Author: Katerina Malakhova
Translated by Lena Lores

On March 8, 1939, in the city of Chernihiv, an uncle and nephew were arrested: Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson (according to documents, born in 1864) and Leivik Abramovich Schneerson (born in 1889). Mendel Leivikovich was the rabbi of the last functioning synagogue in Chernihiv; Leivik Abramovich was a shochet, a poultry slaughterer for Soyuzutil. “My honored father and teacher, Rabbi Menachem-Mendl, of blessed memory, was arrested by the Bolsheviks – may their name be erased – in Chernihiv, on the evening of the Purim holiday in 1939,” his son would later write. “At night on March 8, 1939, there was a knock. My parents woke up and opened the door. Several men entered and said: ‘Put your weapons on the table!’” his daughter would later write.

Searches were conducted at both homes. At the home of Leivik Abramovich on Shilman Street, the passport, several postcards and photographs, an address book, and three “religious books” were confiscated. Left at home were his wife, Khaya Samuilovna, and two children – seventeen year old Avraham and his daughter Maria, fifteen years old and still in school.

During the search of Mendel Leivikovich’s home on Chekhov Street, an entire list of items was seized, among them dollar bills (13 dollars), extensive correspondence in Hebrew with Palestine, envelopes from Danzig, money transfer receipts, a tallit, tefillin, a snuffbox, a library (“117 religious books”), and “palm leaves.” His wife Fenya Izrailevna remained to wait for him. Their four adult children were already living with their own families – some in Chelyabinsk, some in Poland, and some in Paris.

The charges were brought under Articles 54-10, part 2 (anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation) and 54-11 (participation in a counterrevolutionary organization).

Along with the uncle and nephew Schneersons, two more people were arrested: Gavriil Shlemovich Kogan, the shamash of the Chernihiv synagogue, and Samuil Borukhovich Shulman, a ritual slaughterer.

The interrogations continued until the end of August 1939 (Mendel Schneerson was interrogated eight times and Leivik Schneerson fourteen times).

The case ended with a sentence from the OSO (Special Council): five years of exile in Kazakhstan. Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson never made it to Kazakhstan – he died in transit in Kharkiv. Leivik Abramovich Schneerson died in exile on March 12, 1943: apparently, while working as a guard, he froze to death at his post.

Until recently, almost nothing was known about the fate of these two men. Today their story is told by case files R.8840-3-9761 and 9762 of the Chernihiv Regional Archive: one volume of official investigative documents and another with interrogation protocols. The daughter of Leivik Abramovich Schneerson, Margolia Lvovna (Maria Leivikovna) Schneerson, who lived to see the revival of the Jewish community in Chernihiv, published her memoirs about her father. Her struggle for the rehabilitation of Leivik Abramovich, as well as the course of the investigation, is described in detail in an article by historian and head of the Jewish community of Chernihiv, Semen Belman, “Not Listed Among the Rehabilitated.” In 2020–2021 this case was studied by Borukh Gorin; a brief excerpt was published by him in the online album “Harugei Malkhut” (“Those Slain by the Regime”) and later translated into Hebrew.

Behind this case stand not only two individual lives, but – more broadly – the story of the decline of traditional Jewish life in Ukraine. The case of the arrest of Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson and Leivik Abramovich Schneerson turns out to be a “Chernihiv fragment” of a larger mosaic – the persecution of Jewish religious life by the NKVD during the years of the Great Terror. The entire picture has not yet been assembled; only careful reading of such cases allows us to see it in full.

This case has another distinctive feature – the shared family name of the victims. Chernihiv’s rabbi Mendel Leivikovich and the shochet Leivik Abramovich belonged to the Schneerson family – the descendants of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad Hasidism. The influence of the Schneersons, the tzaddikim of the Lubavitch dynasty (the main branch of Chabad Hasidism), in the nineteenth century extended over a significant part of the Pale of Settlement (including the Ukrainian Left Bank and the Kherson region), and in the twentieth century became a global phenomenon, spreading throughout the Jewish world – from the USSR to the United States and Israel.

Unlike many other Hasidic groups that, under Soviet rule, gradually yielded to repression, the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, and his followers in the 1920s–1930s organized a real underground network – with small groups of activists in various cities, safe apartments, and even encrypted correspondence. Their activities are described in the extensive memoir and hagiographic literature of the Chabad movement, as well as in a number of academic studies. Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson himself was arrested in 1927, managed to secure permission to leave the USSR for Riga, and escaped, getting away “only” with the stigma of being an “anti-Soviet activist.”

