Introduction: ‘The Rebbe would like to talk to you’
The Yom Kippur War started out badly for Israel, though it shouldn’t have. During the weeks preceding the October 1973 Arab invasion, Israeli intelligence observed extensive military preparations underway on the Syrian and Egyptian fronts. U.S. intelligence saw it too. Both assumed that the Arabs were too aware of their own technological inferiority to launch an offensive. Indeed, until the final hours, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s priority was preventing a preemptive Israeli strike, warning they could forget about American support if they attacked first.1
Israel, afraid to appear as the aggressor before the world, chose to look away and rely on American assurances. The results were disastrous.2
Early on the afternoon of Oct. 6, 1973—the solemn, holy day of Yom Kippur—Egyptian troops stormed across the Suez Canal to the ancient Arabic war chant of “Allahu akbar.” Syrian tanks simultaneously rolled onto the Golan Heights from the north.3 The first hours of war were devastating, Israel’s very existence imperiled. “In the first 48 hours, Israel’s air force lost close to 10 percent of its aircraft, an armored division on the front line lost more than half of its tanks, and the Bar Lev Line collapsed,” wrote historian Mordechai Bar-On. “No one had foreseen such a thrashing.” “This is now a war for the Land of Israel,” Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan told IDF Chief of Staff Dado Elazar.4
It would take three days of deadly fighting before Israel could turn the tide, finally pushing back in the Sinai and penetrating Syrian lines with its armored divisions. The war, however, was far from over. As Israel engaged in heated battle against Egypt in the south, it sought to force Syria out of the war in the north.5
Joseph Ciechanover, who passed away at the age of 90 on Sept. 17, 2024 (14 Elul, 5784), spent those days and nights at the cigarette-and-coffee-fueled Defense Ministry. On the fifth day of war, just as IDF troops began their advance into Syrian territory and towards Damascus, the phone rang.
“[It was] my good friend Binyamin Klein,” recalled Ciechanover in an interview with Jewish Educational Media’s (JEM) My Encounter with the Rebbe oral history project. Rabbi Klein—a member of the secretariat of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—was an unofficial liaison on Israeli matters. “He said, ‘The Rebbe would like to talk to you.’”
Ciechanover, who at the time served as the legal advisor to the Defense Ministry, had first met the Rebbe seven years earlier, forming a deep personal bond. Though he had countless interactions with the Rebbe over the decades, including dozens of multi-hour private meetings—Ciechanover estimated that at one point he was meeting with the Rebbe 12 times a year—he was reluctant to speak about those experiences in great detail. Even decades later, he considered their interactions too sensitive to Israel’s security to discuss in public. (Ciechanover’s trademark discretion endeared him to Israeli prime ministers of all political parties, from Golda Meir to Menachem Begin, Yitzchak Rabin to Benjamin Netanyahu). What Ciechanover shared next therefore offers a rare window into his unique role as a bridge between the Rebbe and Israel’s corridors of power.
“The Rebbe said ‘Go and ask Dayan to enter [and capture] Damascus,’” he remembered, even just for a short time.6
Ciechanover was conflicted. He was a confidant of Dayan’s, but still feared how the eye-patch-wearing warrior, a staunchly secular Jew with little outward respect for religion, would react. “But for me, a request of the Rebbe was a command. And I said, I have to do it,” Ciechanover recalled.
Dayan was touring the southern front when the call came in. When he returned later that evening, Ciechanover entered his office. “Moshe, I have a message that I have to deliver to you. You may be angry, you may even throw me out the window, but I have to deliver the message.” The exhausted Dayan, troubled by what he’d seen at the front, was intrigued. “The Lubavitcher Rebbe called,” Ciechanover continued. “He advises that the army enter [and hold] Damascus.”
To Ciechanover’s surprise, Dayan took the message seriously, thanking him before launching into an explanation as to why he felt Israel could not make such a bold move. He maintained that there were three primary reasons why it could not be done: 1. The Americans, he believed, would be vehemently against it; 2. He would need to move too many divisions into the area to maintain order, and with war underway on multiple fronts he felt he could not do it from the point of view of manpower; 3. If Israel entered Damascus it would immediately become responsible for feeding the local population of three million people. He asked Ciechanover to communicate his conclusion back to the Rebbe.
