Free Republic

My grandmother came to America -- from Russia with a four-year stopover in Israel -- around 1930. She, with her husband and two infant boys, settled in a Jewish neighborhood in New Jersey. The older boys in the neighborhood welcomed them by snatching their yarmulkes off their heads. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak (the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe) was visiting America around that time. His death sentence had only recently been commuted to life in internal exile, and shortly thereafter he was released/deported from Workers' Paradise. In America Jews lined up to seek his counsel, his blessing. My grandmother came into his room:...