Talk:Isaac Schneersohn

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The article lists this person as a "Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi". It also says that he was a Zionist affiliated with the Revisionist group. If the latter is true, he could not have been a Chabad Rabbi, as the leaders of Chabad were vehemently opposed to Zionism. Yehoishophot Oliver (talk) 05:21, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
 * He was a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi, who later suported Zionism. When you talk about Chabad and Zionism, you talk about the era before the establishment of Israel. De facto, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn supported the State. (Highland14 (talk) 18:50, 30 August 2010 (UTC))
 * During which period did he supposedly host Zionist meetings in his house? Yehoishophot Oliver (talk) 23:19, 30 August 2010 (UTC)
 * You miss the point once more. He campaigned for Israel. Let's look at his positions when Israel was in danger or war. He met zionist politicians. Bibi Netanyahu was at his funerals. Bibi's father was a revisionist. The Likud comes from there. That's not in his house! You evidently don't know history.(Highland14 (talk) 01:02, 31 August 2010 (UTC))
 * You didn't understand my question; sorry for the vagueness. My question was: At which point exactly is Isaac Schneersohn reported to have hosted Zionist meetings in his house. Yehoishophot Oliver (talk) 01:47, 31 August 2010 (UTC)
 * You made a claim that Menachem Mendel Schneersohn - included in the Lubavitcher Rebbes - did not support the State of Israel, which is baseless. Now when did the meetings take place between Isaac Schneersohn and Zionists leaders is not a relevant question. He was in constant touch with them. (Highland14 (talk) 21:30, 31 August 2010 (UTC))
 * No, I said they were opposed to Zionism--there's a difference. Being in touch with Zionist leaders and actively subscribing to and promoting their ideology are two completely different things. Can you please answer the question I asked re Isaac Schneerson? Yehoishophot Oliver (talk) 10:52, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Did you hear about Neturei Karta and Zionist leaders meeting! I gave the reference about the meetings of Isaac Schneersohn. But, of course, you still didn't open the book. (Highland14 (talk) 16:47, 1 September 2010 (UTC))
 * The Rebbe met with all sorts of people whose philosophy he opposed in order to influence them. The book claims that Isaac Schneersohn become a "right-wing Revisionist". This implies that he had ceased to identify as a member of Chabad, because the leaders of Chabad all opposed the philosophy of Zionism, whether the right- or left-wing variety. If you want sources for this I am willing to supply them. Yehoishophot Oliver (talk) 20:15, 1 September 2010 (UTC)
 * It's good that YOU were not the Rebbe. If you had read the book, you would have seen that the Rebbe never gave hope or help, particularly for his relatives. You also don't understand the de facto agreement of the Rebbe for Medinat Israel. Again, you are very far from the Rebbe and his Hashkafa. You are a dogmatist who for the sake of argument will not hesitate to demean the others. Your views on Heilman & Friedman is the best proof. (Highland14 (talk) 22:07, 1 September 2010 (UTC))

Poor translation from the French
Wanted to address several different aspects of the translation, so rather than have one really long convo thread, I thought I'd break it up into different topics which we could address separately, to keep things organized. The first section–Initial cleanup–is copied from another location.

Initial cleanup
First part of this conversation originated on WP:Pages needing translation into English

The initial language of this article was French. Have started to do single-word fixes, like change tense from fr historic future to past tense, improper prepositions, etc. Unfortunately, the syntax is so convoluted in what is obviously a machine translation that it will require a lot of work. Worse, a non-standard reference style has left lots of references (that's a good thing) but the refs are so tangled into the convoluted syntax that disentangling it all will be tedious. Possibly the best approach would be to rip out all the references (maybe save into a table on Talk page), do the rewrite from pure text, then reinstall references. Mathglot (talk) 21:34, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I've ✅ all the references, using (Harvard-style references) where I think appropriate. External links might still need a look over, but they are usually left to rot anyway. I've tidied the French somewhat, but could probably do with another set of eyes. I've added the  tag and removed the other issues at the top since I think I have addressed them all, if not perfectly. Si Trew (talk) 11:37, 29 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi, I wandered by the article before even seeing the ping, and you did a terrific job. One minor quibble:  I remember seeing a MOS somewhere about not adding Infoboxes that are quite small, and have practically no information outside what can be found in the lede, and which are unlikely to be expanded.  This might be a case of that.  But it's minor, and your changes to the article are a great improvement.  There's some ref errors with bad param 'imprint' on the book cites, which I may clean up.  Again, well done. Mathglot (talk) 06:13, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

End of copied material. Mathglot (talk) 03:52, 31 May 2015 (UTC)


