By COLlive reporter
On the 19th of Kislev this year, 2 Chabad bochurim visited Gori, a city in eastern Georgia, and purchased a new Ricoh office printer.
Their goal was to print a local edition of the book of Tanya, the seminal work of Chassidus authored by the Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi OBM.
With paper in hand, the brothers Menachem Mendel Goldshmid and Yechiel Michel Goldshmid printed copies and then studied them at the Gori synagogue.
But this wasn’t just another completion of an instruction of the Rebbe to bring such holiness to places around the world. It was done with the assistance of Georgia’s Shliach Rabbi Meir Kozlovsky.
It was the location: Exactly 770 meters from the childhood home of the brutal Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin who banned the Tanya and imprisoned the Chassidim who taught it.
The small wooden hut where Stalin was born in 1879 was dedicated by Stalin himself in 1957 as the Joseph Stalin Museum.
“The gabbai of the Gori shul was shocked and expressed his admiration for what we were doing,” the brothers said.
This month, in honor of the 11th of Nissan, birthday of the Rebbe, copies of that Tanya was brought to the Library of Agudas Chassidei Chabad in Crown Heights.
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