Ciechanover called Klein back. Understanding that the Rebbe was once again on the line, he relayed Dayan’s response in precise detail. The Rebbe’s next words echoed in Ciechanover’s mind for the rest of his life. “The Rebbe’s answer was, ‘It’s a big mistake, it’s a big mistake [in Yiddish, ah groyse to'es].’ That’s all.”7
On that day, in that war, Israel failed to deliver a knockout blow to Syria, allowing it to continue fighting until the UN-imposed ceasefire and remain intact as a mortal threat on its northern border. “We see it now,” Ciechanover later analyzed. “Imagine [how different things would be] had we neutralized Damascus … a tactical occupation, even just 48 hours.”8
Indeed, the damage to Israel’s prestige and self-confidence during the Yom Kippur War—something a decisive victory in the form of capturing the enemy’s capital city would have prevented—continues to reverberate to this day.9
Even in the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, the Rebbe did not give up hope, noting that the disaster had rekindled a realization among the Jewish people that they had no one to rely upon except G‑d Himself. “Certainly every one of us must redouble our efforts to bring this realization closer to all our fellow Jews everywhere,” he wrote in November 1973.10
No one took the Rebbe’s words more seriously than diplomat Joseph Ciechanover. During his six-decade career, Ciechanover served as head of Israel’s defense mission in the United States and director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, among other positions, earning the Israel Prize, the French Legion of Honor, and the Pentagon’s Distinguished Service Medal. Whether in a formal government position or informal one—he advised Netanyahu even in the last year of his life—Ciechanover carried with him the Rebbe’s message of true Jewish strength.
It is surely no coincidence that Israel’s operation to blow up thousands of beepers held by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon—an operation requiring such precise coordination that only G‑d could have orchestrated it—took place the same day Ciechanover died. The daring move shocked the Jewish people’s enemies, drew respect from her friends and led immediately to more tangible triumphs, illustrating the crux of the Rebbe’s argument: When Israel proudly puts its faith in G‑d and does what is required to protect her people, every effort is crowned with success beyond the limitations of logic.
It was a position Ciechanover well understood.
Loyalty: Ciechanover’s Early Life and Career
Joseph Ciechanover, known to all as Yossi, was born in Haifa on Oct. 1, 1933 (11 Tishrei, 5694), the eldest of Yitzchak and Bluma’s two sons. His parents were immigrants from Poland, religious in their upbringing and conduct, and Zionist in their outlook.
Yitzchak was a practicing lawyer. Those were dangerous years in British Palestine, and Yitzchak risked his life each day when he went to his office in the Arab section of the city. Yossi would later remember standing on the balcony daily, anxiously awaiting his father’s safe return.
“At home, [our father] used every free minute to delve into classic literature, Jewish religious law (Mishnah and Talmud) and modern law books,” Yossi’s younger brother Aaron wrote. “... On the Jewish side, we obtained a liberal Modern Orthodox education.” The family attended synagogue on Shabbat and Jewish holidays. “Needless to say that my mother kept a kosher kitchen.”11
Yossi attended the Chugim School in Haifa and participated in the Bnei Akiva youth movement. In 1951 he enlisted in the IDF and became an officer in the Artillery Corps. He then studied law at Hebrew University, where his classmates included future president of the Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak. During his last year in school, 1957, he joined Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture, eventually becoming legal advisor to the ministry. That’s where, in 1959, Ciechanover met the new minister of agriculture, Moshe Dayan, gaining the war hero’s lasting trust and respect.12
While Ciechanover was still in university, his mother passed away, and Yossi took on more responsibility for the welfare of his younger brother. On a trip to London the following year, Yossi bought 11-year-old Aaron his first microscope, setting him upon a path of scientific discovery that culminated in a 2004 Nobel Prize for chemistry.
In 1962, Ciechanover married Atara (née Pachur). Two years later, tragedy struck again when the Ciechanovers’ father died. The young couple then took Aaron in to live with them in Haifa—an act of kindness that Aaron wouldn’t forget. “[Yossi and Atara] opened their home to me during the fragile times of my high school and medical studies, and made sure I would not collapse along the way … ,” Aaron recalled. “Their help was a true miracle, as thinking of it retrospectively … the distance to youth delinquency was shorter than the one to the high school class.”