 * The following is copied from User_talk:Mathglot:


 * Thanks for the thanks, though that has now been removed from WP:PNTCU as closed. As for the attribute, I didn't think this was valid but deliberately left it there, not knowing the best way to deal with it. I should really put the external links into cite templates as well. I did reword some of the quotes a bit, but I assumed these were Wikipedian translations rather than being quoted from some sourced translation (usually I would give both the original and the translated text, in those cases, and perhaps we should re-introduce the original French there too.) Si Trew (talk) 18:27, 30 May 2015 (UTC)


 * End copy. --Mathglot (talk) 03:59, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Long quotations
Another issue of the translation has to do with copying the structure of the French article, which is problematic. In particular, the use of long quotations which I think are problematic on several levels:
 * there may be WP:COPYVIO issues
 * it's not the right style to use a quote for everything we want to say about a partiuclar point, rather than describing a point, adding a source for it, and perhaps a brief quote as an illustration of the point just made. These can be found in sections:
 * Early life - long quote from Heilman and Friedman. There's no reason to quote them, the material should merely be described, and footnoted.  There's nothing unique or interesting about this quote.
 * The meeting of April 28, 1943 in Grenoble (which should also be renamed) has two long Kaspi quotes and nothing else. Again, no reason to quote this material, it should be summarized and footnoted.
 * Posthumous recognition has three quotes, and no other content. If these are included at all, they should be entirely in footnotes.

Word-for-word quotations from speeches at a memorial seems like way too much detail, and if it's in the article at all, should maybe be in a footnote (along with the original in French) or if it can be found on the web it should just be linked in the article (if at all) and the briefest of quotations if it's a particularly memorable or beautiful quote, otherwise it really doesn't belong in the main body of the article. Mathglot (talk) 05:35, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Some of the relevant guidelines are: WP:QUOTE, WP:QUOTEFARM, WP:MOS. Mathglot (talk) 07:39, 31 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Have removed the long blockquotes by Kaspi in section The founding meeting in Grenoble, summarizing their content briefly and retaining the original Kaspi references. Also removed the long quotations by politicians memorializing Schneersohn sixty years later from the former "Elogies" section, leaving just a short mention of the three politicians present and moved it up to the /* Death */ section.  Mathglot (talk) 03:45, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Section Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation needs a rewrite
Section Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation is a mess and needs a rewrite. First of all, it's way too long. This stems from the fact that the French articlearticle on the CDJC is rather short and not very well-written, so they probably felt the need in the French Schneersohn article to include a lot of detail that was missing in their CDJC article.

Secondly, it has long quotations, alluded to above. These should all go away, either turned into footnotes here (not my preference) or more likely merged into the CDJC article, although even there they should be footnotes, and probably not include the full text of these forgettable and boilerplate comments from memorial speeches by politicians.

Third, the text in the CDJC subsection is not in order chronologically, it's choppy and doesn't flow, and the content is highly arbitrary, including very minor details (Cassin, Feuerwerker) and missing major items entirely (seizing of archives, Nuremberg, the Revue). The name of the section is problematic, being called CDJC under an L2 section name Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation which is what the initials stand for. The text should be trimmed down to a couple of sentences or short paragraph, and the 'CDJC' section header should probably go away.

All of the other subsections, like The meeting of April 28, 1943 in Grenoble, Foundation of the CDJC, Related institutions and Periodical publications of the CDJC should either be merged into the CDJC article or just dropped.

There is already an entire main article for Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation and this section in the Schneersohn article need only cover the highlights. As Schneersohn is known almost exclusively for creating and heading up the CDJC, it's fair enough that the section cover the main points, but it needn't, and shouldn't, try to be as long as, nor include everything already covered in the other article. Mathglot (talk) 05:55, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I'd agree with that (and your other comments in sections above). At least now we can see the meat for the potatoes. Perhaps there is a case for moving some of this content over to CDJC. I have no particular interest in the subject, I just gnomed the references, really. Si Trew (talk) 09:23, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on Isaac Schneersohn. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20120826003340/http://www.memorialdelashoah.org:80/b_content/getContentFromNumLinkAction.do?itemIdP=313&type=1&itemId=313 to http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/b_content/getContentFromNumLinkAction.do?itemIdP=313&type=1&itemId=313#211
 * Attempted to fix sourcing for http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/medias/fr/Le_Monde_Juif.pdf

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Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 17:49, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Isaac Schneersohn. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090204130400/http://parolesetoiles.com:80/parten/index.php?num=6 to http://www.parolesetoiles.com/parten/index.php?num=6

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 01:25, 10 March 2016 (UTC)