Rabbi Zushe Feldman has served as an educator in Oholei Torah in Crown Heights for over forty years. His son, Rabbi Mendel Feldman, is a Chabad emissary in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They were both interviewed in November 2025.

Rabbi Zushe Feldman

My family was spending the summer of 1985 in the Catskill mountains of upstate New York, when one day, I began to experience pain. Initially, I didn’t think much of it, hoping that it would subside. However, as the days passed and the pain only intensified, I realized that I needed to see a doctor. My brother-in-law, Rabbi Yosef Wilenkin, had also become aware of my discomfort and, being more fluent in English than I was, kindly offered to accompany me to an appointment in the city. I accepted his offer.

After a thorough examination, the doctor quickly determined that my condition was serious. Although he wasn’t a specialist in the field, he knew it was cancer. He immediately referred me to a hospital and recommended I see a particular doctor there for further testing and evaluation.

With my diagnosis, the whole family came back to our home in Crown Heights, and I immediately sat down to write a letter to the Rebbe, informing him of the situation and asking for his blessing.

As I was set to be admitted to one of the hospitals in Brooklyn, we received a phone call from the Rebbe’s secretary, Rabbi Binyomin Klein. The Rebbe’s message was clear: “Follow the advice of Dr. Feldman.”

We immediately reached out to Dr. Moshe Feldman, a local physician who was part of the Crown Heights community. As it turned out, Dr. Feldman had connections in Sloan Kettering, the top cancer treatment center in Manhattan, and he referred me there. Clearly, the Rebbe had sensed that Dr. Feldman would be the proper medical channel for my healing.

Before long, I was admitted to the hospital and began undergoing treatment. As you can imagine, I was not in very high spirits. I found it difficult to concentrate, even on my daily Torah studies. After a week or two, my wife wrote a letter to the Rebbe to update him on my condition and, among other things, she mentioned that I was feeling very despondent about the situation.

A short while later, we received an answer. The Rebbe instructed that I make sure to study the daily portions of Rambam (Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, which the Rebbe had recently divided into a study schedule) and Chitas (an acronym for Chumash, meaning the Five Books of Moses, Tehillim, meaning Psalms, and Tanya, the classic chasidic work by the Alter Rebbe.)

The Rebbe then quoted the verse from Psalms, “The commandments of G-d… gladden the heart,” to say that studying Torah would lift my spirits, and that “all the [positive] benefits that result from [happiness] are obvious.” The Rebbe added that he would pray at the resting place of the Previous Rebbe for my situation to be resolved with “great success” and that I should “report good news.”

On the surface, the Rebbe was addressing my mood, since learning Torah would lift my spirits. But by mentioning those other positive outcomes, along with his blessing for my recovery, I understood that all of those results would come from my meticulously learning the portions of Chitas and Rambam every day.

Needless to say, after receiving such a clear answer, along with the Rebbe’s blessing, my spirits were very much lifted. And, as you can imagine, from that moment on, I was able to concentrate fully on my daily Chitas and Rambam. Until today, I make sure to study them every single day. 

Rabbi Mendel Feldman

Several weeks passed after my father was admitted to the hospital, and with the festive Tishrei season quickly approaching, we weren’t sure if he would be discharged in time for the holidays. A week before Rosh Hashanah, the doctors still couldn’t say, and every day we were getting more and more anxious. With only a few days left, my mother wrote another letter to the Rebbe, and she asked me to deliver it to his office the next morning. 

At the time, I was only fifteen years old, but I can still recall bringing the letter to the office of the Rebbe’s secretariat and placing it on the pile of mail that would soon be brought in to the Rebbe’s office. I still felt uneasy – as all of us were – so about two hours later, I decided to go back to 770 to see whether there might be an answer already. 

As I walked into the building, I saw Rabbi Leibel Groner, one of the Rebbe’s secretaries, walking out of the Rebbe’s office with a pile of mail. “The Rebbe just gave me an answer for you,” he informed me. The Rebbe had written his reply on the letter I had delivered.

I hadn’t read my mother’s letter before, but now, when Rabbi Groner showed me the Rebbe’s reply, I saw that my mother had written that we were “all feeling anxious at the thought of my husband not being home for Rosh Hashanah.”

The Rebbe circled the word “all” – “kulam” in my mother’s Hebrew – and then I saw that in the margins of the letter, he had added the traditional Rosh Hashanah greeting to be “inscribed and sealed for a sweet new year.” In other words, this applied to “all” of the people my mother had referred to in her letter, especially, of course, my father.

We took this as an indication that my father would be home for the holidays – and that is exactly what happened. He was home with us for Rosh Hashanah, and thank G-d, he went on to have a full recovery.