Nuchie Schapiro was sitting with his uncles, marking his father’s 21st yahrzeit in 2011, when he realized how little he actually knew about his family’s story.
The Los Angeles-based healthcare entrepreneur, now 42, was 27 years old. His father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schapiro, had passed away suddenly at 41 in 1990, leaving behind a wife, four young children and a generation of students who never forgot him. Schapiro had been just 6 at the time.
The conversation at the memorial gathering was moving along rapidly as they regularly do by comfortable family gatherings, with relatives swapping names, stories and references with easy familiarity. But Schapiro stopped them every few minutes, asking for details and more more information as his uncles spoke about their family history. Who is this person to us? Where did this happen? How did they get from here to there?
“While my cousins all grew up hearing these stories from their parents, I never got that opportunity,” Schapiro says. “I knew the general outline of their stories, but sitting at that table showed me how much more I had to learn.”
He pulled out his iPhone 3, hit record and spent 90 minutes drilling them on a history he had grown up without.
“That was the first moment of gold,” he says. “And the genesis of this book.”
Fifteen years later, the resulting volume, Legacy of Resilience, is 624 pages long. Released earlier this year, it traces four generations of the Schapiro and Vilenkin families from the shtetls of Tsarist Russia through the Soviet Chassidic underground, a displaced persons camp in postwar Germany, resettlement in Ohio, and finally, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. It is a family memoir, a document of Chabad-Lubavitch history across 150 years, and, in its final hundred pages, the portrait of a father Schapiro had spent his life trying to know.
“The reality is that writing this book was the closest thing I could do to bringing him back and understanding a special man I never got to know,” he says.
A Cast of Extraordinary People
The story Schapiro tells begins in the late 1700s and introduces his impressive lineage and family’s deep connection to the Rebbes of Chabad-Lubavitch over the centuries. Hundreds of meticulously gathered photographs, documents and maps guide the reader throughout the book, and the primary characters are introduced shortly into the story, beginning with Schapiro’s great-grandfather, Rabbi Shneur Zalman Vilenkin.
Vilenkin was the childhood teacher of the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—in the Ukrainian city of Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro) in the early 1900s. The Rebbe and his two brothers would walk to Vilenkin’s home for their formative Jewish education. Decades later, when Vilenkin passed away in Crown Heights in 1963, the Rebbe attended his funeral, carried the casket to the hearse and stood at the cemetery gate for the duration of the burial. The Rebbe contributed to the funeral costs and asked that the headstone record that Vilenkin had been his teacher.
“He hut mir avekgeshtelt oyf di feet—he put me on my feet,” the Rebbe said of him.
Vilenkin daughter, Chana, married Rabbi Lipa Schapiro in 1937, joining the two family lines at the book’s center.
Educated in the underground yeshivas of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, Rabbi Lipa moved between Soviet cities every six months to stay ahead of the secret police. In Leningrad, he secretly organized Torah classes for young adults until authorities came to his door and he jumped out the back window, spending the next three years wandering from city to city, never sleeping in the same place twice.
When World War II reached the Soviet Union in June 1941, Rabbi Lipa and Chana Schapiro found themselves separated by roughly a thousand miles.
Chana had traveled to Yekaterinoslav to visit her father when Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, violating its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Rabbi Lipa was left in Leningrad as the city came under severe siege, its bridges and rail lines destroyed, trapping most residents inside. He managed to escape by boat with his father, Rabbi Nachum Schapiro, making his way eastward through Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), to Omsk, in southwestern Siberia, where they stopped to observe Yom Kippur among former prisoners of war, before continuing through Almaty and finally reaching Tashkent, some 3,000 miles from where they had begun.
Chana’s route was no less grueling. She fled Yekaterinoslav on foot and by wagon, traveling largely through forests, eventually reaching Makhachkala on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. There, her father taught Torah to refugees. When word spread that Chabad had established a foothold in Tashkent, Chana undertook the final 1,500-mile journey to reunite with her husband.
The couple had been separated for approximately a year and a half. They would spend the remainder of the war in Tashkent, where two of their children were born, having lost two others earlier.
