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.