Life
He was born in Lubavitch, on 20 Cheshvan 1860, the second son of Shmuel Schneersohn, the fourth Chabad Rebbe. In 1882, when his father died, he was not quite 22 years old, and his brother Zalman Aharon was not much older. A period followed, during which both brothers fulfilled some of the tasks of a rebbe, but neither felt ready to take on the title and responsibilities. Over this period he gradually took on more responsibilities, particularly in dealing with the impact of the May Laws, and on Rosh Hashanah 5643 (10 September 1892 OS) he accepted the leadership of the Lubavitch movement.
In his early 40s he suffered a loss of sensation in his left hand, and in 1903 he spent two months in Vienna, where Sigmund Freud treated him with electrotherapy. The treatment had some success, restoring some feeling to the hand, but he was unable to stay in Vienna longer than two months. When he returned home he attempted to continue his treatment with a small machine that he had bought in Vienna, but experienced no further improvement and eventually gave up.
In 1915, as the fighting in World War I neared Lubavitch, the Rashab moved to Rostov-on-Don. As Bolshevik forces approached Rostov he considered moving to Turkey, and prepared all the necessary paperwork; his only extant picture comes from his Turkish visa, since he usually refused to be photographed. But eventually he decided to stay in Rostov, where he died on 21 March 1920.
During the construction of the "Rostov Palace of Sport" on top of the Old Jewish Cemetery in 1940, his remains were secretly moved by a devout group of chassidim to a different burial site where they are located to this day in the "Rostov Jewish Cemetery." While relocating his grave, the chassidim found his body full and not decomposed even though this was a full twenty years later. His grave is visited daily by followers of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement who come from all over the world.
Read more about this topic: Sholom Dovber Schneersohn
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