Leonard Holtz found an archive of letters in a shoebox. Then he and his wife gave it to the Chabad Library
By: Dovid Margolin
In July of 1941, a worried Rabbi Shimon Leib Greenberg of Chicago sent a letter to a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied France who had just arrived in New York. The Warsaw-born Greenberg had lived with his wife and stepson in Paris before moving to the United States in 1939, intending to send for his family when he could. In September of 1939 World War II broke out, and by early summer of 1940 the Germans had captured Paris and communication was severed. Did the recent arrival have any word of Greenberg’s loved ones?
On Monday, July 14, 1941 (19 Tammuz, 5701), the refugee responded in a hand-written letter. He and his wife, he wrote in Hebrew, had left Paris just days before the Nazis’ arrival on June 14, 1940. Before that, he had seen Greenberg’s stepson, a young man named Yaakov Potlik.
But that was then. “A few weeks before our recent trip from France I received regards from Potlik from acquaintances who had come [to Marseille] from Paris and had seen him there,” he wrote. “But they don’t know what the current situation is, in particular since they last saw him before the current chaos in Paris, when [the Nazis] took many of our brethren Jews and sent them to work” in labor camps.
The author of the letter helpfully writes out an address for Rabbi Zalman Schneerson, a Jewish activist aiding refugees in Marseille, and suggests that Greenberg maintain contact with him in order to send food, money and immigration documents to his wife and stepson.
He continues, “Currently, it seems to be impossible to send money [to occupied France] through American Express. However, there might be a way to send money through [another recently arrived immigrant] Mr. [Leibish] Heber, and it is best to verify that with him directly.”
The new refugee was Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, still nine years away from assuming his father-in-law’s position as Rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. The Rebbe had arrived in New York on the S.S. Serpa Pinto three weeks earlier together with
his wife, the Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka.
Greenberg was an eminent Chabad Chassid who had studied at the yeshivah in the White Russian village of Lubavitch, and the Rebbe had known him in Poland and then during their years living in Paris. In response to his request for information, the Rebbe wrote Greenberg his detailed letter and dispatched it to Chicago, where Greenberg was living at the time.
The letter was among Greenberg’s possessions when he relocated to Hartford, Conn., in 1947, but remained entirely unknown to the world. Last Sunday, on June 13, 2021, Leonard Holtz discovered it in a shoebox in his Hartford-area basement, nearly 80 years to the day of its writing. The letter is a unique historical document because it is one of only two known surviving letters written by the Rebbe in the Jewish calendar year 5701, or October 1940 to September 1941. In fact, the next known letter is dated May of 1942.
More, this newly discovered letter sheds light on the Rebbe’s efforts to help his fellow Jews stranded in the Holocaust that would consume European Jewry. The curious fact is that despite the Rebbe’s voluminous output (his published letters alone fill 33 volumes), almost none of his early war-time correspondence have surfaced—though he certainly wrote correspondence during this period. That means there are surely many more out there.
From the moment of the letter’s providential discovery the team of scholars at Vaad Hanachos B’Lahak (Lahak), led by Rabbi Chaim Shaul Brook, worked for days straight to bring it to print, adding copious background and sources in the footnotes. As he went through last-minute proofreading, Brook commented that there are several layers of meaning in the letter.
“It is the first time that we see the Rebbe himself speaking of his escape from Paris to Vichy France and then on to America,” he explains. “We knew this information from other testimonies, but here the Rebbe describes it himself. It’s a major revelation.”
The letter was published at the conclusion of Shabbat by the Kehot Publication Society in a pamphlet together with a Chassidic discourse delivered by the Rebbe in 1974. It also includes a second recently discovered letter—this one from the summer of 1942—addressed to a Chabad Chassid in a refugee camp in Jamaica, to whom the Rebbe notes he is sending seforim (books) and prayer books for the Jewish refugees in the camp.
But the 1941 Holocaust-era letter almost didn’t reach the light of day. That is, until Laura Zimmerman asked her husband, Leonard Holtz, the director of the Hebrew Funeral Association in Hartford, to perhaps spend some time clearing out their basement of the many old books and papers that had piled up there over the years.
