This is an abbreviated version (with minor edits done by myself) from an excellent article by Rabbi Pinni Dunner:
The amazing return of the Yabloner Rebbe which was published in Tablet magazine.
Yechezkel Taub was born on Oct. 7, 1895 and took over from his father to become the “Rebbe” of Jabłonna (Yablona), a small rural town close to Warsaw that was home to a vibrant Orthodox Jewish community. He was Revered across Poland as a mystical Hasidic leader, and his Hasidim adored him and flocked to his weekly Friday night tisch gatherings.
Yet everything changed in 1924, with the visit to Jabłonna by a distant relative of the young Rebbe, Rabbi Yeshaya Shapira (who) became consumed by the idea of Jews resettling the Land of Israel. The response to this vision in Jabłonna was jubilant and euphoric. It was as if the Messianic era had arrived. The Yablonna Rebbe sought the advice of the Gerrer Rebbe but he dismissed it as a terrible idea.
Surprised by the harsh advice, the Yabloner Rebbe was still determined to carry out his plans. Within months he was on a boat to Haifa with a couple of hundred Yabloner Hasidim, armed with cash from hundreds more who wanted to own some holy land and to participate in this unique endeavor. Tragically, however, whatever could have gone wrong went wrong.
“We don’t have any money, and we are drowning in difficulties,” the Rebbe told Zionist officials when they met, “but we have come this far, and we are not giving up now.”
The JNF and Jewish Agency administrators sat there stony faced. This enterprise was no longer the propaganda vehicle of 1925, and they were in no mood to waste time or money on a project that was by all measures an unmitigated disaster.
Ultimately the two sides reached an agreement. The Zionist administrators insisted that the elderly and infirm would have to return to Poland until everything was sorted out, as they were a drain on resources. Secondly, the dairy farm would need to close and make way for orchards and crops. Thirdly, the land would have to be signed over to JNF ownership, pending future developments. The Yabloner Rebbe reluctantly agreed to all of these conditions.
In exchange, the Jewish Agency provided the settlers with a stipend, while JNF took care of accumulated debts.
Sadly, although matters had improved for residents of Kfar Hasidim, the Yabloner Rebbe soon found himself in the midst of a financial scandal. With the situation for Jews in Poland rapidly deteriorating, especially after 1935, Hasidim from Jabłonna began turning up in Palestine, expecting to take possession of the plots of land they had paid for over a decade earlier. Since the Yabloner Rebbe was unable to give them any land nor refund their money, they accused him of being a thief.
After the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in 1936, and the increasing violence against Jews in Palestine, longtime residents of Kfar Hasidim also demanded money from the rebbe so that they could go back to their families in Poland. But he had no money for them either. In 1938 the Yabloner Rebbe traveled to the United States to see if he could interest some wealthy Zionist Jews to offer him financial support.
Two months later the German army marched into Poland, and the Yabloner Rebbe now found himself stuck in the United States as a war refugee.
He immediately abandoned his fundraising campaign and attempted to volunteer for the war effort but ultimately found work in the military-supplies industry.
For the Yabloner Rebbe, the emerging news of the Holocaust came as a double blow. Besides the fact that the entire Jabłonna community had been obliterated along with the rest of Polish Jewry, there were those—including the extended families of many of the Kfar Hasidim pioneers—whom he had sent back from Palestine to Poland, because they served no useful purpose in the farming settlement and were a pointless drain on its resources. This had been a non-negotiable condition for the continued involvement of JNF and the Jewish Agency with the Hasidic settlement, and however reluctant the Rebbe may have been to go along with it, he had allowed it to happen. In his own mind the Rebbe began to believe that the deaths of those who had gone back to Poland were his fault.
In late 1944, as the full weight of his distressing predicament became clear, and his anger at God grew and kept on growing, the Yabloner Rebbe decided on a drastic course of action. Without Hasidim, he decided to himself, he was no longer a rebbe—a rebbe has to have Hasidim, and his Hasidim were gone. The best thing for him to do, he concluded, would be to disappear into oblivion in the United States of America, like millions of other faceless immigrants who had done the same.
