When Chesky Lever and his chavrusa for Merkos Shlichus drove past a door with a mezuzah, they never expected what awaited them inside.

They knocked, and an elderly Jewish man warmly invited them in. When they asked if he wanted to put on tefillin, he explained that he had lost his own pair somewhere in the house but would be more than happy to put them on. They gladly helped him don tefillin, and together they began to say Shema.

“As we were saying Shema, I noticed a framed rabbinical ordination hanging on the wall, and the last name caught my eye: Natkin,” recalls Chesky Lever. “So I asked him, are you perhaps related to the famous Nosson Nota Natkin? He replied, ‘Indeed, I am a seventh-generation descendant.’”

Nosson Nota Natkin lived in the time of the Alter Rebbe and, as the Frierdiker Rebbe described, was “the head of the misnagdim and an enemy to all the chassidim.” It was to his home that the Alter Rebbe was taken after being freed from prison on Yud Tes Kislev. Natkin spent three hours fiercely attacking and berating the Alter Rebbe over the Chabad minhagim – hours the Alter Rebbe later described as more painful than the 53 days he had endured in solitary confinement.

“And yet, generations later, history came full circle,” Lever said. “The Alter Rebbe did not forsake the descendants of Nosson Nota Natkin. The seventh generation of the Alter Rebbe – our Rebbe – sent his shluchim to this very home to put on tefillin, according to the Alter Rebbe’s minhagim, with a seventh-generation descendant of Natkin, and to blow shofar for him.”