Today in History: Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn arrives in America after his miraculous escape from Nazi-Occupied Warsaw

After a 12-day sea voyage, the previous Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880-1950), disembarked at the New York harbor on the 9th of Adar II of 1940, following his miraculous rescue from Nazi-occupied Warsaw. 

Among those trapped in Warsaw in 1939, was the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, and his extended family. As the Rebbe celebrated the closing days of Succoth that year, leaders of Chabad in the United States set about the difficult process of rescuing their beloved leader from the Nazis

In a short span of years that saw most of the great Hasidic dynasties of Eastern Europe end in the Nazi concentration camps, the Chabad Rebbe’s survival came against all odds and all logic.