Against this background, the case of the Chernihiv Schneersons becomes especially interesting. What happened to the many relatives of the Lubavitcher Rebbes during the years of repression? What role did they play in the struggle of religious Jewry for survival? How did belonging to a famous family affect their fate?

Let us begin with genealogy. Who exactly were Mendel Leivikovich and Leivik Abramovich Schneerson in relation to the well-known dynasty?

Here we encounter an amusing difficulty. The fact is that the Schneersons are a family that carefully preserves the custom of naming children after recently deceased and/or prominent relatives. As a result, half the men in this large and venerable family are named Shneur Zalman, and the other half Menachem Mendel; and those who are neither Shneur Zalman nor Menachem Mendel are almost certainly Levi Yitzhak. Mendel Leivikovich (Menachem Mendel Schneerson) and Leivik Abramovich (Levi Yitzhak Schneerson) therefore have many namesakes. One has to be patient to remember and distinguish them all.

Incidentally, the fate of Leivik Abramovich Schneerson, the ritual slaughterer from Chernihiv, strikingly repeats the fate of his namesake and relative – Levi Yitzhak (Leivik Zalmanovich) Schneerson, the rabbi of Ekaterinoslav and father of the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe. We will return to this remarkable parallel.

The Chernihiv rabbi Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson was the son of Levi Yitzhak Schneerson (1834–1878), a rabbi in the Belarusian border shtetl of Poddobrianka. The Poddobrianka rabbi was one of the many grandsons of the Second Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Tzemach Tzedek. It is said that before leaving for Poddobrianka he served as cantor for the Third and Fourth Lubavitcher Rebbes.

Mendel Leivikovich had two brothers – Avraham and Barukh Shneur Zalman. The Chernihiv shochet Leivik (Levi Yitzhak) was Avraham’s son, named after the grandfather from Poddobrianka. And the son of the other brother, Barukh Shneur Zalman – also Levi Yitzhak, named after the same grandfather – was the well-known rabbi of Ekaterinoslav and the father of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Thus, Leivik Abramovich was a first cousin once removed of the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe and a second cousin of the Sixth. Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson was a second cousin of the Sixth Rebbe and a great-uncle (first cousin once removed) of the Seventh. Not the closest of kin, of course – but not very distant either. What role would this relationship play in the story?

According to the “Arrest Questionnaire,” Mendel Leivikovich was born in the town of Lubavichi in the Mogilev Governorate. Being a direct great-grandson of the Tzemach Tzedek in the male line, he quite likely grew up not just in Lubavichi, but at the famous Lubavitch Hasidic court itself. His brother – the Rebbe’s grandfather – was also born there.

The year of birth raises questions. The questionnaire lists 1864 – obviously the date recorded in the passport issued shortly before his arrest. However, Menachem Mendel Schneerson was named after his great-grandfather, the Tzemach Tzedek, who died only in 1866 – so the great-grandson could not have received his name earlier. Chabad sources give 1872 as the year of birth. He also studied in Lubavichi – most likely in the Lubavitch yeshiva. Upon reaching marriageable age (that is, in the late 1880s), he married Liba Leah Menuhin from Homel and apparently moved there – most of their children (from 1891 to 1909) were born in Homel. According to Geni.com, Liba Leah died in 1931; in the 1939 questionnaire a second wife appears – Fenya Izrailevna. Sometime in the 1910s, Mendel Leivikovich received a position as rabbi in the large Jewish shtetl of Repki in the Chernihiv region (in 1897 more than three thousand Jews lived there – 91 percent of the population). In this post he replaced a distant relative, another Schneerson – Shneur Zalman, the son of the rabbi of Rechitsa – who had been enticed from Repki to take a rabbinic position in Starodub. “Rebbe der Repker,” “the rabbi of Repki,” he was called in Chernihiv, according to his daughter.

In 1921 a horrific pogrom took place in Repki: on February 16, a certain ataman Galaka with 130 bandits burst into the shtetl and slaughtered or burned alive from 150 to 200 Jews. The surviving Jews fled Repki – by 1923 only about a quarter of the previous Jewish population remained. In that same year 1921, according to the case materials, Mendel Leivikovich also left Repki and moved to Chernihiv.

