Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn - Launch of Lubavitch Activities in The USA

Launch of Lubavitch Activities in The USA

During the last decade of Schneersohn's life, from 1940 to 1950, he settled in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in New York City. He was often too ill to stand. The community in Crown Heights remained small, and the synagogue records show that at some points during 1950 they struggled to form a regular minyan.

Schneersohn was already physically weak and ill from his suffering at the hands of the Communists and the Nazis, but he had a strong vision of rebuilding Orthodox Judaism in America and he wanted his movement to spearhead it. In order to do so he went on a building campaign to establish religious Jewish day schools and yeshivas for boys and girls, women and men. He established printing houses for the voluminous writings and publications of his movement, and started the process of spreading Jewish observance to the Jewish masses worldwide.

He began to teach publicly, and many came to seek out his teachings. He began gathering and sending out a small number of his newly trained rabbis to other cities – a trend later emulated and amplified by his son-in-law and successor Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

In 1948 he established a Lubavitch village in the Land of Israel known as Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv, on the site of an abandoned onetime Arab village of Safria.

He died in 1950 and was buried at Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, New York City. He had no sons, and his younger son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson ("The Rebbe") succeeded him as Lubavitcher Rebbe, while the older son-in-law, Rabbi Shemaryahu Gurary led the Chabad Yeshiva network Tomchei Temimim.

After Schneersohn's passing, his gravesite, known as "the Ohel," became a central point of focus for his successor, who would visit it regularly for many hours of prayer, meditation, and supplication for Jews all over the world.

After his successor's passing and burial next to his father-in-law, philanthropist Joseph Gutnick of Melbourne, Australia, established the Ohel Chabad-Lubavitch Center on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens, which is located adjacent to the joint gravesite.