lubavitcher village called Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv in the newly-created state of Israel, while the following year he became a U.S. citizen. On account of his failing health, Schneerson arranged for a federal judge to officiate the ceremony at his home rather than travelling to a courthouse. However, Schneerson’s health soon caught up with him, and he died on January 28, 1950 at the age of 69. He was buried at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, with his gravesite, known as “the Ohel”, becoming a popular site of prayer and reflection for Chabad followers and other Jews. His son-in-law and successor as Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, would go on to become a renowned religious scholar and leader in his own right, helping to greatly expand the Chabad Lubavitch Movement around the world. He was even considered by many Chabad adherents to be the jewish Messiah. Menachem Schneerson died in 1994 at the age of 92 leaving no named successor, leading the Chabad community to declare him the last Lubavitcher Rebbe. As a result, his predecessor Yosef Schneerson is often referred to as the Frierdiker or “Previous” Rebbe or sometimes Rayatz – a contraction of Yosef Yitzchak.
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