It should be noted that Chernihiv is a city where Chabad Hasidism put down deep and lasting roots. “In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most religious Jews of Chernihiv were Chabad Hasidim,” writes the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia. From the mid-nineteenth century, the rabbis of the city came from the Hen dynasty. Peretz Hen (1797–1883), an old Lubavitch Hasid, was the rabbi in Chernihiv with the blessing of the Tzemach Tzedek from 1866 until his death; before that he had been rabbi in the famous Chabad shtetl of Nevel. It is said that he merited to see in person six Lubavitcher Rebbes – from the Alter Rebbe to the Sixth. After him, for about fifty years the community, in the role of spiritual rabbi, was led by his son, Chaim David Zvi Hirsh (Duvid Peretzovich) Hen (1846–1926), a student of the Lubavitch yeshiva – until he left for the Holy Land in 1924. And the position of the government-appointed rabbi of Chernihiv in the 1910s was held by a member of the Schneerson family. In 1907, in the election for government rabbi of the Chernihiv community, Itzhak Zalmanovich Schneerson (1879–1969) was elected; he was the son of Shneur Zalman Schneerson from Repki (the very same one whom Mendel Leivikovich replaced in Repki), who came from the collateral Chabad dynasty of Kopys–Rechitsa. Naturally, he too was a distant relative of our protagonists; his fate is remarkable and deserves a separate essay.

In the early 1920s, during the anti-religious campaign, the new authorities closed all Jewish religious and private educational institutions and opened state schools under the supervision of the Yevsektsiya instead (by the second half of the 1930s these too would be closed). In the second half of the 1920s, synagogues and Jewish prayer houses were also shut down. From 1925, after the departure of Duvid Peretzovich Hen to the Holy Land, the rabbi of Chernihiv became Yehuda-Leib Don-Ihye (1869, Drissa – 1941, Tel Aviv). Coming from a well-known Chabad rabbinic family, he was broadly educated – studied in the famous Volozhin yeshiva, was interested in Zionism, and authored several works on that subject. Until 1936 – when, following his predecessor, he too left for Palestine – Rabbi Don-Ihye headed the Chernihiv community and ran a tiny underground yeshiva at the synagogue.

Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson became a rabbi in Chernihiv in 1921 – therefore still during Duvid Hen’s tenure – and “enjoyed authority among the religious Jewish population.” From 1925 onward, he and Rabbi Don-Ihye held rabbinic positions simultaneously.

Sometime between 1931 and 1934, Mendel Leivikovich renounced his status as rabbi. In the “Arrest Questionnaire” he states: “Until 1931, religious functionary; thereafter supported by my children.” Gavriil Kogan, at a face-to-face confrontation with Schneerson on July 28, 1939, explained: “About five years ago Schneerson Mendel officially announced through the press that he was renouncing the rabbinic office. After this renunciation, Schneerson took part in religious activities only on individual matters.”

It was in this status – former rabbi, active member of the community, adviser on religious affairs – that arrest overtook Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson.

What is known about the second man arrested, Mendel Leivikovich’s nephew, Leivik Abramovich?

About his father Avraham, brother of Mendel Leivikovich, Hasidic sources are silent; we learn the details from the case materials. “My father died very early,” he says during interrogation. In a penitential letter to the authorities from exile in 1940, Leivik Abramovich reports that his father was severely disabled: “I come from the poorest family; my father (deaf and mute from birth) died 37 years ago” (that is, in 1903). Geni.com, however, gives a different year of death – 1920, Rostov-on-Don (possibly yet another confusion). Avraham Leivikovich, nevertheless, was married, and in 1889 in Poddobrianka, Leivik Abramovich was born.

Here is what else he tells during interrogation:
“I was born in the town of Poddobrianka, BSSR. My father was the son of a rabbi – a hereditary citizen [more precisely, a “hereditary honorary citizen of the Russian Empire” – an estate status that, according to legend, was granted by Alexander I to Shneur Zalman of Liadi and his descendants after the latter’s arrest and release from the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Schneersons indeed held this status, although in reality it may have been obtained later. – K.M.] He died very early. At about 9 years old I was sent to a cheder, where I studied until the age of 15, that is, until 1905–1906. After that I found work as a procurement clerk and worked until 1912. From 1912 to 1913 I was a melamed (Jewish religious teacher). From 1913 to 1920 I again worked as a procurement clerk. From 1920 through 1922 inclusive I served in Soviet institutions. From 1922 to 1927 I was ill and on disability. In 1927 I studied in Nevel, formerly of Pskov Province, with a religious slaughterer. After finishing my studies, I received the title of religious slaughterer and took up this work … From 1932 to 1934 I worked as a guard in Soviet institutions and finally, from 1934 until the day of my arrest, I worked at the poultry slaughterhouse as a killer.”

