Auction 1 Rare and Prestigious Items
By King David Auctions
Mar 19, 2018
22 Ha'Nassi Ha'Shishi st., Jerusalem, Israel

Historical Documents, Rare Books, Rabbis Letters, Art and Banknotes

The auction has ended

LOT 185:

Letter by the Lubavitcher Rebbe to Rabbi Eliezer Nannas "the Man Who Had not Surrendered"

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Sold for: $900
Start price:
$ 300
Estimated price :
700-1,200$
Buyer's Premium: 20%
VAT: 17% On commission only
Auction took place on Mar 19, 2018 at King David Auctions

Letter by the Lubavitcher Rebbe to Rabbi Eliezer Nannas "the Man Who Had not Surrendered"
Typewritten on an airmail letter. The Rebbe's signature appears on the margins of the letter. The content of the letter: Greetings for Passover 1978.
Rabbi Eliezer Nannas (1897-1997). When he was five, his father brought him to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Rebbe Rashab, who told him that "just as Pharaoh's sword did not control Moses, so with you, there will not be a sword that will control you". He studied at the "Tomchei Temimim" Yeshiva in Lubavitch. The Rebbe Rashab used to send him on missions to the Rebbe's father, rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneersohn and to Rabbi Yosef Ruzin, the Rogotchover.
On the eve of Yom Kippur 1936, he was imprisoned in Rostov, where he was locked standing in a cupboard until the end of Yom Kippur. Several months later he was sentenced to ten years of forced labor in Siberia for studying Torah with children and opening Cheiders. There too he continued to observe Mitzvoth and kept his beard and side locks. 
When the ten years of his sentence ended, he was sentenced to ten additional years for the religious activity he had participated in. And again, for the next ten years, he went through hardships, mortal danger, confinement, beating and forced labor, all these while he was living among thieves, criminals and murderers. "According to my calculations", he once said, "I have been in confinement close to a thousand five hundred Sabbaths and Holy Days".
What had given Rabbi Nannas the strength to survive all this were the words of the Rebbe Rayatz that their sword will be unable to control him. He was imprisoned in 1936 when he was forty and returned from Siberia in 1956, when he was sixty. 
11 years later, he immigrated to Israel and lived in Jerusalem. He died in 1997 when he was a hundred years old. 
With time, Reb Laser wrote down what had happened to him in soviet Russia, during his imprisonment and exile until he immigrated to Israel. His story was published (by Heichal Menachem Jerusalem, edited by Reb Naftali Zvi Gottlieb) in two volumes titles "Ha'Ish shelo Nichna" (The Man who did not Surrender). The book was translated into English and additional languages. 
Condition: Good.

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