Hillel Zaltzman was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1939. Fleeing the German invasion in 1941, the Zaltzman family settled in Samarkand, a city in southeastern Uzbekistan, along with many war refugees. There the Chabad community was able to reestablish houses of worship, Jewish schools and a yeshiva, which operated in secret to avoid persecution by the Soviet authorities. Hillel received his early Jewish education from distinguished rabbis who taught small groups of children at great personal risk. In the postwar years under Stalin, with more frequent arrests, the Zaltzman’s hid a fugitive rabbi in their home for six years.
At age sixteen, Hillel joined a newly formed clandestine group called Chamah, whose goals were the preservation and promotion of Judaism and to provide economic assistance to the Jews of Samarkand. They founded a network of underground classes for children and a charity fund to help needy Jews obtain coal and food packages. Through their efforts, an underground yeshiva also emerged in Samarkand, housed in private homes. At age twenty, the author was traveling extensively through the Soviet Union in connection with his community work, while taking the opportunity to visit and bolster the morale of isolated Chassidic and religious Jews. In 1971, after a fifteen-year wait, he finally received his exit visa and he and his wife left for Israel.
In Israel, Rabbi Zaltzman and his friends saw a continuing need for Chamah — to help Russian immigrants adjust to their new home. They created programs to introduce new immigrants to Jewish culture and started schools for Russian and Bukharin children. Zaltzman moved to New York in 1973, where he established a New York office for Chamah.
Over the years, Chamah became a successful and accomplished international organization assisting Russian Jews on three continents — in the United States, Israel and the Former Soviet Union. Rabbi Zaltzman is currently president of Chamah International. Under his leadership, Chamah has expanded its activities to include social and medical services, educational programs, and a publishing division. In 1989, Zaltzman returned to Russia to represent Chamah’s publishing department at the Moscow International Book Fair. He is also the author of a memoir, Samarkand, which was published in Hebrew, English, Russian, and Yiddish and upon which this abridged edition is based. Rabbi Zaltzman was honored in the US Senate in 2016 for his humanitarian work as part of Jewish American Heritage Month. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Shoshana. They are parents of a daughter and a son and are blessed with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
