Moishe Levertov

Spies, cold-hearted agents, and daring escapes fill the pages of this engrossing memoir about the chasid Rabbi DovBer Levertov, known as Berel Kabilaker, and his family's life under Communist rule.

Note The following transcripts must represent but a small fraction of Reb Berel Levertov’s long interrogation sessions. Such sessions would normally last four to five hours, and sometimes all night. The NKVD files record only the few paragraphs they consi...

Abraham Excerpts translated from recently released NKVD files about DovBer Levertov TOP SECRET AGENCY INFORMATION Facts provided by the informer of the “Marina Roshtcha” Synagogue Name of officer: Fuchs Date: 4/9/45 Our known informer..., from Samarkand, ...

The End Of The Escape Operation Back in Lemberg, the organizers of the Chabad escape operation invested enormous effort in planning another getaway for the remaining Chassidim. Another train managed to depart safely, but it left the city so unexpectedly t...

Lemberg Before World War II, Lemberg had been part of Poland. After Germany attacked Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union annexed the city in accordance with its partition pact with Germany. After the war, all Polish territories annexed by the USSR were incor...

Where To Go? After the war ended in 1945, Soviet troops occupied most of Eastern Europe, where the lands now became Communist satellites of the USSR. In another goodwill gesture to its new satellite, Poland, the Soviet Union permitted all Polish refugees ...

Tashkent The train ride to Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, where I had to change trains to get to Samarkand, took about a week — including Shabbos. On such a long journey, observant Jews would normally get off the train before Shabbos, spending the holy ...

Starting Anew On returning to Moscow, we discovered that we were now homeless. Our apartment had been occupied by a Russian woman who refused to move out. “My husband is an officer in the Soviet army,” she yelled at us, “fighting at the front for our home...

New Home When our train finally reached its destination, we were happy to learn that the government had sent us far away from the war. We had been brought to Bashkiria, a territory in the Ural region of Russia inhabited mainly by a Tatar tribe called the ...

Josef War Intensifies Ideologically, Communism and Nazism-Fascism had been implacable foes. So the whole world was shocked when it was revealed that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had come to a non-aggression agreement — the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” —...