The Ciechanovers had three children, Tami, Dafna and Tzachi, and were happily married for more than 50 years, until Atara’s passing in 2015.13
Connection: ‘You must see the Rebbe’
It was during Ciechanover’s time at the Ministry of Agriculture that he was first introduced to Shlomo Maidanchik, the legendary secretary of the Chassidic village of Kfar Chabad. Ciechanover felt something authentic about Maidanchik and the people he represented. During one meeting in 1966, Ciechanover mentioned to Maidanchik that he was heading to the United States in a few weeks, where he would be studying at the University of California, Berkeley.14
“You must see the Rebbe,” Maidanchik told him. Ciechanover was at the time unfamiliar with the Rebbe, but he found the Russian-born Chabad-Lubavitch chassid’s exhortation compelling and soon found himself at the Rebbe’s door. Ciechanover’s meeting began at two in the morning and lasted for three hours. “I was mesmerized,” Ciechanover later recalled. “By the personality, by the knowledge, by the wisdom. We were in contact from then on.”15
Not content with keeping the Rebbe to himself, Ciechanover made it his mission to share this fount of wisdom and guidance with others. “He was so taken by the Rebbe, and he became devoted to him,” says Laya Klein, who together with her husband, Rabbi Binyamin Klein, became lifelong personal friends with the Ciechanovers. “Yossi’s theory in life was to bring as many people to the Rebbe as possible. He felt that once they had contact with the Rebbe, and spoke to the Rebbe, then their outlook became very, very different. Whenever he had an opportunity he would bring people. ”
Towards the end of his life, Ciechanover told Rabbi Elkanah Shmotkin, director of JEM, that in his experience there were two types of people in Israel’s government: those who had met the Rebbe, and those who hadn’t. Shmotkin estimates that of the more than 2,000 interviews in the My Encounter with the Rebbe archive, at least 150 testify that it was Ciechanover who first introduced them to the Rebbe.
These were government figures like Shimon Peres,16 and people from other sectors of Israeli society: the experimental sculptor Yaacov Agam; physicians like Mordechai Shani and Chaim Doron; and leading scientists, including his own brother, Aaron.17
“Yossi was very impressed by the Rebbe’s personality, by his charisma,” says Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, a protege of Ciechanover’s who served as attorney general of Israel and later as vice president of its Supreme Court. In an interview with Chabad.org, Rubinstein couldn’t confirm whether Ciechanover led a conscious campaign to introduce notable Israelis to the Rebbe, but said that knowing Yossi’s deep understanding of people, it would have made sense.
And who first brought Rubinstein to meet the Rebbe?
“Yossi did.”
Ongoing Dialogue
Returning from Berkeley in 1968, Ciechanover was poached from agriculture by Dayan, who was by now minister of defense. This transition appears to mark the beginning of Ciechanover’s decades of involvement in the most sensitive matters of state.
“I had known Yossi from his time working with me at the Ministry of Agriculture and was glad that he joined the team,” Dayan wrote in his memoir. “A talented, intelligent and responsible young man, he worked nights as he did days. During our time working together, we developed a warm personal relationship.”18
When Dayan married his second wife under a chuppah in 1973, Ciechanover was among the bare minyan invited.19
Ciechanover’s connection with the Rebbe continued to deepen during this period, their correspondence pointing to an ongoing dialogue. “Your letter reached me a bit late,” the Rebbe wrote to him on May 20, 1970. “Although you don’t mention anything about the follow-up to our conversation, I assume it surely had a positive outcome, though perhaps for matters such as these, lengthy written correspondence isn’t suitable. Nevertheless, I hope that at an appropriate opportunity I will hear from you regarding the matters we discussed … .
“Since we met, several things have changed, but it seems to me that regarding the matters we discussed, not only has nothing occurred that would change my mind, but on the contrary, I find my views confirmed.”20
“I know that Yossi admired the Rebbe very much, and that he shared with him very sensitive matters,” explains Rubinstein, who interned for Ciechanover at the Defense Ministry in the early 1970s, before becoming his assistant.
While many letters were exchanged between them by post and courier, most remain unpublished. Ciechanover also made few notes of their conversations—he was, after all, a lawyer—leaving the specific content of their long meetings largely unknown.
At least one exception are the notes Ciechanover made synopsizing a meeting he had in late 1969. Ciechanover entered the Rebbe’s office at 1:10 a.m. and remained until 3:30. “His eyes are very blue, and he is very warm. He is involved with every issue which concerns Israel,” Ciechanover observed. The Rebbe started off by asking detailed questions about the most recent elections, including why school children had participated in electioneering.21
The conversation then turned to territories captured during the Six Day War, just two years earlier. The Rebbe was adamantly against their return.22 “We must recognize that returning the territories is a question of security of the first order,” Ciechanover paraphrases the Rebbe as saying. Drawing on recent history, the Rebbe dismissed the reliability of peace treaties and foreign guarantees. “In 1957,” when Israel had captured the entire Sinai, gaining defensible borders for the first time since 1948, “we had guarantees from the great powers—greater than Nasser or Syria—and we saw what that was worth.” Israel had returned the territories at that time in exchange for international promises, and a decade later witnessed the world remain silent as the Arabs attempted to push the Jews into the sea.