Let us note that he did not learn the craft of slaughterer just anywhere, but in Nevel – today a district center in Pskov Oblast and formerly a center of Chabad learning, a shtetl that, according to Chabad legend, was supposedly founded personally by the Alter Rebbe, when he stopped there for Shabbat on his way under escort to Petersburg. Even its very name, the Hasidim read in their own way: “Praise the Lord with the harp (nevel)” (Ps. 150:3) – “Praise the Lord in Nevel!”

The connection between Chernihiv in general – and our protagonists in particular – and Nevel is one of the hidden springs of this case. Many members of the Chernihiv community studied in Nevel (including the shamash Gavriil Kogan); the first Chabad rabbi of Chernihiv, Peretz Hen, before coming to Chernihiv, had been rabbi in Nevel.

In 1901-1902, part of the famous “Tomchei Tmimim” yeshiva was transferred from Lubavitch to Nevel. In 1924, already underground, a branch of “Tomchei Tmimim” for younger students was opened again in Nevel. The yeshiva was headed by Yehuda Eber – a scholar and musician, an expert in Chabad niggunim. And in 1926, already serving as head of the Nevel yeshiva, he married Frida Schneerson – the daughter of our protagonist, Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson of Chernihiv.

At the beginning of 1929, the yeshiva was shut down, and its leaders were imprisoned. Yehuda Eber and his wife fled to Riga and from there to Warsaw, where Eber once again headed a branch of “Tomchei Tmimim.” “My daughter Frida lives in Poland,” her father writes briefly about her when filling out the questionnaire at the time of his arrest.

In the summer of 1925, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the Sixth Rebbe, opened in Nevel, in addition to the yeshiva, an underground rabbinical seminary (beit midrash le-rabbanim). It operated for only four years, training young men for rabbinic service under Soviet conditions and, as a special focus, producing shochetim of the highest level. “A butcher from Nevel is dearer to me than a ‘scholar’ from Kremenchug,” the Sixth Rebbe used to say.

Apparently, it was precisely there that Leivik Abramovich Schneerson “received the title of religious slaughterer” – not just a title, but the best possible training in this field. From the interrogations we also know the name of the man he studied under: “some religious slaughterer named Geitzhaki.” Obviously, this refers to Zalman Moshe Gaichoki – the famous Nevel shochet, a man of fierce temperament and great spirituality. “A drunk shochet cannot perform shechita,” he used to say. “But if a shochet does not say lechaim, he is even less able to perform shechita, for he does not fear God.”

Therefore, they say, Zalman Gaichoki would always drink on Fridays, before Shabbat, when work is forbidden, and all of Nevel took part in his festive gatherings–gitvaaduyos. Quite possibly, Leivik Abramovich did as well. (“Gitvaadut” (literally “gathering”) is a term in Chabad Hasidism for a festive table gathering for sacred conversation, originally with the Rebbe.)

It was his cousin, the son of Mendel Leivikovich, Shneur Zalman Schneerson, who arranged for him to study in Nevel. It turns out that he too was among the organizers of the Nevel yeshiva. We will return to the role of Shneur Zalman Schneerson in this case later.

At the moment of his arrest, Leivik Abramovich Schneerson was a professional shochet, a poultry slaughterer at the Soyuzutil poultry plant.
What, then, was their crime in the eyes of Soviet power?
Soon after the arrests, both men were formally charged in identical terms – Mendel Leivikovich on March 17, and Leivik Abramovich on the 23rd – under Articles 54-10, part 1, and 54-11, with the wording: “is a member of an anti-Soviet Jewish clerical organization and of an illegal ‘charitable’ society.”

