During a private audience with the Rebbe in 1960, a young Moshe Feller heard an unexpected suggestion: he should gather his articles about his Merkos Shlichus travels through Central America and publish them as a book.

That book has now been published by Kehot Publication Society.

We Travel to Educate: Dispatches from the Early Chabad-Lubavitch Summer Visitation Program brings together Rabbi Moshe Feller’s vivid firsthand accounts of his pioneering journeys through Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Mexico in 1959 and 1960.

The story behind the book began in 1960, the two-hundredth year since the passing of the Baal Shem Tov. With the Rebbe placing special emphasis on spreading awareness of the Baal Shem Tov and his teachings, Feller wrote an article for the then-fledgling Jewish Press titled “The Rebbe and the Baal Shem Tov.”

Before submitting it, he brought the article to the Rebbe to verify its accuracy. The Rebbe approved it—and edited it in his own handwriting.

Its publication gave Feller another idea. During his summer travels for Merkos Shlichus, he and his companions had encountered a remarkable array of Jewish communities, personalities, and human-interest stories. Perhaps those experiences, too, could be shared with a wider audience.

The Rebbe approved the idea, as did The Jewish Press. Thus began a regular column under the title “We Travel to Educate.” Over approximately two years, some seventy-five installments appeared.
It was during this period that the Rebbe suggested to Feller: “Es volt geven a gleiche zach oib du volst machen fun deine maamorim a choveres”—it would be appropriate for you to make a compilation of your articles.

As Feller writes in his introduction to the new volume, “The Rebbe’s suggestion from years ago is now a reality.”

The stories take the reader back to an era long before Chabad Houses and permanent shluchim became familiar sights around the world. Feller and his companions were senior rabbinical students, traveling in pairs during their summer vacation under the auspices of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the educational arm of Chabad-Lubavitch.

In 1959, Feller traveled with Shraga Faivish Vogel; in 1960, with Asher Zeilingold. Their route took them through Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Mexico.

What they encountered provides a fascinating snapshot of Jewish life in Central America at the time: vibrant communities and rich traditions alongside Jews living far from centers of Torah life; colorful personalities and unexpected encounters; challenges, humor, setbacks, and successes.

They had come to strengthen Jewish knowledge and observance. But Feller also understood that what they were seeing was a story worth preserving.

The dispatches have an immediacy that later recollections could not reproduce. Written while these pioneering activities were still new, they capture both the adventure of the road and the emerging vision behind it: Jews would be sought out wherever they lived, and distance would not be allowed to become an obstacle to Jewish connection.

One passage captures what sustained the young travelers themselves. During a difficult night on the road, close to 3:00 a.m., Feller imagined the Rebbe’s office on Eastern Parkway, its lights still burning. He knew that while he and his companions were trying to locate one another on a map, the Rebbe was thinking about the young men he had sent out.

“It was reassuring to realize that just as our thoughts were with the Rebbe, his thoughts were with us,” Feller wrote, “and it was safe to assume that he, too, was ‘locating his boys on the map.’”

The articles made an impression back home as well. Years later, after Feller and his wife had established the permanent Chabad-Lubavitch presence in Minnesota, the Rebbe’s mother, Rebbetzin Chana, told him that she had been an avid reader of his articles and missed them.

“I used to write, but now I do,” Feller responded.

“Aza shrayben iz tu’en,” Rebbetzin Chana replied—“Such writing is doing.”

The volume contains opening words by Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, who places Feller’s journeys within the beginnings of the Rebbe’s far-reaching vision of shlichus. There is a special symmetry to his contribution: years earlier, Krinsky himself had been among the young Merkos Shlichus students who encountered Moshe Feller in Minneapolis, helping set in motion Feller’s own journey to Lubavitch and, ultimately, to a lifetime of shlichus.

The new Kehot edition preserves the original text of Feller’s Jewish Press articles, with minor editorial adjustments for clarity and consistency.

We Travel to Educate: Dispatches from the Early Chabad-Lubavitch Summer Visitation Program, by Rabbi Moshe Feller, is published by Kehot Publication Society.
Order here.