“The rabbi viewed with great anxiety the declarations of [Israeli] government ministers immediately after the conquest [of ‘67], in which they said we would return territory in exchange for peace agreements,” Ciechanover noted. “What would it matter to Nasser to sign some piece of paper and get the territories returned?”23
During their conversation, the Rebbe went on to address the problem of Islamic terrorism, advising that Israel needs to maintain a strict and uniform zero-tolerance policy towards terrorists and those who harbor them. When Israel allows it to fester and for hotbeds of terror to grow, it only encourages more Arabs to engage in it.24 “The reduction of terrorism is ultimately beneficial for the entire population,” the Rebbe explained.25
‘Did You Ask the Rebbe?’
When in the fall of 1970 Ciechanover was offered a position at an investment firm, he turned to the Rebbe asking whether he should accept. The Rebbe responded on Sept. 14, noting he was rushing his letter for he did not see the inquiry as a personal one, but rather of public concern.26
“Your current role is in the field of security, and this is assuredly not the time to take any action that might compromise or weaken this area,” the Rebbe wrote. “Even if you were to say that they would find a replacement, etc., it is not comparable to someone who has experience and knowledge in this field for some time … . Certainly my response to the aforementioned question is the same as it was a few weeks ago, but even more emphatically now. This is all the more so my position in light of the current situation, when it is absolutely necessary that there be no disruption—even a minor one—in the framework of the security apparatus.”
The Rebbe went on to lament that Israeli government leaders have a tendency to lose faith and give in to weak voices advocating for compromise in matters of security. “They do so even though they have seen that every proposal for compromise is interpreted throughout the world as a clear sign of weakness, and immediately brings about an even stronger attack,” the Rebbe noted. That Ciechanover was in close contact with the leadership made it all the more vital that he remain in his position of influence.
“It is my hope that you are among those who wholeheartedly uphold the authority of the Jewish people [over the Land of Israel],” the Rebbe continued, “and if [the Jewish people] are worthy of such trust, how much more so is the Rock of Israel [tzur Yisrael]—the blessed and exalted G‑d.”27
Typically, Ciechanover did not keep this to himself. When, for example, a subordinate at the Ministry of Defense expressed his desire to join the private sector, Ciechanover pushed back.
“‘Did you ask the Rebbe about this?’” Shimshon Halpern recalled Ciechanover asking him. “I almost fell off my chair. Here was a man who was not religious, sitting in front of me without a yarmulke, and he was telling me to ask the Rebbe! He went on to explain, ‘There are a number of us who have worked for the Ministry of the Defense for a long time and we also want to leave, but the Rebbe won’t let us.’”
This conversation took place just six months before the Yom Kippur War. “The Rebbe obviously anticipated that something ominous was on the horizon,” Halpern observed. “A departure of key personnel in the Ministry of Defense at such a time would have been disastrous.”
Ciechanover remaining in place meant he was on the front lines of the decision making process during the most critical hours of the Yom Kippur War. The diplomat Naphtali Lau-Lavie recalls entering Dayan’s office on the morning of Yom Kippur 1973 to find the defense minister huddled with a handful of generals and advisors, Ciechanover among them.28
Although the Yom Kippur War got off to a disastrous start, within a few days Israel dramatically regained its footing, encircling the Egyptians and humbling the Syrians to the point that their Soviet backers requested the UN broker a ceasefire. Israel also retained all of its territory.
But it paid a very steep price: In three weeks of war Israel lost 2,656 soldiers, with 7,250 wounded.29 It also lost its aura of invincibility. Worst of all, in many ways it had been self-inflicted.
“The essential point of this whole tragic war is that it could have been prevented, and, as in the case of medicine, prevention is more desirable than cure,” the Rebbe wrote in November 1973. Yet, he continued, this did not mean that G‑d had abandoned His people. In some ways the extraordinary events of the Yom Kippur War were even more remarkable than those witnessed during the Six Day War.
“The overall miracle, which has now been revealed, although not overly publicized, is [Israel’s] survival after the first few days of the war, when even Washington was seriously concerned whether the Israeli army could halt the tremendous onslaught of the first attack,” he wrote. An even greater miracle had been the Egyptian army’s decision to halt its invasion just a few miles east of the Suez Canal. “The obvious military strategy would have been to encircle a few fortified positions in the rear, and with the huge army of 100,000 men armed to the teeth, march forward in Sinai, where at that point in time there was no organized defense of any military consequence,” the Rebbe observed, noting the Germans had conquered France using this strategy in just a few days during World War II. That the Egyptians just stopped “is something that cannot be explained in the natural order of things … .”30
That G‑d continuously watches over the Jewish people does not absolve Israel’s leaders of their failures. Bowing to pressure, after the war Prime Minister Golda Meir tasked Supreme Court Justice Shimon Agranat with leading a commission of inquiry into what had gone wrong.31
Ciechanover saw the writing on the wall. On March 3, 1974, a month before the Agranat Commission published its findings, he turned to the Rebbe again to ask whether now was the time to move on.