The “Rulings on the Choice of Preventive Measure,” issued on March 4, set out the agent reports that served as the pretext for the arrests and investigation. Rabbi Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson is suspected, in addition to charitable activity, of:
maintaining ties with “abroad” through his son, Zalman Schneerson, who in turn “is connected with the Tzaddik /world Jewish patriarch/ Schneerson,” and of receiving money from abroad,


creating an “illegal ‘yeshivot’ school” at the synagogue, where young people “were brought up in a religious and nationalist spirit,”


receiving from “former rabbi Doniach” (this is how Rabbi Don-Ihye is referred to in the case) in Palestine in 1938 a “sacred palm, which was used by Schneerson for anti-Soviet purposes,”


attempting to organize the religious life of the community – arranging for kosher slaughterers to be hired at the city poultry plant and trying to set up a matzah bakery in the city.




Leivik Abramovich, apart from participating in the “illegal charitable society,” is suspected by the NKVD of the following:
“closely connected with the Tzaddik SCHNEERSON, his cousin, who emigrated abroad in 1929, from whom he receives large sums of money for conducting anti-Soviet work in the USSR,”


having completed an “illegal ‘yeshivot’ school” and conducting anti-Soviet agitation,


being, as a former ritual slaughterer of the synagogue, hired as a poultry killer at the poultry plant.



This information – obtained either from informers or from the “developments” of someone in their close circle – would become the main substance of the interrogations. It is this same information – taking into account the entire specificity of testimony beaten out of the defendants with boots, threats, and who knows what else – that will tell us about the lives of Mendel Leivikovich, Leivik Abramovich, and their community.
Let us begin with the formal charge – participation in an “illegal charitable society.”
Judging by the case materials, a charitable society at the Chernihiv synagogue really did exist. It arose about ten years before these arrests, that is, in the late 1920s, and was engaged in distributing tzedakah (“justice”) among the Jews of Chernihiv – something desperately needed in view of general poverty.

Here is what Mendel Schneerson says in his interrogation on March 17:
“ ‘Poor’ Jews, especially the elderly, often came to the synagogue and collected donations from those who attended. The old Jews began speaking among themselves in the synagogue about the need to collect donations from Jews throughout the city of Chernihiv in order to ‘provide charity’ to ‘poor,’ sick, and disabled Jews. Right there in the synagogue the old men entrusted me, Khrakovsky, and Borshchevsky with collecting and distributing the donations. We collected 120–150 rubles a month and distributed them to the poor – five rubles to some, twenty-five to others, and various small sums. That is how a ‘charitable’ society was created in the city of Chernihiv. The creation of this ‘society’ did not pursue any political goals. It was established thanks to the philanthropic motives of the old Jews – synagogue-goers who follow the Old Testament law…”

According to his own words, Mendel Leivikovich was responsible for recording and distributing the tzedakah:

“I kept records of the funds collected, and then, together with other members of the committee, distributed these funds among the ‘poor’ population.”
“I was on the committee of this society; my time in it dates to 1936,” he say
s at one of the last interrogations, on August 28. “I spent several months in it and then left.” The reason for leaving the committee:

“I considered that being in it was illegal activity, because this committee existed unlawfully.”
However, it was not the distribution of alms itself that was deemed subversive, but the shadow of “abroad” – the suspicion of foreign funding for anti-Soviet purposes. A witness–informant (Margolia Lvovna did not reveal his name, out of concern for his grandchildren; we will not name him either) claimed that the society, founded by Rabbi Doniach and Mendel Schneerson, was connected “with foreign charitable organizations”:

“…The most active period in the Committee’s activity was the years 1932–1934. The Committee members Doniach (Rabbi Don-Ihye), Schneerson Mendel, and Kogan Gavriil systematically wrote letters abroad, reporting in them false and slanderous information about the economic situation of the Soviet Union and about the allegedly disastrous situation of the Jewish population in the USSR.”

Mendel Schneerson consistently denied that the committee had received money from abroad (“the committee received no funds from abroad during the period when I was a member”), insisting that the “committee” distributed alms collected within the community, as is customary among Jews. This did not help: the charge migrated into the bill of indictment – “SCHNEERSON M.L. was a member of the illegal committee of the charitable society. He wrote letters abroad to charitable organizations containing slanderous information about the material condition of the Jewish population, and received currency and parcels from abroad.”
As for any link between this committee and Leivik Abramovich Schneerson, the investigators were unable to find one at all. And yet “active participation in the illegal committee of the charitable society” was “pinned” on him as well.

