Description:
It was the author, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn of Lubavitch, who spearheaded the underground Jewish resistance to Stalin's ideological Final Solution - and paid for it by brutal incarceration and a capital sentence. From this he was miraculously liberated on Yud-Beis Tammuz, 1927, exactly 70 years ago.
In this unparalleled historic first-person description the Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe graphically documents the cold truth behind the cynical Stalinist facade of religious tolerance - midnight arrest, intimidation and interrogation, incarceration without trial, the humiliation of prison routine, the torture of dissidents, and so on.
This description, which he entitled Reshimas HaMaasar ("An Account of the Imprisonment"), appears as part of Volume IV of Likkutei Dibburim, both in the Hebrew original and in its English translation. Unfortunately, not all of the author's manuscript has come to light.
An invaluable companion volume to the above document is Defiance and Devotion (Kehot, N.Y., 1996), selected discourses delivered by the same illustrious author during the period of his arrest and liberation. Fearlessly, he called on his chassidim to defy the mighty Soviet regime, even at the cost of literal self-sacrifice, in order to secure the survival of meaningful Jewish life.
