Peres Divulges Meeting Details

By COLlive staff

Israel’s current President Shimon Peres agreed to go on record for the very first time about meeting the Rebbe at Lubavitch Headquarters in Brooklyn over 45 years ago.

It has long been known that the Rebbe received Peres for an audience in 770 Eastern Parkway during January of 1970 and the staff at JEM (Jewish Educational Media) was hoping that he would share previously-unknown details about their conversations and correspondence.

“What is largely unknown is that his first meeting with the Rebbe took place four years earlier, in 1966,” points out Rabbi Yechiel Cagen, Director of JEM’s oral history project “My Encounter with the Rebbe.”

Cagen and his team discovered that fact after several months of research in New York and Israel. They studied whatever details were available about those two Yechidus meetings, uncovered photos of Peres in 770, as well as correspondence between him and the Rebbe.

With this information in hand, R’ Zalman Wolff, a Chabad activist who maintains friendly ties with Israel’s government officials, contacted the President’s staff to facilitate the interview.

Peres initially expressed interest in recording his testimony, and a date was set. However, a series of events postponed the meeting, including the passing of his wife, Sonya Peres, and an emergency surgery for Peres, who is 89.

Finally this week, the “My Encounter with the Rebbe” team was hosted for an interview at the Beit Hanasi in Jerusalem, where the President spoke to Rabbi Zusha Wolff of JEM and discussed the full details of his relationship with the Rebbe.

The cost of the interview – including research, cinematography, lighting and sound, was sponsored by Sholom and Pessy Jacobs.

THE NEED

“The aim of the “My Encounter with the Rebbe” project has been to document the history of the Rebbe and the evolution of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in modern times,” explained JEM’s Director, Rabbi Elkanah Shmotkin.

“As an important player in Israel’s government for over 60 years, the testimony shared by President Peres is important to the historic record,” he said. “If we would only interview those who agreed with the Rebbe on every issue, we’d miss many important events and perspectives.”

In the interview, referring to his political differences with Chabad (the Rebbe opposed concession negotiations with the Arabic countries), Peres said: “Unfortunately, the Chabad movement did not support me politically. But I value the Rebbe’s outstanding leadership and his great inspiration.”

He added that “the Rebbe was unique in the fact that he merged the spiritual and the practical. He saw the future as clearly as the present. When he looked at the present, he understood our immediate security challenges, and at the same time, he endeavored to meet the future by investing in education.”

About his meetings with the Rebbe, Peres said: “He recognized the gap between the present and the future, but urged us not to allow ourselves any gap in our action. He dealt with our present and the future with equal urgency, because they cannot be separated. And [he held that] any separation between them presents a danger.”

THE SUGGESTION

Born Shimon Perski, his family spoke Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian at home and he was raised by his grandfather Rabbi Zvi Meltzer, a grandson of Rabbi Chaim Volozhin, founder of the Volozhin Yeshiva and a talmid of the Vilna Gaon.

When Yossi Ciechanover, a legal adviser to the Israel’s Defense Department, suggested that Peres meet the Rebbe, he enthusiastically accepted the opportunity. “I had heard a lot about the Rebbe, and I wanted to meet him.”

They spoke in English, Yiddish and Hebrew at that first meeting in 1966 which lasted over an hour.

It was some 15 months before the outbreak of the Six Day War, and Egypt was growing increasingly antagonistic and threatening toward its Jewish neighbor to the south. In Peres’ words, “the world was ready to eulogize Israel.”

The Rebbe urged Peres to view the problem of Egypt as a personal, rather than national, confrontation.

“The Rebbe began to discuss with me what we should do about [Egyptian President] Abdul Nasser. He asked me, ‘Why do you need to wage war with Egypt? Take care of this one person, Nasser. You won’t need entire armies to do this’.”

Of course, Nasser’s provocations continued, and the IDF would deliver a resounding victory over the armies of Egypt, Syria, and a number of their neighbors. The Rebbe would later call Israel’s victory in the Six Day War “G-d given and miraculous.”

THE REQUEST

4 years later, during their second meeting in 1970, Peres said the Rebbe spoke to him about matters standing at the center of Israeli life, including “Who is a Jew?,” absorbing the mass immigration from Russia, Jewish education and the Jewish identity of the State.

At that time Peres was Israel’s Minister of Transportation and Communications, and the Rebbe addressed the importance of connecting the two roles of transportation and communication.

“He said we must use modern communication – at the time, radio, telephone and television – to facilitate Jewish education,” Peres recalls the Rebbe saying, a known position that led Chabad to quickly adopt modern technology in service of education and outreach.

JEM released 2 weeks ago the documentary film “Faithful and Fortified: Israel’s Prime Ministers,” in which 5 of Israel’s leaders speak about the Rebbe. Cagen said that full interview with Peres will be released in future volumes of the Faithful and Fortified series.

VIDEO: Preview of the interview