Chabad to Publish Lubavitcher Rebbe’s English Correspondence Archive for the First Time
Marking the 32nd anniversary of the death of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Chabad’s Kehot publishing house announced it will begin publishing the rabbi’s full English correspondence archive. Chabad said the project is unprecedented and is expected to take 10 to 20 years, producing about 50 volumes with more than 10,000 letters.
The archive will reveal, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of letters the Rebbe sent over four decades to thousands of Jews and other figures in the English-speaking world. His correspondence covered faith, education, family, business, community matters, and questions of Jewish law, medicine, science, and philosophy. According to Chabad, the letters reflect both his personal involvement in individual lives and his leadership of the wider Jewish public.
The publishers said the material is especially significant because it was written in English for readers in the United States and other Western countries after World War II, when Eastern European Torah centers had been destroyed and Yiddish use was declining. The letters show how the Rebbe brought Torah and Chassidic teachings to a new generation living in an English-speaking environment.
The first volume, already available for preorder, is scheduled to be released after the upcoming Tishrei holidays. It will contain 214 letters from 1950 to 1951, a crucial period between the death of the previous Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s assumption of leadership in 1951. The letters were drawn from archive copies preserved in the Rebbe’s secretariat for decades and from documents provided by private recipients, with special care taken to protect privacy in line with his instructions. Chabad said the publication offers the public a rare look at the Rebbe as both a spiritual guide and a personal adviser.
