It was not the Rebbe’s custom to refer to individuals by poetic epithets. A striking exception was his repeated reference to the quietly-spoken Reb Moshe Feiglin, for decades the only Lubavitcher chassid in his continent, as “Avraham Avinu of Australia” – because of his pioneering impact on the state of Yiddishkeit out there. 

On the initiative of the Rebbe Rayatz, he eventually succeeded in bringing out six pioneering and idealistic families of Russian Lubavitcher chassidim, who (quite literally…) changed the face of Australian Jewry. 

From his own arrival in 1912, Reb Moshe had maintained a loving and reverent correspondence with the Rebbe Rayatz, but never saw him.

The passage below is taken from the biographical Avraham Avinu of Australia, by Uri Kaploun, a grandson of Reb Moshe Feiglin:

“After the passing of my sage and warm-hearted grandmother, Bobbe Leah, her children did not want their father, Reb Moshe Feiglin, to be left alone at night. Since we lived next door, I slept in his house – and continued to study with him daily – for the next seven years, first in the tiny out-of-town community of Jewish orchardists that he founded over a century ago in Shepparton, and later in Melbourne.    

“One Friday night, just before my bar-mitzvah, and almost four weeks after he was widowed, he woke up suddenly. He hurried anxiously into the dining room, where I followed him, to discover what had woken him: a framed photograph of the Lubavitcher Rebbe of that time, R. Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, which for years had occupied pride of place on a sideboard at the head of the room, had fallen to the floor.

“For decades, Zeide Moshe had been bound to him with every thread of his noble soul, even though during their time in this world, they had never met.

“Now, pointing at the shattered glass, he told me quietly, “Something has happened!”

“I did my best to reassure him that there must have been a draft or perhaps a tremor, but to no avail. On Shabbos morning, he shared his concern with our learned neighbor R’ Betzalel Wilschansky, the first of the Russian Lubavitcher chassidim whom he had brought out to Australia. He had come by as always to say Gut Shabbos and to accompany my grandfather and my father to shul. He too sought to reassure my grandfather.

“Now Zeide Moshe was a man who had never been known to be shocked out of his tranquil faith and equanimity. This Shabbos, the only time in my recollection, he could find no peace.

“Finally, some time after Shabbos, the ominous telegram arrived from Brooklyn: “Histalkus Admur…”. The date of that Shabbos was the Tenth of Shvat, 5710 (1950), the day on which the Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak completed his lifework in this world and ascended to another.”

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The ongoing challenge of maintaining the soul-connection called hiskashrus with a Rebbe whom one cannot physically see or hear is addressed in a letter of the Rebbe Rayatz that appears in Hayom Yom in the entry for 24 Sivan (English translation from Tackling Life’s Tasks: Every Day Energized with HaYom Yom):

You ask: what does your spiritual bond with me — your hiskashrus — consist of, since you do not know me by face…?

“True connection is attained by Torah study. When you study my maamarim, read the sichos, associate with my friends (the members of the chassidic brotherhood and the temimim) in their studies and in their farbrengens, and fulfill my request by reciting Tehillim and maintaining a regular study schedule, — this is what constitutes hiskashrus.”