Menachem Shmuel David Raichik
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Rabbi Menachem Shmuel David Raichik | |
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 Rabbi Menachem Shmuel David Raichik (second on right), with a delegation representing the "American Friends of Lubavitch", presenting a menorah to president Ronald Reagan, White House, 1984. | |
| Born | March 15, 1918 |
| Died | February 4, 1998 |
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Rabbi Menachem Shmuel David Raichik (March 15, 1918 – February 4, 1998) was an Orthodox rabbi of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, and the pioneer of Chabad's activities in Los Angeles, California. Raichik served as a shaliach for the sixth and seventh Lubavitcher Rebbes.
He was born in the Polish town of Mlava. In 1936, upon the advice of the famous Amshinover Rebbe, the young Raichik enrolled in the Yeshiva Tomchei Temimim in Otwock, Poland, where he learned the Chabad doctrines of synthesis, scholarship, and personal refinement.
Fellow students recall his meticulous observance of the mitzvot and his passionate way of prayer. His Shabbat morning prayer ritual would last as long as six hours, and included lengthy meditations in the Chabad tradition. At night, when reciting the bedtime prayers, Raichik would often become engrossed in introspection into the wee hours, when the time came for morning prayers. During the day he employed his sharp mind in deep Talmudic study.
It was in the Lubavitch yeshiva that the young Raichik became attached to the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn. In a short time he became one of the select group who memorized and reviewed the Rebbe's discourses, known as choizrim.[citation needed]
During World War II
With the outbreak of World War II at the end of 1939, Raichik and his fellow yeshiva students were forced to flee Otwock. Shortly before Chanukah that year, Raichik and a friend reached Warsaw, Poland, where the Rebbe guided them and gave them money to escape to Vilnius, Lithuania.
Once he reached Lithuania, Raichik labored tirelessly to save fellow students from German-occupied Poland and the Baltic states. Despite his own capture once by border police, he organized smuggling operations, bringing many refugees across the border to safer territory.
When Japan's consul to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, sacrificed his diplomatic career to issue Japanese passports to Jewish refugees, Raichik helped procure visas for his fellow students and others. After spending close to a year in Kobe, Japan, the yeshiva relocated again, this time to Shanghai, China, where many other Jews spent the remainder of the war years as well.[1] In Shanghai, Rabbi Raichik became the foundation for the uprooted Lubavitch yeshiva. In addition to overseeing the daily running of the school, friends recall how lovingly he served as surrogate parent to the younger students. Though given many chances to leave, Raichik chose to stay in until the very last student was able to leave, in 1946.
Throughout that period Raichik was in communication with the Rebbe who, in addition to massive fund-raising and rescue efforts for Jews in German-occupied territory and Russia, raised money to send to Shanghai.