The real story behind this charge was the aid that charitable organizations from Poland, Great Britain, and the United States were indeed providing to religious Jews in the USSR. “Packages and money from abroad” is the leitmotif of interrogations in very many “Jewish” cases. “Did you receive packages from abroad?” “Did you receive packages from America?” “Your answer lacks all logic and plausibility: someone sends you money and you don’t know this person at all. I demand truthful testimony on the substance of the question.”

In the hungry early 1930s it mattered little to Soviet Jews whom they wrote to for help, or from where the packages came. Help trickled in bit by bit from children, relatives, acquaintances and strangers, and organizations. “Two or three parcels from Paris and three from Poland I received over the last four or five years. These parcels consisted of textiles, which I used for my personal needs. They were sent to me by my children, Zalman and Frida, from Poland,” Mendel Leivikovich admits.

In the early 1930s, a system for distributing charity appeared in Kyiv, and it cost many Ukrainian Jews their freedom. “Someone sent Rabbi Doniach a letter asking him to send a list of Jews in need of help. Such a list was sent by Doniach. According to this list, parcels were sent not only to me but also to other Jews of the city of Chernihiv,” Gavriil Kogan recounts during interrogation.

Mendel Leivikovich says the same:
Question: Who else, besides you, received parcels through Vaishelbaum?
Answer: I don’t know. Rabbi Doniach, who went abroad in 1936, told me that besides me, other Jews in the city of Chernihiv also received parcels through Vaishelbaum. I do not know the names of these Jews.”
(interrogation of Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson, April 2, 1939)
Elhanan Dov Vainshelboym headed the Kyiv underground branch of the London Federation of Jewish Relief Organizations. This charitable organization, founded in 1919 in London’s Soho, sent money and food parcels to the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1930s. It was this organization that Soviet Jews referred to with the colloquial word “Relfederatsiya,” which constantly appears in case files from those years.
Vainshelboym, a Kyiv journalist and Zionist, had once worked as a clerk for the Kyiv branch of the “Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia” and as secretary to the prominent ophthalmologist Professor Max Emmanuel Mandelstam, and later was engaged in assisting Jewish refugees of World War I. In the early 1930s, together with the Chabad Hasid Moshe Kolikov, they established contact with the London committee and created the Kyiv branch, intended to organize support for Jews in Ukraine.

Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, was also connected with this activity. In 1934 the “Relfederation” decided to set up a branch in Poland to expand assistance to Jews in the USSR. Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, who had just moved from Riga to Warsaw, became involved in the effort. “The voice of our unfortunate brothers, inhabitants of the land of Russia, cries out to you…,” he wrote in his appeal for assistance. “Lately, great famine again reigns there, and every day people die…” (quoted from Toldot Chabad be-Russia ha-Sovietit, p. 144). To coordinate aid, the “Committee to Aid the Jews of Russia” (Vaad le-ezrat yehudei Rusia) was founded in Warsaw. The Rebbe reported that by the summer of 1934, four thousand parcels had been sent. Special attention was given to distributing matzah for Passover.

A man by the name of Vaishelboym (or Vainshelbaum), head of the Kyiv “Relfederation” committee, plays a key role in an entire series of cases involving the arrests of Jewish religious figures in March 1939. On the instructions of Vainshelboym and his associate Moshe Kolikov, lists of those in need of assistance were compiled in many Jewish communities – Uman, Dnipro, Vinnytsia. The lists were sent to Kyiv and from there to London. Cantors and shochetim in need received flour for Passover, a few dollars through the Torgsin system – and this was followed by accusations and arrest in March 1939. Apparently, the NKVD identified Vainshelboym and then, link by link, pulled in everyone who had sent him lists of the needy and had received aid. On March 8, Usher Lerner and about a dozen Vinnytsia Jews were taken. On the same day, the Chernihiv Schneersons and two other members of their community were arrested. On March 10, Moshe Kolikov was in Kyiv. And on March 28 in Dnipropetrovsk – Levi Yitzhak Schneerson, the Rebbe’s father. There were other arrests as well – at least in Uman and Kharkiv. And how many more we still do not know…

From the interrogation of the shochet Usher Lerner (Vinnytsia):
Question: What kind of assistance did the representative of the London committee for helping poor Jews, Vainshelboym, provide you?
Answer: When visiting me, Kolikov took lists with the addresses of local shochetim and rabbis, and we received money transfers from abroad.