“In my opinion, given your long service in this ministry and particularly in light of your position and status within it, I am concerned that if you leave your position, for whatever reason, it is liable to bring weakness and further instability to the work of the Ministry of Defense,” the Rebbe wrote to him. “Therefore my opinion now, as it was during our previous conversation, is that as long as the … the Minister of Defense continues in his position, you too should continue in your position in the ministry. Of course, I am referring to the Minister’s actual departure, not just talk about it … . There is surely no need for a lengthy explanation to someone of your stature.”32
The Agranat Commission published its preliminary report on April 1. Ten days later Golda Meir announced her intention to resign, which meant her cabinet would go too. For the next two months she led a caretaker government while Rabin formed a new coalition. The Rebbe’s fear of instability in the Defense Ministry was not unfounded: The horrific Ma’alot terror attack, in which 21 Jewish school children were murdered in cold blood by Palestinians, took place during this time.33 On June 4, 1974, a new government was sworn in and Dayan went home.34
Ciechanover stayed on until the very last moment, just as the Rebbe had directed. Now it was time to start a new chapter. “I was pleased to receive … the news that you have already arrived in New York,” the Rebbe wrote to him on July 15. “It should be, as the traditional phrase goes, ‘change of place brings change of luck’ in matters of good and blessings.”35
The move would place Ciechanover in greater proximity to the Rebbe than ever before.
Jews and Arms
Yossi Ciechanover’s new assignment was a vital one. Israel had spent most of its military inventory during the Yom Kippur War and badly needed to replenish. Ciechanover was therefore tasked with opening an Israeli defense mission to the United States, focused on procuring and financing the purchase of weapons.
Ciechanover spent the next four years in the United States, shuttling between his office on the 16th floor of a nondescript Manhattan high-rise and Washington, D.C. Within a year of his arrival, Israeli defense purchases from the United States jumped from $150 million to $3 billion.36 By 1977 the defense mission employed 202 people, making it nearly twice as large as the Israeli embassy in Washington.37
“The mission’s direct link with U.S. arm manufacturers is also an important source of information and experience, according to defense officials,” the Washington Post reported in the summer of 1977. “They’ve come in and asked for things that were still so secret I wasn’t even cleared to know about them,” an unnamed U.S. defense official complained to the Post.38
In a brief exchange caught on camera during the farbrengen gathering held in the Rebbe’s synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway on 10 Shevat, 5735 (Jan. 22, 1975), Ciechanover can be seen approaching the dais to share a few words with the Rebbe. The conversation shifts easily between Hebrew and Yiddish. “Shalom aleichem, Reb Yosef!” the Rebbe begins. “You need to buy a lot of arms, so say a lot of l’chaim!” Ciechanover responds: “If only they’d give them to me!”
“They will supply them, but the arms must be used properly,” the Rebbe says. “In other words, there should be no need to actually use them.”
In the conversation, the Rebbe underscores the importance of keeping negotiations out of the papers, this being the American way, and then suggests the best tack for Ciechanover to take with Kissinger on a pending issue.39
That evening, with Ciechanover still in the crowd, the Rebbe continued talking about matters of Israeli defense in his public address. It was in the United States’ own best interests to supply Israel with the arms necessary to defend itself, he explained. As a superpower leading the world in an era when isolation was impossible, the U.S. knew that a Middle Eastern war could potentially suck in the entire world. Arming Israel amply had the ability to avoid war in the first place.
“Providing [Israel with] arms does not increase the danger of war,” the Rebbe explained, but preempts it. “A large defense arsenal … helps [the enemy] realize that it would be wiser to coexist in peace.”
Indeed, Americans instinctively understand this. After all, the Rebbe continued, the Founding Fathers had grounded their experiment in the Bible, the same Five Books of Moses which tells of G‑d’s eternal gift of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. But it was up to the Jews to stand proudly and proclaim Israel their rightful property, inherent in this inheritance the right to defend the Land and her people. “When we enforce this claim,” the Rebbe said, “there is no doubt we will succeed, and the U.S. will continue to help as they have until now, and even more so.”
