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Rabbi Hirshel Chitrik and the Crown Heights Eruv Discussion With the Rebbe
A later Chitrik family account preserves a report of Rabbi Hirshel Chitrik bringing a practical Crown Heights eruv question to the Rebbe. The account is significant because it comes from identified family members discussing what they heard within the family. It must also be described for what it is: later oral testimony, not a recording or written transcript of the original yechidus.
The question Rabbi Chitrik reportedly brought
In a 2023 episode of Chatting Rabbis, Rabbi Mendy Chitrik and Rabbi Eliezer Zalmanov discussed the family story. In the relevant passage, one of the hosts says that he personally heard the account repeatedly from his grandfather, Hirshel Chitrik.
According to the account, Hirshel wanted an eruv in Crown Heights at a time when his wife had young children and wanted to be able to bring them with her to shul. Hirshel asked the Rebbe about making an eruv for the neighborhood.
The answer as Hirshel later related it was not to establish a publicly known Crown Heights eruv. The family account describes a qualification involving an enclosure that would remain hidden rather than becoming something on which Shabbos-observant residents would knowingly rely. The host explains that such a hidden enclosure would function only as a failsafe for people who carried regardless, reducing the severity of their transgression where such an enclosure was halachically possible.
According to the same discussion, that did not accomplish the practical purpose for which Hirshel had asked the question, and he did not build the eruv.
A second family recollection
The 2023 conversation also records a later discussion with Hirshel Chitrik's wife after Hirshel had passed away. When the possibility of a public Crown Heights eruv was mentioned to her, she reacted strongly against it and attributed that position to what the Rebbe had told them. The speaker says she had been present and that he regarded her recollection as independent confirmation of what he had heard from his grandfather.
The family discussion also preserves an important nuance. Hirshel could still speak positively about the usefulness of an eruv in principle. According to the recollection, the decisive point for him was that the Rebbe had told him not to establish the public eruv he had proposed for Crown Heights.
That distinction is consistent with a wider theme in the Rebbe's eruv correspondence: the mitzvah and usefulness of a kosher eruv in a place where halacha permits it do not by themselves decide the separate questions of a particular city's domain, enclosure, publicity, and local conditions.
The nature of the account
The public recording preserves a named family transmission. A grandson describes what he says he heard repeatedly from Hirshel Chitrik and later from Hirshel's wife.
It does not supply the date of the original encounter, a recording of the yechidus, a contemporaneous note, a signed statement by Hirshel, or a verbatim transcript of the Rebbe's words. For that reason, the reported substance can be presented as Chitrik family testimony, but individual sentences from the 2023 retelling should not be converted into quotation marks as though they were the Rebbe's exact wording in the original yechidus.
The account belongs with the other Crown Heights testimony collected on The Rebbe and Crown Heights and Testimony Concerning Crown Heights. The local practical psak itself comes from the Crown Heights Rabbonim, not from later family testimony.