And here is a description of the case of Levi Yitzhak Schneerson, the Rebbe’s father (Dnipropetrovsk):
“Thanks to Moshe Kolikov, who visited Dnipropetrovsk, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak got in touch with the committee’s representative in Kyiv, Vainshelboym… These were the main questions that interested the investigators: ‘When did you meet Vainshelboym? Did you correspond with him? Whom else from the aid committee did you know? Who compiled the list? Who received assistance? Who baked matzah?’” (I. Osipova, The History of the Hasidic Underground during the Years of Bolshevik Terror, p. 56)

In Chernihiv, judging from the case materials, it was Rabbi Don-Ihye who maintained contact with Vainshelboym until 1936. He collected and sent lists of needy Jews and later forwarded their letters requesting help to the appropriate place. “On Doniach’s advice I wrote a letter in which I explained who I am and where I live. In this letter I asked for financial assistance. I gave the letter to Doniach (I should add that in the letter I asked that money be sent to me through Torgsin), and he sent the letter abroad. … I do not know the address; the address was written by Doniach. From everything it was clear that Doniach kept it secret,” (Gavriil Kogan during interrogation).

Rabbi Don-Ihye escaped by leaving for Palestine in 1936. Vainshelboym perished: “The well-known Zionist leader, Mr. Elhanan Dov Vainshelboym… was ten years ago exiled to distant, cold Siberia, torn from his family, and it has now become known that he died in Siberia, and no one even knows where his grave is.” (Forverts, 1946). Those who had received parcels – Mendel Leivikovich Schneerson, Gavriil Kogan, and others – received five years of exile in Kazakhstan.

The second charge against both men was their connection with the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson. In essence, both were accused of participating in the underground activities of Chabad Hasidim in the USSR solely on the basis of family ties. Did such contacts actually exist, or was the accusation against the Chernihiv Schneersons based only on their surname?

Neither of the two relatives appears to have had direct contact with the Sixth Rebbe. When investigators asked Mendel Leivikovich, “Did you go to the tzaddik Schneerson in Leningrad?” he replied, “Never. I was never in close relations with him.” Whether there was any correspondence between them is unclear; there is no trace of it in the case file. “Mendel Schneerson told you about letters he received from the tzaddik Schneerson. Did he let you read those letters?” the investigator tried to “set up” Gavriil Kogan, arrested in the same case. But he got nowhere: “Mendel Schneerson never mentioned to me any letters from Schneerson the tzaddik and, of course, never let me read such letters. Whether Mendel Schneerson received letters from the tzaddik from Poland, I do not know.”

At the very first interrogation (March 9), when asked about the tzaddik Schneerson, Leivik Abramovich described him at once proudly and disapprovingly, in tones “useful” to the investigator:

Question: Who is this Schneerson the Tzaddik who emigrated to Poland?
Answer: As I have already stated above, Schneerson (the tzaddik) is my relative. In the past he was a hereditary honorary citizen, a religious functionary, a so-called tzaddik, who, while in the USSR, played a leading role among rabbis and other privileged circles of the tsarist period. In the USSR Schneerson had a wide circle of relatives and acquaintances, among whom he enjoyed exceptional authority. He possessed enormous means, with which, contrary to the existing Soviet system, he at one time created a broad network of Jewish religious schools in the USSR, drawing Jewish youth into them.”
(interrogation of Leivik Abramovich, March 9)
Later, Leivik Abramovich admitted that “I wrote to him (the Sixth Rebbe) only once, as far as I can remember, in 1930.”
It is possible this entire passage was written under dictation during the first, harshest interrogation. It is also possible that Leivik Abramovich had complicated relations with religion, with Chabad Hasidism, or with his highly prominent relatives. In this sense, the remark made by Gavriil Kogan during a face-to-face confrontation with Leivik Abramovich is telling: “I had personal scores with Leivik because I tried to persuade the old Jews not to use his services as a slaughterer, since I considered Leivik not quite a religious person.” “Both before the Revolution and after, I was and remain a proletarian, and did not belong to any organizations, having all my life been a non-religious person,” wrote Leivik Abramovich in a desperate petition for a review of his case from hungry exile in Kazakhstan in March 1940.
Thus, the investigators failed to uncover any personal “close ties with Schneerson the tzaddik” in which they suspected the Chernihiv Schneersons: neither man appears to have been his Hasid, they did not travel to the Rebbe, and they did not correspond with him.
However, channels of contact with the Rebbe did exist. First, through Mendel Leivikovich’s daughter, Frida. Together with her husband, Yehuda Eber, head of the Tomchei Tmimim yeshiva in Warsaw, she may have belonged to the circle close to Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson. One could approach the Rebbe through her: “Because my son suffers from epilepsy, I decided to find out from Schneerson the tzaddik whether he knew of a remedy for curing my son. Mendel Schneerson gave me the address of his daughter, who lives in Warsaw, and through her I appealed to the tzaddik…” Gavriil Kogan admitted it during interrogation.

