On Monday afternoon a prison commander stood before a small crowd at the Lukyanivka Detention Center in Kyiv, Ukraine, and acknowledged the unjust persecution decades earlier of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, of righteous memory, at the facility he oversees.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, longtime chief rabbi of Dnepropetrovsk, Soviet Ukraine, was the father of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory.
The most eminent Jewish religious leader remaining in the Soviet Union, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was arrested by Stalin’s secret police—known at the time as the NKVD—at 3 a.m. on March 28, 1939, at his home in Dnepropetrovsk. The next morning the regional NKVD transferred him to Kiev (today’s Kyiv), capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, placing him in the Lukyanivka Detention Center where they beat and interrogated him for months.
At least a dozen Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidim had been arrested in Kiev, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk in the preceding month, and it appears the NKVD was initially planning on staging a large show trial. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s case was later severed from those of the other Chassidim and on Oct. 4, 1939, he was sentenced to five years of internal exile in a remote village in Kazakhstan. As a result of the harsh treatment at the hands of the authorities, he passed away on Aug. 9, 1944, 20 Menachem Av on the Jewish calendar, and was buried in what is today Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Eighty-two years later, on 20 Menachem Av of this year, corresponding with August 3, Ukrainian authorities unveiled a permanent plaque honoring Rabbi Levi Yitzchak inside Lukyanivka, which continues to operate as a prison.
Leadership Amid Persecution
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was born in 1878 and by the time he was in his 20s widely recognized as an authority in Kabbalah and Halacha. After his marriage to the future Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson he lived in Nikolayev, where the couple had three sons, the Rebbe being the eldest. In 1908 he became the chief rabbi of Yekaterinoslav—known in the Soviet era as Dnepropetrovsk and since 2016 called Dnipro—a post he held for three decades, during tumultuous times for the Jews of Russia.
He guided his community through the blood and mess of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent campaign to destroy Jewish life in the Soviet Union. After the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, was forced to leave the USSR in 1927, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak became the leading rabbinical figure in the Soviet Union.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak arranged matzah distributions, funded the families of imprisoned Jews and pushed through construction of an illegal mikvah. In the months before his arrest, he refused to certify government-baked matzah as kosher unless it met his standards, and won that fight.
Just days before Passover of 1939 the NKVD arrested him. The arrest decree declared that “under the guise of religious activity, SCHNEERSON, L.Z., conducts active anti-Soviet agitation of a slanderous and defeatist character.” It continued:
Maintaining regular contact with his son—the chief rabbi of Warsaw, who is a major agent of Polish intelligence—and also with his close relative, the chief rabbi of Riga, SCHNEERSON organizes and consolidates cadres of the anti-Soviet clerical underground and is suspected of espionage. [Additionally,] he uses his right to preach weekly in synagogue to slander Soviet power and its leaders….
The son claimed by the secret police to be chief rabbi of Warsaw—and a Polish agent to boot—was the future Rebbe, who, in fact, was neither. Meanwhile, the “the close relative” with whom he was accused of maintaining connections was the Sixth Rebbe, who likewise was not the chief rabbi of Riga.
Neither was Rabbi Levi Yitzchak a spy for a foreign entity. But that was besides the point. He was an unbending and influential Jewish leader who inspired Jews to hold strong to their heritage, and that was more than enough to make him a target of the regime.
Over the following months he was shuttled between five prisons, including Lukyanivka, and subjected to interrogations that sometimes stretched 15 or 16 hours. Sentenced to five years of internal exile, he was sent to the remote village of Chi’ili on the Kazakh steppe.
At great personal sacrifice, his wife Rebbetzin Chana joined him in Chi’ili, and the two found ways to sustain other Jews in distress even while enduring their own hardship, accounts of which she later recorded in her own memoirs. By early 1944, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was allowed to relocate to the city then called Alma-Ata. Already gravely ill, he passed away on 20 Av, 5704, at the age of 66.
An Apology Half a Century Late
For decades, the Soviet government made no acknowledgment of what had been done to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak. That silence broke in August 1991, when, in the final chaotic months of the USSR, the Ukrainian KGB formally apologized for its treatment of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak.
A senior KGB official told two Chabad representatives that the arrest and everything that followed had been wrong, and that responsibility lay with a previous generation of the agency. During the historic meeting, the Ukrainian KGB also handed over documents relating to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s arrest.
“The KGB has admitted that its forerunner framed and imprisoned a Hasidic Jewish leader, leading to his death … the official Tass news agency reported…,” the Associated Press reported at the time. “Tass said the Ukrainian branch of the security police handed over documents this week to the Lubavitch movement about the persecution of Rebbe Levi Y. Schneerson….”
The KGB files were flown directly to New York and given to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s son, the Rebbe.
Further documents followed in the years after: hundreds more pages from Ukraine in 1993, and additional files from Kazakhstan in 1999, each cache shining further light on Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s heroism under the most brutal and trying of circumstances.
In 2020 the Kazakh government formally designated his Almaty burial site a National Heritage Site, an event attended by representatives of the United States and local Kazakh officials.
Monday’s ceremony at Lukyanivka continued the historic acknowledgment of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s persecution. The dedication was arranged by Rabbi Yonatan Markovitch, who leads Chabad-Lubavitch of Kyiv and also serves as rabbi of Ukraine’s prison service, together with his son, Rabbi Ariel Markovitch. The two spent months securing approval from facility administrators for a permanent marker inside the active detention center.
“There is profound significance in the fact that on the yahrzeit of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, we have gathered to establish a memorial at the very place where his freedom was taken from him simply because he was a rabbi spreading Judaism,” Markovitch said.
The prison’s commander, speaking alongside his deputy, reiterated that Rabbi Levi Yitzchak had been held there for no offense beyond serving as a spiritual leader, and that the episode deserved to be remembered and commemorated, rather than left buried in the past.
Along with the plaque, the facility received a volume of Nitzotzei Levi Yitzchak, a selection of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s own Torah writings.
A Pilgrimage That Keeps Growing
Meanwhile, thousands of people made the long journey to Kazakhstan to spend the hours of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s yahrtzeit at his resting place in Almaty.
“The Rebbe’s father suffered tremendously when he was here, in exile, just him and the Rebbe’s mother, Rebbetzin Chana, alone,” Rabbi Yeshaya Cohen, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Kazakhstan and the country’s chief rabbi since 1994, told Chabad.org in 2024. “Coming here to honor Rabbi Levi Yitzchak is a way of saying his sacrifice was not forgotten, to thank him for everything that he gave us, most of all for his son, our Rebbe.”
At one point during the Stalinist era, exiles and prisoners of the Gulag labor camp system made up half of Kazakhstan’s population. Today, it is a site of a uniquely powerful spiritual pilgrimage.
“My father passed away and is buried specifically in his place of exile,” the Rebbe noted in 1991. “For it is specifically from the very lowest of places that the greatest heights are reached, symbolizing the completion of his lifework in a way of everlasting impact.”
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