Today, the 3rd of Kislev, marks the 121st anniversary of the birth of Dov-Ber Schneerson, the brother of the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He was the middle son of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, the Chief Rabbi of Yekaterinoslav from 1909-1939, and his righteous wife, Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson.
Dov-Ber Schneerson was born in 1904, shortly before the family of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson and his wife Chana moved from Nikolaev to Yekaterinoslav. Although Dov-Ber, like his brothers, possessed remarkable abilities and was an excellent student, he had very weak and fragile health and often required constant medical care. After the arrest of the Rebbe’s father by Stalin’s NKVD in 1939, his wife followed him to his place of exile in Kazakhstan, but it was clear to everyone that Dov-Ber would not survive the extreme hardships of the journey and the conditions at his father’s place of exile. He remained in Dnipro under the care of relatives and close ones. After the Nazi occupation of Dnipro in 1941, Dov-Ber Schneerson, along with other patients from the hospital on Igren, was executed by the Einsatzgruppe “Z-6.” After Ukraine gained independence and Jewish life was revived in the city, a memorial marker was placed on the mass grave.
The account of Dov-Ber Schneerson, written by his mother, the righteous Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, in her famous “Memoirs,” is profoundly emotional and heart-wrenching. Unfortunately, our site has been unable to locate a Russian translation of this, the thirty-seventh part of her memoirs, in the recognized translation by Zvi-Hirsch Blinder. We therefore invite our readers to read it in English on the website www.chabad.org
