Alexander Rozin
I have lived in Toronto for over 30 years. Recently, a significant event was celebrated in our community - 94 years since the release of the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe from Butyrka Prison in Moscow. The liberation of the Rebbe was associated with the amazing events of the distant 1927. A direct participant in these events was Mordechai Dubin, a Jewish public and political figure, a large timber merchant and a wealthy man, a member of the Latvian Constituent Assembly and the Saeima [Latvian Parliament] and the head of the Jewish community of Latvia until 1940, who contributed to mitigating anti-Jewish measures under the dictatorship of Karlis Ulmanis, whom he knew personally.
In 1927, at one of the sessions of the Saeima, the question arose of a trade agreement with Soviet Russia. Dubin had the decisive vote, and it depended on him whether the trade agreement with the USSR would be ratified.
It was this trump card that he laid out in Moscow, where Dubin traveled several times in connection with the case of the Sixth Lubavitch Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson. On June 14, 1927, the Rebbe was arrested by the GPU and taken to prison. On the third day, he was sentenced to death, but under public pressure, his sentence was commuted to life in exile in Kostroma. And then Mordechai Dubin intervened. He was openly afraid of Moscow: he already had a difficult experience of communicating with the Bolsheviks. In 1919, during the short communist occupation of Riga, he tried to defend the interests of the Jewish population. It almost ended tragically for him. But when the Russians realized that the signing of the trade treaty depended on Dubin, their attitude toward him changed, and the Rebbe received permission to leave the USSR. Moreover, Dubin insisted that the Rebbe be accompanied by family members and close associates, among whom was the successor of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok - the future Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
The second time Dubin intervened to save the Rebbe was some thirteen years later. At the beginning of the war, the Rebbe was living in Warsaw. Dubin immediately rushed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Rebbe had Latvian citizenship, which gave him a formal opportunity to work for him. In the conditions of war, it was extremely difficult to do anything. On September 1, hostilities began, and two days later, the connection between Riga and the Latvian embassy in Warsaw was interrupted. There was a plan to take the Rebbe out by car, but the roads were bombed, so this plan had to be abandoned. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs contacted Berlin directly and an agreement was reached for the Rebbe to leave Poland.
The evacuation schedule was designed in such a way that Yom Kippur caught refugees on the road. The Rebbe flatly refused to go. He thus found himself under German occupation. In the end, through the efforts of Dubin, the Rebbe eventually reached Riga in December, and in April 1940 he sailed to America on the last steamship to leave.
When Latvia was annexed to the USSR in 1940, Dubin was arrested and sent first to Moscow. He was sentenced to exile in a far-flung Russian outback for settlement. After the war, Dubin was imprisoned in the Vladimir Central Prison, and then lived under house arrest in Siberia. He spent his last days in a psychiatric hospital in Tula, where he died and was buried in a non-Jewish cemetery.
A well-known rabbi and Jewish figure, Rabbi Pinchas Taits, upon hearing about the tragic fate of Dubin, was able to organize the reburial of Mordechai's remains at the Jewish cemetery near Moscow. Finally, the righteous man found a traditional Jewish burial. I believe that this is a real miracle.
I was fortunate enough to touch the fate of a righteous man. In 1991, Rabbi Taits came to look after Mordechai Dubin's grave. Rabbi Berl Lazar (now the Chief Rabbi of Russia, and then the rabbi of the Marina Roscha Synagogue in Moscow) asked me to participate in a very important matter: it was necessary to make and erect a worthy monument at Dubin's grave. I was instructed to acquire the granite, install it on the grave of the righteous man, and engrave the text in Hebrew. In order not to attract the attention of the authorities, I had to work at night.
According to Jewish tradition, from time immemorial, an abbreviation of the first letters of the Hebrew words that make up the saying: “May his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life” has always been carved on each tombstone. I realized the depth of this saying when I touched the fate of a such a special person. I clearly felt that Dubin's soul is really “bound in the bond of eternal life.”
When my work was completed, a grand unveiling of the monument was held, which was attended by Jews from all over the country.