Second, through Mendel Leivikovich’s son, Shneur Zalman.
Shneur Zalman Schneerson was a truly remarkable figure. Born in Homel in 1898, he managed to study at a gymnasium, in 1914 ran away to the Lubavitch yeshiva, served as treasurer of the rabbinical council in Poltava, and later, in 1923, became secretary to the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. He then followed the Rebbe in succession to Rostov, Leningrad, and Moscow. In 1928, when the Sixth Rebbe left the USSR, Shneur Zalman remained as his representative in Moscow – community funds passed through him. “An active clericalist” directing “all anti-Soviet activity in the USSR,” is how investigators described him. In 1935 he went for several months to Palestine and from there to Paris.

He had an excellent command of Russian and was a capable essayist. His 1935 letter to Dizengoff, then mayor of Tel Aviv, about Zionism’s failure to see and understand Russian Jewry, still sounds piercing today: “You overestimate, Jews of Russia, the depth of the feelings and thoughts of your brothers abroad… The international situation is murky. In the dark waters of the international expanses, international carp are swimming. Instead of dealing with your emigration, people want to bring new contingents of Jews into the USSR, to Birobidzhan… Future generations will not understand how they allowed the Jews in Russia to die.” (Quoted in Yan Toporovsky, “I Consider Jewry and Jews Indivisible.”)

That it was precisely Shneur Zalman Schneerson who stood behind almost all communal life in Chernihiv in the 1920s–1930s we learn mainly from the interrogations of Leivik Abramovich Schneerson. The father, Mendel Leivikovich, tried not to say too much. Leivik Abramovich, however, in Semen Belman’s words, “broke already at the first interrogations.”

At one of the first interrogations, on March 22, Leivik Abramovich recounts how his cousin arranged for him to study in Nevel:
Question: Why did you study religious ritual in the city of Nevel in particular?
Answer: Because at that time my cousin, Schneerson Zalman, lived in Nevel.
Question: And what of it?
Answer: At that time Schneerson Zalman was an active organizer of various Jewish religious schools in Nevel, and it was naturally easy for him to place me to study ritual slaughter there, and I could lodge with him.
Question: How did you know that Zalman Schneerson was an active organizer of Jewish religious schools?
Answer: My uncle, Mendel Schneerson, father of Zalman Schneerson, informed me of this.
From this testimony – if it is truthful – we learn that Zalman Schneerson, in addition to “directing all anti-Soviet activity in the USSR,” was involved in setting up the Nevel yeshiva and even lived there for some time, and also arranged for young men from Chernihiv to study there:

“…He showed exceptional concern for the Nevel yeshiva,” says Leivik Abramovich. “He examined the yeshiva students, together with a certain Shmuel Levitin took interest in their progress in study. Zalman often traveled to Moscow and Leningrad. Returning from Leningrad, he would speak about the tzaddik Schneerson Yosef, about how he took a great interest in the yeshiva, and he praised him as a true clerical orthodox figure.”
Mendel Leivikovich, however, supposedly knows nothing about any of this – nor does he know where or how his son is employed:
“…I don’t remember exactly what he was. It seems he wrote then that he worked as an employee at a mill, then as a [private] tutor.”
Question: You are not telling the truth. You told your relative, Schneerson Leivik, that your son Zalman is an organizer of Jewish religious schools in Nevel.
Answer: I say sincerely that I am hearing this for the first time. I know absolutely nothing about any involvement of my son Zalman with the Nevel religious schools, and of course I never told Schneerson Leivik anything of the kind.
Question: Did you persuade Schneerson Leivik to study ritual slaughter in Nevel?
Answer: No. And I never had any conversations with him on this matter.