Too often, Israel’s leaders struggle to make such clear and unequivocal statements. Their argument went (and goes) something like this: True, the Jewish people had a historical connection to the Land of Israel, but didn’t it make more sense to act as a nation like any other and point to the UN partition or the like to bolster her claim of legitimacy? And didn’t Israel’s continued existence rely on the goodwill of her friends, the U.S. in particular? The Rebbe, over a period of half a century, did everything in his power to impress upon Israel’s leaders and people that this was not the case: The Jews received the Land of Israel from G‑d, the Torah serving as a deed. Neither was its continued existence dependent on earthly powers—one glance at Jewish history ought to disabuse anyone of this notion.
At one point Ciechanover tried making the case to the Rebbe that Israel has but one friend in the world, the United States, represented by one person, the president. “We [therefore] must maintain good relations and do things that perhaps we wouldn’t do under other circumstances,” he remembered telling the Rebbe.
“The Rebbe did not accept this,” Ciechanover said. “The Rebbe told me, it is incumbent on [Israel] to do only that which is good for [the safety and security of Israel]. He said, ‘You are doing things today that will shape the future of Israel for generations to come, and that’s how you need to relate to this. The president of the United States appears, is elected and then moves on, to be followed by another president. The Land of Israel, the Jewish people in this land, this is forever.”40
As the Rebbe wrote to Ciechanover prior to Chanukah 1975: “The Festival of Lights must illuminate each one of us in our own self, and particularly in our unique essence. This includes the idea that a Jew cannot be intimidated at all by circumstances of being ‘weak’ and ‘few’ (in quantity) against the ‘mighty’ and ‘many.’ On the contrary, since the Jewish people are ‘pure and righteous and occupy themselves with Your Torah,’ they overcome all things, from without and within.”41
A Jewish Heart
In 1977 newly-elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin arrived in the United States to meet President Jimmy Carter for the first time. Before venturing to Washington, he made his way to Brooklyn. “I have come tonight to our great master and teacher, the Rabbi, to ask from him his blessings before I go to Washington to meet President Carter for the important talks we are going to hold … ,” Begin told the press.
Inside, Begin presented various members of his entourage to the Rebbe. At least one needs no introduction. “He is a kohen,” the Rebbe can be heard telling Begin when the latter mentions Ciechanover. “Yes,” Begin responds in Yiddish. “And he is occupied with very important things.”42 (Ciechanover later joined Begin’s meetings with the president as representative of Israel’s Ministry of Defense.)43
The Rebbe often made a point of Ciechanover being a kohen, a member of the priestly class. From when he arrived in New York, Ciechanover made it his personal custom to spend every Yom Kippur at the Rebbe’s side, flying to New York for this express purpose even after he’d moved back to Israel.44 One Yom Kippur, just as the kohanim were about to begin blessing the congregation together from the front of the synagogue, people noticed the Rebbe looking around the room. Ciechanover had remained in his place and not gone up with the throng of other kohanim. Sitting next to him was Maidanchik, who quickly understood who the Rebbe was looking for, and motioned that Ciechanover was at his side.
“The Rebbe pointed with his hand and said, bring him in front,” Ciechanover recalled to JEM. “And in the split of a second I was shifted from the back to the front. And at that moment the Rebbe gave the sign and the birkat kohanim started.”
This happened in a jam-packed synagogue in front of thousands of people, but most of Ciechanover's visits took place in the quiet of the night. The keenest observers of these comings and goings were the students learning at the Central Lubavitcher Yeshivah located in 770. “The Rebbe prayed maariv at midnight, after which Mr. Yosef Ciechanover entered the Rebbe’s office, emerging at 2 a.m.,” one student wrote in his diary about the night of July 20, 1975.45
Yeshivah students were also from time to time drafted by Rabbi Klein to courier envelopes between 770 and Ciechanover’s Manhattan office. One former student recalls Klein pulling him over in the summer of 1986, by which time Ciechanover was ostensibly retired from government, and sending him to an address in Manhattan. “There you will meet an El Al crew which recently landed from Israel,” Klein told him. “The pilot has brought something with him. Pick it up from him and bring it to Yosef Ciechanover at this and this address.” His interaction with Ciechanover was limited to reaching his office door, where two guards accepted the envelope on Ciechanover’s behalf.46
But Ciechanover’s relationship was by no means limited to business, even if that business was the defense of millions of Jews living in the Land of Israel. Rabbi Tuvia Zilbershtrom was an Israeli yeshivah student in Crown Heights in the mid-1970s, during which time Klein summoned him into his office and asked him to prepare a few pages of Tractate Sanhedrin of Talmud Yerushalmi. Klein then requested he head to an address in Manhattan and begin a regular study session with Ciechanover. He was to do this on the condition that he ask Ciechanover no questions about the Rebbe.