After the war, they posed as Polish refugees and crossed into Poland. They made their way through Czechoslovakia, Austria and Germany, arriving at the Pocking Displaced Persons camp in the American occupation zone. A planned six weeks in Paris became six years.
In 1953, the Vilenkin and Schapiro families were directed to Cleveland, Ohio, and settled there with the Rebbe’s blessing.
Vilenkin eventually moved to Brooklyn in the early 1960s, and the Schapiros followed in the 1970s, after leaving a lasting impression on the Ohio Jewish community. Rabbi Lipa became the rabbi of the Empire Shtibel synagogue, delivered regular classes in Torah and Talmud, and served on the Central Committee of Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbis of the United States and Canada. He continued teaching until the week he died in 2010 at the age of 97.
Naturally, Schapiro writes most poignantly of his father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schapiro, in the last section of the book. A son of Rabbi Lipa and Chana Schapiro, he served as a teacher and assistant principal—first in the Bronx and then in Crown Heights, impacting hundreds of students and devoting his entire being to his work.
In addition to his educational work with children, he was a mentor to young families, patiently and lovingly. One of the families he formed a lifelong connection with was that of Dr. Moshe (Robert) Feldman, to whom Rabbi Schapiro became a cherished mentor and mashpia throughout the years. The Feldmans would go on to become proud Chabad chassidim, and Feldman served as a member of the Rebbe and Rebbetzin’s medical team, as well as the go-to physician for many in the Crown Heights community.
Legacy of Resilience is a memoir and a chronicle of one family’s journey through the Soviet Union and World Wars I and II. Yet it is also the broader story of the 20th-century Jewish experience and a history of the Chabad movement, as the Schapiros’ faith carried them through starvation, devastation and persecution in Eastern Europe, to rebuild in America, first in the fledgling Jewish community in Ohio, and then in the bustling Chassidic world of New York, all the while encountering noted rabbis, personalities and luminaries along the way.
Since its release, Legacy of Resilience has resonated deeply with readers, becoming Amazon’s No. 1 New Release in Jewish History through word of mouth alone.
The Research
The 90-minute recording at the yahrzeit gathering was only the beginning. Over the following years, Schapiro accumulated what he could. He contacted every relative he could find and asked for everything they had. A relative’s school social-studies project, in which students interview their grandparents, surfaced material he hadn’t known existed. Separately, a cousin had spent hours recording their grandfather’s full account of his life story on tape. Working with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and even able to reciprocate by sharing his own findings, Schapiro reconstructed the postwar Pocking chapter in unusual depth.
“People think it was freedom and a big bungalow colony,” he says. “But it was still a hard period.”
The displaced Chassidim in Pocking had to contend with kashrut challenges, competing secularist factions, and the hard work of building schools and institutions from nothing. Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, of righteous memory, the Rebbe’s mother, was also there during this period.
His editor returned the first draft with 800 questions. It took him 11 months to address every note.
Schapiro worked on the manuscript every day for the past seven and a half years—early mornings, late nights, stolen hours after a full-time career in psychiatric healthcare, while also being there for his wife, Chavie, and six children.
“It was a one-man show,” he says. “Thank G‑d, I loved working on this project, and I never got burnt out by it. While other people kick back after work, this was my lounging.”
What Schapiro found, on the other side of seven and a half years, surprised him.
“I always struggled when people would loudly proclaim the actions and heroism of their ancestors, because I felt it was unearned. What did we do to deserve the praise they, not us, are due?” he says. “But through coming to learn and understand my own family’s story, I’ve come to see that it’s very appropriate to be proud of the ancestors you have, and to recognize the sacrifice our elders went through to preserve their Yiddishkeit, and to keep telling their stories for future generations to be inspired by.”
The hardest section was the last. “The first few times I worked on it, I bawled,” he says of the chapter describing his father’s final night. It was Dr. Feldman who was with him when he passed.
But finally, he says, he got to know his father.
“This is a book of the stories he would’ve told me but never got to, with the addition of his own. Whenever a student or friend of his met me over the years, I would treasure their memories and stories about him. Now, we’ve got a glimpse of the incredible and special person, father and Chassid he was. I hope this tribute makes him proud.”
To purchase Legacy of Resilience, click here.
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