When Stalin’s Secret Police Persecuted the Chabad Movement as Spies

Sept. 2 2022

Until the Lubavitcher rebbe, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, was forced out of the USSR in 1927, his was the largest ḥasidic court to remain in the country. And even after his departure with many of his followers, Chabad-Lubavitch continued to maintain a significant network in the Soviet Union—much of it operating underground to avoid tangling with the authorities—which remained in place until the collapse of Communism. Many Chabad Ḥasidim nonetheless attempted to flee in the years just after World War II, raising the hackles of the political police. Dovid Margolin writes:

On June 6, 1950, Mikhail Popereka, a deputy minister of the Ukrainian branch of the MGB, [or] Soviet secret police—the precursor to the KGB—drafted an eleven-page memo on the status of the ongoing investigation into the case of the “Ḥasidim” and sent it to Viktor Abakumov, the minister of state security of the Soviet Union, [i.e., the head of the MGB]. Marked with a hand-written “Top Secret,” the report synopsized information gathered by the MGB over the course of its investigation into “the Schneersohn anti-Soviet organization” via foreign agents, informants, and interrogations.

An anti-Soviet center headed by the “tsaddik Schneerson”—standard shorthand for . . . Joseph Isaac Schneersohn in Soviet documents—had been set up in New York by American intelligence under the guise of a yeshiva, a European branch established in France, and all of it connected to an extensive anti-Soviet network within the Soviet Union. This, at least, is how the Soviet Union’s intelligence apparatus saw it, all the way to the top.

It was Abakumov who in October of 1946 first alerted Stalin to the threat posed to Communism by “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” and launched into the post-war anti-Semitic campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” i.e. the Jews. This dark period would see the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee—the Jewish organization Stalin had established during the war to rally support to the Soviet cause and raise much-needed funds, whose members were arrested and shot after the war—and the lead-up to the Doctors’ Plot, in which Jewish doctors were announced to have been part of a vast conspiracy to poison Soviet leadership, the development of which was only halted with Stalin’s sudden death in 1953.

Read more at Chabad.org

More about: Anti-Semitism, Chabad, Joseph Stalin, Soviet Jewry, Soviet Union

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023