During their first session, Ciechanover explained that he’d restarted donning tefillin daily as a result of the Rebbe’s request, and that at the Rebbe’s suggestion he’d also begun regularly studying Talmud.47 He’d just spent two weeks in Washington and needed to catch up with his study group, and asked the Rebbe to send someone to help him. The phone rang as they studied, with Ciechanover telling each person that he was in the middle of a Torah study class and they should call back when it was over.48
To the Rebbe, obviously, any Jew’s growth in Jewish matters was not merely a side endeavor, but part and parcel of who they are at their essence, impacting their personal surroundings, their public persona, the Jewish people at large, and the entire world. As with the individual, so too with the Jewish nation. Just as the Rebbe insisted that Israel defend itself vigorously and not cede its strategic defense in exchange for elusive, and ultimately false, assurances of peace and international recognition, he underscored the very real and vital importance of spiritual matters. It is true that Israel needed advanced arms, but no less important were spiritual armaments. It was for this reason that the Rebbe had launched his famous tefillin campaign in the run-up to the Six Day War, emphasized gathering Jewish children for Torah study and prayer prior to the Yom Kippur War, and introduced unity Torah scrolls before the war in Lebanon. The Jewish path to victory requires G‑d’s assistance.
It was along these lines that the Rebbe launched a quiet campaign for every IDF unit to have its own pair of tefillin, a library of Jewish holy books, as well as a tzedakah box. More difficult than this was his request that kosher mezuzahs be affixed throughout the IDF’s many installations. For this the Rebbe enlisted a host of influential Israelis, including Chief Rabbi of the IDF Mordechai Piron, offering to match dollar for dollar what the IDF spent on it. In a 2009 interview with JEM, Piron said that by the time the Rebbe asked for his help, Ciechanover was already deeply involved in the campaign. In a short time they’d successfully affixed some 60,000 mezuzahs throughout the Israeli military.
Today, authentic Jewish practice is respected and upheld in the IDF, few people remembering that there was once a time it wasn’t like this. The secret to Ciechanover’s dedication was simple: “Whatever the Rebbe said, he tried to do,” says Laya Klein. “Sometimes he knew it would not be accepted [by the conventional wisdom], but he said, ‘If the Rebbe asked me to do this, I’m going to do it no matter what the other person’s response is going to be.’”
“Yossi had a Jewish heart,” says Justice Rubinstein. “It came from the heart.”
Strategic Foresight
In August 1978, Moshe Dayan, now the foreign minister, appointed Ciechanover as director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A letter the Rebbe sent Ciechanover before his return to Israel allows us an additional glimpse into the depth of the former’s strategic guidance to the government.
As Ciechanover recalls it, very early in their relationship—i.e. the mid-1960s—the Rebbe began raising the idea of Israel procuring oil from Norway.49 Even the possibility of finding oil on the Norwegian continental shelf was unknown until the early 1960s, but the Rebbe famously kept himself abreast of the latest scientific developments. Indeed, oil was first struck in December of 1969, and “within a few years, the North Sea would run second only to the Middle East in ‘proven oil reserves,’” one-third of it under Norway’s waters.50
“Why don’t you go … to your government, and then to the Norwegian government, and ask to have a long-term agreement under which the Norwegian government will supply Israel with oil,” Ciechanover recalled the Rebbe telling him. “And you will even participate in the development of the wells, the oil wells, which is very important for Israel long-term.”51
When Ciechanover raised the idea within the Israeli government it garnered little interest, but he was given the green light to explore it nevertheless.
