Residents of the Ukrainian port city of Dnepropetrovsk celebrated the finished renovations of the former residence of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, the father of the late Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
A memorial plaque was dedicated at the home where Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson lived from 1934 to 1939 in Dnepropetrovsk, then known as Yekaterinoslav. The foyer of the home will also host a permanent exhibition in the rabbi’s honor.
The major renovations involved restoration work, erecting a memorial plaque, and creating an exhibition. The Chief Rabbi of Dneprpetrovsk, Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky, along with Israel Embassy attaché, Vladislav Krischanovich, attended the dedication ceremony.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson lived in Nikolayev until 1909, when he began his tenure as the chief rabbi of Yekaterinoslav from 1939. The home was from where the rabbi was arrested on the night of March 29, 1939 by the Soviet NKVD secret police for his outspoken efforts against the Communist Party’s efforts to eradicate Jewish learning and practice in the Soviet Union. After more than a year of torture and interrogations in Stalin's prisons, he was sentenced to exile to the interior of Russia. He died there in 1944.
Rabbi Schneerson was a distinguished Kabbalist. Some of his writings have been published under the name Likkutei Levi Yitzchak. Most of it, however, was burned or confiscated by the Soviet authorities and has yet to be returned to the Chabad movement.
During the German occupation of Ukraine in World War II, the city changed its name to honor a Nazi general commissioner. Dnipropetrovsk was an important center of Jewish life, and 80,000 Jews lived in the city before the Holocaust, but soon after the Nazis conquered the city on October 12, 1941, 11,000 were shot. At the end of the war, only 15 of the city’s Jews survived.