The day was Sunday, June 13, 2021, or the 3rd of Tammuz on the Jewish calendar, which was also the 27th anniversary of the Rebbe’s passing. But the story doesn’t end there.
“I thought to myself, ‘Is this real?’ ” an emotional Holtz tells me by phone about the hours after his discovery, and the otherworldly events that followed. “Could this really be?”
And then: “Why did the Rebbe pick me?”
Hartford Roots
Leonard Holtz is a collector by nature. Over the years, he has built up a large collection of Civil War materials and documents. He reveres old things, particularly Jewish ones: the musky smell of old books; the stamps denoting they came from Vilna, Kovna or Warsaw; the fading, swirling ink of handwritten Yiddish letters. To him, these aren’t just items but pieces of history, a paper trail attesting to the lives of individuals who inhabited a world that no longer exists.
This can be a difficult trait, particularly for someone like Holtz, who directs a Jewish funeral home established in Hartford in 1898. From time to time, people ask Holtz to bury the sacred Jewish books and belongings—otherwise known as shaimos or geniza—of their loved one. But as a collector, Holtz finds it difficult to just discard these items, even if it’s being done in accordance with Jewish law, which often requires their burial.
“It’s hard to bury these old seforim, so I have the habit of holding on to some of them and asking around if anyone wants these things,” he explains.
The Holtz family’s roots go way back in Hartford, where Leonard’s German-Jewish great-grandfather settled in 1865 after serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. The veteran was among the founders of Ados Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in Hartford of which Holtz’s father, the late Herman Holtz, was still president when it closed in the mid-1980s, after most of the city’s Jews had relocated to other parts of the city.
How Rabbi Shimon Greenberg made it to Hartford is another story. Born in Poland around 1893, he traveled to White Russia and studied at the famed Lubavitcher yeshivah in Lubavitch. Greenberg was a prolific chazzan, and a number of his original compositions are considered Chassidic classics—among them a tune set to the words Al Achas from the Haggadah.
Back in Poland, he married a young widowed mother by the name of Chana Potlik (nee Hurewitz.) In 1932, the Sixth Rebbe—Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory—sent Greenberg to Paris as his emissary, where he raised funds for the yeshivah, worked as a shochet and ritual scribe, and taught Torah. Finding it difficult to support his family, he set out for America in 1939, where he first settled in Chicago. It was from there that he reached out to the Rebbe; tragically, as Lahak’s research shows, Chana Greenberg and her son Yaakov Potlik were deported to Auschwitz in 1943.
In 1947, Greenberg moved to Hartford and married a second time. His second wife was likewise a widowed mother, whose name, remarkably, was also Chana Hurewitz—though not seemingly related to his first wife. There, Greenberg worked as a rabbi at the Hebrew Home for the Aged, taught Torah at the local Young Israel synagogue and was a renowned chazzan in the city before passing away in 1959. “He was also a leading figure in the pietist movement of Lubavitch,” his death notice reads, “and was a disciple of Rabbi M.M. Schneerson.”
The now-twice widowed Mrs. Hurewitz Greenberg turned to Herman Holtz, funeral director of the Hebrew Funeral Association in Hartford to conduct the funeral. The elderly Chassid’s services were held at Young Israel of Hartford, but instead of being buried in Connecticut, he was transported to New York and interred at Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, N.Y., just a few rows away from the Ohel of the Sixth Rebbe, which, since 1994, is the site of the Rebbe’s resting place as well.
In 2015, Greenberg’s stepson from his second marriage, Samuel Meyer Hurewitz, passed away at age 80 in Hartford. This time it was Leonard Holtz who conducted the funeral. At the time, he also received a few boxes of shaimos that had once belonged to Rabbi Shimon Greenberg, including an old, uncovered shoebox, which he placed in his basement intending to one day bury with other old books.
(www.Chabad.org)
(To Be Continued Next Week)