Norway’s state-owned Statoil was established in 1972. That same year, when Norwegian Prime Minister Lars Korvald was on a private visit to Israel, Israeli deputy finance minister Zvi Dinstein caught him completely off guard when he raised the question of supplying Norwegian oil to Israel. “At this stage, Norway hardly had any oil at all,” writes Norwegian scholar Hilde Henriksen Waage. Korvald dismissed the idea. Israeli foreign minister Yigal Allon unsuccessfully broached the topic again in 1976.52 While one can only speculate whether Ciechanover was behind these early efforts, it seems unlikely that it came from any other source.53
The Rebbe remained keen on the idea, and as Ciechanover headed back to Israel in the summer of ‘78, suggested that he stop in Oslo to investigate. The Rebbe noted that the Norwegians remained fearful of the effect oil wealth would have on their society, and it would make sense to put out quiet feelers while in the country.54
“In the current situation, the choice is yours whether you want to formally investigate it or hold casual conversations, whether as a private citizen, someone from the Ministry of Defense [which he was leaving], or someone from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [where he was heading],” the Rebbe wrote to him. “You should start while you’re still here in the United States (because they are surely interested in all aspects of this in Washington, for several reasons), and utilize all of your connections (including the medal you recently received),55 and then continue on to Scandinavia (without emphasizing this as your purpose—since you are visiting there ‘in order to familiarize yourself with the work of the embassies before entering your new role.’) This is a unique opportunity.” The Rebbe notes that for obvious reasons he is not sending this letter via post.56
Throughout this time, the Rebbe continued to express his sharp disagreement with Israel’s decision to give the tangible Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for an intangible peace agreement, a move made under severe U.S. pressure and with the delusional hope that it would secure international legitimacy.57 Besides for the strategic depth the Sinai gave Israel, it contained oil fields which the Israelis had themselves developed, and the Rebbe spoke and wrote frequently regarding how grave a mistake it was to return this critical resource. “Oil, in this day and age, is an indispensable vital weapon, for without it planes and tanks are put out of action as surely as if they had been knocked out,” the Rebbe stressed in a 1981 letter. Israeli politicians supportive of the Camp David Accords had claimed Israel held oil reserves to last months, but the Rebbe pointed out that they were soon begging the U.S. for urgent oil deliveries because in fact the reserves held supplies to last only days.58 Israel was reduced to buying oil on the spot market at exorbitant prices, as well as from the Egyptians, paying billions of dollars for oil pumped from the very same wells it had constructed—and surrendered.59
Despite the Rebbe’s unequivocal stance on the Sinai—had Israel not signed the peace deal it would have had ample oil—he spent years encouraging Israel to keep open alternate pathways towards energy security. Israel did not develop the relationship to the extent that the Rebbe was pushing for, but it did successfully buy oil from Norway in the early 1980s.60
Ciechanover was three years into the job when Dayan resigned from Begin’s government. Four months later, on March 10, 1980, Yitzchak Shamir was appointed Foreign Minister in his stead. The norm is for staff to leave with their boss, but Shamir requested many of the old hands to remain while he learned the ropes. “Within weeks, thanks to the staff’s co-operation—including that of then Director General, Yosef Ciechanover, who resigned but agreed to carry on and did for a long time—I no longer felt myself to be a stranger in their midst, the new boy in class,” Shamir recalled.61
Shamir may or may not have known the reason behind Ciechanover’s decision: In a letter dated six days before Shamir’s appointment, the Rebbe wrote to Ciechanover expressing deep concern regarding Israel’s overly deferential posture towards the United States. In a handwritten postscript, the Rebbe added: “In my opinion, given the turbulent circumstances, it is imperative that you remain in your present position to maintain stability (and to bolster the ‘pride of Jacob’ ‘not to kneel and not to bow.)’... .”62
“What did director general Yossi Ciechanover discuss with the Lubavitcher Rebbe when he was with him in New York for three and a half hours?” Maariv wanted to know in the summer of 1979. “What did the Rebbe tell him, what did he answer?
“‘I will not comment on the content of the conversation,’ Ciechanover said, ‘but I can tell you this. The Rebbe is full of life, sharp, and knowledgeable about everything happening in Israel. He knows about important events, meetings, conversations, in short—everything about life in the Land, which he truly lives and breathes … .’”63
***
Joseph Ciechanover formally resigned from his government position in 1981 and spent much of the rest of the decade in the United States. During this time he continued to meet with the Rebbe in private.64 In the years that followed he served as chairman of Bank Discount and chairman of the El Al airline—leading it out of receivership and establishing it as a regular commercial company—and started a successful venture capital fund. Whenever called upon, he was there to serve his country. In 1997, he chaired the government committee investigating Israel’s botched assassination attempt of Khaled Mashal; in 2010 he served as Israel’s representative on the UN committee investigating the Turkish flotilla incident, later chairing the connected Ciechanover Commission; and in 2019 he represented Israel in talks with Poland after the latter passed a Holocaust memory law that seriously threatened diplomatic relations with Israel.
Ciechanover never retired, in the aftermath of Oct. 7 working tirelessly for Israel to emerge stronger both physically and spiritually. “In everything that I did, two things were before me,” he said when he won the Israel Prize for life achievement in 2021. “One, to care for the security and well-being of Israel, and the other, to stay below the radar. I adopted as my motto the Talmudic adage: ‘Blessing is found only in a matter concealed from the eye.’”65
Join the Discussion