The Central Asian Republic adds the tomb of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson to its national heritage.
Kazakhstan’s has added the tomb of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, leader of the Habad-Loubavitch Hasidic movement, to his list of national heritage sites, an American diplomat said.
Paul Packer, chairman of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of American Inheritance Abroad, announced the resolution of a stopover at Almaty’s tomb, where Schneerson was buried in 1944.
Schneerson, the father and predecessor of the movement’s last non-secular leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, “served fearlessly as the rabbi leader of what is now the city of Dnepro in Ukraine” until he was arrested, tortured, imprisoned and sent into exile in 1939 through the repressive regime of Joseph Stalin, then leader of the former Soviet Union Packer said in a video posted monday on Twitter.
The elder Schneerson died on the 20th of Av’s Jewish civilian month, which fell this year on August 10. Thousands of pilgrims stop in their year from the tomb in Almaty, the largest city in the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan.
Levi Yitzchak Schneerson hoped his exile in Kazakhstan would be a “period of darkness,” but was “well received and temporarily became the leader of his Jewish community,” Packer said. His and his son’s training “continues with the lives of Jews around the world.”
Packer thanked President Kassym-Jomart Kemeluly Tokayev and officials for “adding the tomb of the holy rabbi to Kazakhstan’s national heritage list.”
Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of the American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), who was called by Levi Yitzhak Schneerson, saw the call as a tribute to Schneerson’s wife. “The rabbi’s mother wrote in her diary many years ago, in pain, that she had not yet realized the correct popularity of her holy husband,” said Shemtov, whose organization was founded in Washington DC. “She knew her true greatness more than anyone else and made her profound cabalistic writings and preservation imaginable.