In 1927, after incitement by the Yevsektzia, the virulently anti-religious
Jewish Section of the Soviet Communist Party, the Rebbe Rayatz, the saintly
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak of Lubavitch, was incarcerated under capital arrest in
Leningrad, interrogated, tortured and exiled, until ultimately -- and
miraculously -- he was liberated. The five chassidic discourses in this volume
all date from this period, surely one of the most agonizing and turbulent epochs
in all of our turbulent and agonizing history.
In these memorable addresses, the Lubavitcher Rebbe of that time explicitly
and fearlessly called on his chassidim to defy the mighty Soviet regime, even at
the cost of life itself, for the rescue of Jewry's threatened soul.