The Brooklyn apartment of Rabbi Yehuda Leib (Leibel) Posner was a frequent visiting spot for his dozens of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, many of whom serve as Chabad emissaries in places as close as New Haven, Conn., and as distant as Kyiv, Ukraine. He took great pride in them, even as they multiplied to the point that he had a difficult time remembering the names of the youngest ones.
And as he watched the legions of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries dispatched by the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, spread across the globe, he knew that he was there at its inception, the pioneer who blazed a path that has since become a highway of goodness.
Posner passed away on Tuesday morning, 19 Tammuz (July 15), at his home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Yehuda Leib Posner was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1928. He was the second child born to Rabbi Sholom and Chaya Posner, Chabad Chassidim who’d recently escaped the Soviet Union.
At the urging of the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, the couple relocated to New Jersey. He assured them that their children would remain faithful to Chassidic tradition.
By the time young Leibel was seven or eight years old, he was boarding with his brother with a Chassidic family in Brooklyn so that they could attend a proper Jewish school.
In time, the family relocated to Chicago and the boys enrolled in the local Jewish school.
In 1940, shortly after arriving in New York from war-torn Poland, the Sixth Rebbe founded a yeshivah, and then a middle school. Young Leibel was sent from Chicago and became the first out-of-town student in his young age bracket.
Prior to his bar mitzvah, which was held in Chicago during Passover break, he and his older brother, Zalman, entered the Sixth Rebbe’s room for a private audience. The Rebbe inquired about their travel plans—making sure the bus home was heated and that they’d be able to put on tefillin and pray. He then expressed his satisfaction with their progress and remarked, “You are my children. You are physical children of your parents, and you are my spiritual children.”
In 1948, he was chosen to spend five weeks on the road as part of Chabad’s nascent Merkos Shlichut project, traveling throughout the farmlands, towns and cities of New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania. The 19-year-old yeshivah student was instructed to travel on what was then called the “milk train,” which stopped at every local station, where he would disembark to meet Jews in each community, offering Jewish books and subscriptions to Torah literature.
(At the same time, his elder brother Zalman, together with fellow student Mendel Baumgarten, was dispatched to recently-liberated Europe to serve the needs of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Stalinist oppression living in displaced-persons camps throughout the continent.)
Before he left, Posner was granted a private audience with the Sixth Rebbe. Ailing and frail, the Rebbe leaned forward in his seat and said, “When you meet another person, make sure that you look for his strong points. At the same time, do not overlook his weak points. The Torah has some large letters and some small letters. Chassidim used to say: We need to see a person’s fine qualities in big letters, and take note of their shortcomings with small letters,” for the sake of helping to correct them. The Rebbe blessed him with success, and Posner set off.
On that trip, he visited a certain rabbi who asked what he was doing in town. The young student explained that he was conducting a census for Lubavitch. “Who is Lubavich to conduct a census?” the rabbi fumed.
When telling the story decades later, Posner would smile and say, “Today no one would ask such a question.”
New Rebbe, New Postings
Posner was especially studious in yeshivah, and gained greatly from the tutelage of Rabbi Yisroel Zev Gustman, who taught at the Central Chabad yeshivah in Brooklyn at the time. In the winter of 1950, Posner’s world turned upside down when his Rebbe—in whose presence he’d spent a formative decade of his life—passed away on a cold Shabbat morning.
The following day, at the funeral, he was selected to be one of the four pallbearers who held the Rebbe’s coffin during the hearse ride from Brooklyn to the Ohel in Queens. (He would go on to do the same for the seventh Rebbe and Rebbetzin decades later.)
That summer, he was introduced to Thirzra Freimark, whose family maintained their fealty to Judaism both in their native Germany and then in rural New Jersey, where her father served as shochet in Vineland. Several of her uncles were farmers in the area.
After he proposed to Thirza and she accepted, they stood under the Williamsburg Bridge together and dropped a nickel into the pay phone to report the good news to the new Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. While the Rebbe, the Sixth Rebbe’s son-in-law, had yet to formally accept the position, Posner had already accepted him as “his” Rebbe.
The following night, the engaged couple had a private audience with the Rebbe, who asked them: When two people marry, what is the reason for the great joy? The logical reason is that marriage ensures the continuation of generations. But if that’s so, then a wedding reminds us of our mortality, not a happy thought.
The Rebbe quoted a Zohar that says that in heaven, each soul is divided into two. Both halves are sent down separately in two different bodies, male and female. At the wedding, we rejoice at the reunion of the two halves of one soul.
Their wedding—held on 30 Shevat, 5711 (Feb. 6, 1951)—was a happy one indeed, as it was the first wedding at which the Rebbe officiated and it marked the first joyous occasion the Rebbe attended since the passing of his beloved predecessor one year earlier.
Shortly thereafter, the couple set off by train to Los Angeles, where the Rebbe had sent Leibel several months before. His posting in California and the Rebbe’s insistence that he stay there meant that he was not present at the Rebbe’s official acceptance of the position on the first anniversary of the Sixth Rebbe’s passing just three weeks before the wedding.
There, they piloted the Rebbe’s concept of shlichut. While the Sixth Rebbe’s emissaries went to run a school, take a rabbinical post in an established synagogue or serve as a shochet, they were to take a more holistic approach, seeing what needed to be done and how they could bolster Judaism as a whole.
In 1953, they took up a position in Marinette, Wis., where he served as rabbi, schochet, and Torah teacher for the entire region, stretching into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Decades later, his students would recall him as unique. Bearded and devout, he spoke English like them, played baseball with them, and made Judaism fun and relevant.
“He taught us always to do what’s right, it does not matter what conventional wisdom is,” recalled onetime student Charles Lavine, who now serves as a member of the New York State Assembly. “I loved him.”
Posner’s teaching career then took him to southern New Jersey, where he taught in the local day school.
![Posner passes by the Rebbe during a "Dollars" distribution.](https://w2.chabad.org/media/images/1327/FIwI13275757.jpg?_i=_n504BC99DD0473598AAE3BCDC5D75568D "Posner passes by the Rebbe during a "Dollars" distribution.")
Then in New York, he taught in the German-Jewish Yeshiva Rabbi Shamson Raphael Hirsch in Washington Heights. The school’s director, Rabbi Dr. Joseph Breuer, would note with satisfaction that the Chassidic instructor made sure to include in his lessons teachings of the leaders of the German-Jewish Orthodox community of the previous generations.
His other postings included serving as dean at Beth Rivkah in Brooklyn and shochet and kosher supervisor at many facilities.
In his later years, his primary occupation was Torah study and he loved nothing more than to share a novel Torah thought on the weekly Torah portion or upcoming holiday.
A longtime resident of Brooklyn’s Boro Park neighborhood, he lived his final decades in Crown Heights, where his apartment was frequently visited by children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren from all over the world.
Predeceased by his wife in 2016, he is survived by his children: Channah Sonenfeld (Nachlat Har Chabad); Rabbi Yosef Posner (Skokie, Ill.); Rabbi Uri Posner (Crown Heights); Rabbi Yechezkel Posner (Crown Heights); Rabbi Shmuel Posner (Boston); Brocha Sapochkinsky (Westlake Village, California); and Elisheva Mishulovin (Beitar Illit, Israel); grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. He is also survived by his siblings Bassie Garelik (Milan, Italy) and Sara Rivka Sasonkin (Taanach, Israel).
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