He avoided all contact with the Jewish community of Los Angeles, and severed all contact with Kfar Hasidim, except for secretive communications with his family, who referred to him by the codename “Uncle Dod,” combining the English and Hebrew words for uncle. He stopped keeping kosher, and also stopped observing Shabbat and Yom Tov. He abandoned the study of Torah and almost never visited a synagogue. For all intents and purposes, the Yabloner Rebbe was no more, and he changed his name to George Nagel, to blend in even better. In his old age he decided to get a degree in psychology. When he was in the midst of doing his master’s degree in psychology, and at the age of 83, his relative, Ehud, was finally able to prevail upon him to return to Kfar Hasidim to visit his family.
Quietly, without letting George know, Ehud informed his mother that her uncle was coming back.
They arrived at the hall, which was packed with hundreds of people who had gathered to meet the man who had put Kfar Hasidim on the map. Old and young, religious and secular—everyone connected to the village was there. A seat at the front was left empty for George, and as a hush descended he slowly made his way toward his seat and sat down under the large welcome sign that adorned the front wall. An elderly man stood up and turned towards George.
“Rebbe, do you remember me?” he asked.
George looked at him, trying to figure out who he was.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Are you Chaimke? Chaimke Geldfarb?”
Chaimke smiled. “Yes, Rebbe, it’s me.” His voice was hoarse with emotion. “On behalf of all the residents of our Kfar, I want to welcome you back home. You were probably nervous to come here. You probably think we are angry with you. You probably think that because you brought us here from Poland, away from our homes, away from our families, to build your dream, not ours. And then it all went wrong, so you think we are angry that it all went wrong. But Rebbe, if that’s what you think, you’re mistaken. Because Rebbe—you saved our lives—if it were not for you, we would all have been killed by the Nazis.”
After more than 40 years away, he was finally back living in Kfar Hasidim, and he once again became the revered Yabloner Rebbe. He became an observant Jew again and the Rebbe was given a seat at the front of the Kfar Hasidim shul, where he prayed regularly, and gave shiurim.
In early 1986, the Rebbe died at the age of 90. He was buried in the heart of the cemetery, among the graves of all those who had followed him from Europe to create a Hasidic settlement in Eretz Yisrael over 60 years earlier
This is an incredible story primarily because it is astounding that someone at such a late stage in life could decide to come back to observance. This decision must have taken so much courage for the Yabloner Rebbe.
As chazal teach us
͏במָקוֹם שֶׁבַּעֲלֵי תְּשׁוּבָה עוֹמְדִין אֵין צַדִּיקִים גְּמוּרִין יְכוֹלִין לַעֲמֹד בּוֹ- ברכות ל”ד:ב
“In the place where a Ba’al Teshuva stands a purely righteous person cannot stand.”
But why is this true? Wouldn’t it be better if someone hadn’t sinned at all then if someone sinned and returned?
I believe that the reason chazal suggest this is because it is harder to return to the correct path once someone has strayed then to just remain on the correct path.
Rav Hirsch suggests that the reason our Torah doesn’t hide our forefather’s sins because the true testament to someone’s greatness is how they are able to rise above a challenge:
“The Torah never hides from us the faults, errors and weaknesses of our great people. This in no way makes them smaller; it actually makes them greater and more instructive. If they stood before us as the purest models of perfection, if they had no internal struggles, we would attribute to them a different nature than we have. In that event, they would not be a model that we could hope to emulate. Take, for example, Moshe’s humility. If we did not also know that he was capable of anger (see Bemidbar 20:10 & 31:14), his humility would seem to us to be nothing more than his inborn nature. Now, however, we know that his humility was the result of immense self-control which we should copy. (Commentary on the Torah, Genesis, 12,10-13, “And there was a famine in the land”)
