I don't really know how to write this one. Saw a documentary clip of her talking about the kids in France once and it stuck with me for days, 98 years old, that's a whole world gone.
Their story
Hadassah Miriam Carlebach (nee Schneersohn; also known as Hadassa Schneerson) was a Russian-American Holocaust survivor, memoirist, educator, and longtime matriarch of Manhattan's Carlebach Shul. Born on 23 February 1928 in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), in the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union, she was the daughter of Rabbi Schneour Zalman Schneersohn…
Hadassah Miriam Carlebach (nee Schneersohn; also known as Hadassa Schneerson) was a Russian-American Holocaust survivor, memoirist, educator, and longtime matriarch of Manhattan's Carlebach Shul. Born on 23 February 1928 in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), in the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union, she was the daughter of Rabbi Schneour Zalman Schneersohn and Sarah Levine (Sara Levin). Her father, a distant cousin of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, spent the Stalin years sustaining clandestine Jewish life: underground yeshivas, hidden minyanim, and American relief funds for impoverished Jews. Soviet authorities arrested him repeatedly. Young Hadassah learned early to measure every word and to memorize escape routes. Decades later she still said that when she entered an unfamiliar building she instinctively looked for exits.
In 1935 the family left the Soviet Union with help from Jewish activist Joseph A. Rosen (Dr. Yosef Rosen) and reached Jaffa after a twelve-day voyage. For eight-year-old Hadassah, Eretz Yisrael brought the first real sense of safety she had known. Her father, uneasy with the socialist climate around Tel Aviv and advised by the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe to take up communal work in France, relocated the family to Paris in 1936. There he led the Association des Israelites Pratiquants (Kehillat Haharedim), founding a kosher soup kitchen, synagogue, and Talmud Torah for Jewish refugees streaming into France.
When war broke out, her father's work expanded into rescue. Appointed by the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE) to run a kosher children's home at Chateau des Morelles in Brout-Vernet, he later moved the children south to Marseille and through a succession of farms and chateaux as danger shifted: Domaine de Seignebon in Demu, Chateau du Manoir in Saint-Etienne-de-Crossey, sites near Grenoble and Voiron, and temporary lodging in Nice. The homes kept strict kashrut and Jewish education even under hunger. Hadassah later recalled weeks of bread and green peppers, one egg per child per month, and her father sending margarine for laboratory testing before it entered the kitchen.
Still a teenager, she became cook, teacher, and escort. At about fourteen she helped move groups of children from Vichy France toward Marseille and toward the Swiss border. At sixteen or seventeen she was put in charge of a home with about fifteen children. She helped arrange matzah for Pesach, read the Megillah on Purim, and assisted with shofar on Rosh Hashanah. One Purim, French officials warned that a Gestapo raid was expected the next day. Her father refused to spoil the children's celebration; when the party ended, the children were loaded onto trucks and moved. On another night, leading children through snow after a hiding place was exposed, she froze at the sound of dogs until a girl of about seven urged her to trust in God and keep walking. Most of the children under the family's care were eventually smuggled into Switzerland. Not all were saved: one betrayed group of sixteen children was deported to Auschwitz; only one is known to have survived. Her mother was captured and tortured, then released after insisting her husband had fled to Switzerland.
After France's liberation in 1945, the family returned to Paris and spent two years trying to reunite hidden children with relatives, sending thousands of letters to municipalities. Some reunions succeeded; others learned they were alone. Hadassah turned to teaching and, finding that wartime sadness entered the classroom, began each morning by singing with her students. In 1947 the family immigrated to the United States and settled near their Lubavitch cousins in Brooklyn and on Manhattan's West Side.
In 1949 she married Rabbi Eliyahu Chaim (Eli Chaim) Carlebach, twin brother of the singer and teacher Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Rabbi Eliezer Silver attended their wedding. The couple lived in Crown Heights and New Jersey, where Eli Chaim served at the Hillside Jewish Center and later co-led the Carlebach Shul on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Hadassah became a defining presence there: board member and longtime vice president, fundraiser when the congregation struggled, and the person congregants remembered for noticing strangers and telling them they belonged. After Shlomo's death in 1994 she and her husband (until his death in 1990) and later she alone helped carry the shul's pastoral and organizational life. Yehuda Green, the congregation's longtime chazzan, credited her with drawing him into the community on his first visit in 1997 and said, simply, that she saved the shul.
Within Lubavitch she maintained close personal ties to Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson and to Rebbetzin Chana, the Rebbe's mother, with whom she would sit and sing niggunim. In interviews she insisted that Schneerson yichus was never a bank account of status but an obligation to do more for Yiddishkeit. She spoke publicly about the Holocaust for Names Not Numbers, Amud Aish, YIVO programs on her father's rescue work, and Jewish communal audiences, while for years she was cautious about sharing wartime detail even with her own family. She raised five daughters and lived to see grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren continue in Torah and Chabad shlichus. Into her final months she remained engaged with younger students, including a farbrengen with yeshiva bochurim about a month before her death.
Hadassah Carlebach died in New York City on 6 September 2026. Wikipedia records her age as 98 based on a 1928 birth date; many communal obituaries styled her as 99 and placed her birth in 1927. Her levaya passed 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights. She left a public record of Jewish rescue under occupation, of rebuilding Orthodoxy in America, and of ordinary, relentless welcome at a Manhattan shul that became a spiritual home for thousands.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia; Matzav; Collive; CrownHeights.info; Anash; VIN News; Names Not Numbers; USHMM catalog pa1170868; Jewish Press (Molly Resnick, 2018); YIVO One Thousand Children. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“We never had to bank on our yichus. We lived in the USSR during the era of Stalin, and the only consciousness I had of my yichus is that it required us to do more.”
2018 Jewish Press interview with Molly Resnick, on growing up Schneerson
“I knew I could not let loose with being happy or even speaking. Every word had to be measured. There were informers all over.”
Jewish Press interview, recalling childhood under Soviet surveillance
“That's why when we came to Eretz Yisrael in 1935 when I was eight, it was such a liberating feeling. I could breathe. I could laugh. I could speak.”
Jewish Press interview on arriving in Palestine
“You know what? We grew up so fast. In 1944 when I was 16 or 17, I was in charge of a home with 15 children.”
Jewish Press interview on wartime responsibility
“Never stop trusting that God is good, and we are here.”
Quoted in Collive obituary coverage of her later testimony
“I just want to tell you, you belong in this shul.”
Words to Yehuda Green on his first visit to the Carlebach Shul in 1997, as recalled to VIN News
Photos
2Hadassah Carlebach portrait used by Names Not Numbers survivor profile
by People Forever
Hadassah Carlebach speaking; published with VIN News obituary
by People Forever
same, watched that Names Not Numbers clip too, never forgot it