Maamarim of the Previous Rebbe (Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn)

R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880-1950) was the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe; the only son of the Rebbe Rashab, and the father-in-law of the Rebbe. In 1920, with the passing of his father, the fifth Rebbe of Lubavitch, Rabbi Sholom Ber Schneersohn, the 39-year-old Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak had found himself thrown into the leadership of the Chabad chassidic community. In the wake of World War I, the Revolution of 1917, and the anarchy and pillage of the battles between Denikin's Cossacks and the new Red Army, the Russia that confronted him was impoverished and seething with religious persecution. This was a tzaddik who in the teeth of Stalinist persecutionm devoted his life and risked his life for the teachings of the torah to even the very small children. He was imprisoned in 1927 and brutally treated by the Soviet government for his refusal to stop teaching Torah in Russia. He left Russia and arrived in the United States in1940. In the United States he proceeded to establish Torah centers, determined to re-awaken the flame of Torah and Judaism in America. Upon his passing in 1950, he was succeeded by his son-in-law, the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, who continued and intensified this monumental task of spreading the light of Torah and Judaism through-out America and the entire world