Their mother lode

Schneur Zalman of NY commenting to mentalblog.com: Why kill Litvinenko with nuclear radiation?

Reading your blog the last few years has enlightened me in many ways. My parents were White Russian Jews living in Eastern Poland when the War broke out in Sept. 1939 and again in June 1941.While Hitler profoundly shaped their lives, Stalin and his henchman had no influence over their lives. My parents were born and lived in small Lithuanian (White Russian) towns. My mother in a Lithuanian Misnagdishe sviva and my father in a Chabad sviva.

After the War and Concentration camps they came to America. Thus they and thousands of other Holocaust survivors in the US and Israel were influenced by their childhood culture in Poland and Lithuania and their war years spent in Concentration Camps , or as partisans or hiding or in many instances as refugees in Central Asia. From reading this blog I see that the Soviet culture - including politics, language, music, Art, urban life, Russian culture, etc etc all influenced those Jews who lived in the USSR certainly those who lived there until the 1970's . Their mother lode was not the shtetel, rather the new Soviet culture.

This seems to be true of Lubavitch too. Older Anash like Rabbis Dworkin, Futterfass, Duchman etc still remembered the shtetel and that was their chief influence. Certainly that was true of the 6th Rebbe (the 7th Rebbe was also influenced by Western ideas). But most Lubavitchers born after the Revolution were influenced by the new Soviet man, even if they did not attend Soviet schools. I can not relate to that way of thinking, acting and frame of reference. By that I mean that I have no idea what that all about. We the Second generation is influenced by American ideas rather than the Soviet new Man culture.

Thus unlike the rest of the Chassidic Charedi world like Satmar, Bobov, Ger, Belz whose frame of reference is the shtetel and the Holocaust, the reference point and chief cultural transmitter of most older Lubavitcher today of Russian descent is not the shtetel of their parents but the New Soviet Man. That’s all very interesting and important to understand present day Lubavitch especially those who grew up in such homes.