Editing Michael Lipsker (section)

== Mesiras Nefesh During the Leningrad Siege ==
He married his wife Teibel, daughter of the chossid Rabbi Eliyahu Par. During the difficult times in Russia, he was one of the prominent figures among Anash in Leningrad who worked for the community, and among his other activities during the siege of Leningrad - together with his brother-in-law Rabbi Baruch Shifrin, he brought thousands to proper Jewish burial.

During the siege of Leningrad in World War II, residents died in the streets in masses, and there was no one to bury them. It is estimated that no less than a million Leningrad residents perished from hunger during the siege, including many from Anash families in the city. Many Jews brought their deceased relatives uncoordinatedly to the courtyard of the Great Synagogue, from where they were taken for Jewish burial. The ones who stepped forward to bring them to Jewish burial were the two brothers-in-law Rabbi Michael Lipsker and Rabbi Baruch Shifrin, who decided that despite the contagious diseases that were raging and the danger of infection from the deceased, they would ensure that the many thousands would receive proper Jewish burial.

They made sure to collect the bodies to the Great Synagogue, and on Fridays they would rent a large truck, which they would fill with seventy to eighty bodies R"L, and transfer them to the cemetery for burial, where they would dig a huge pit that quickly became another mass grave R"L.

One of the few who merited individual burial in those days was Rabbi Yehoshua Nimotin, one of the important Chabad rabbonim of that time. He and his wife died of starvation at the end of Shvat 1942. R' Baruch Shifrin, R' Michael Lipsker and Rabbi Zalman Shimon Dvorkin made sure to bury them side by side in an individual grave, but during the war the markers for the grave location were lost, and today the location of their burial is unknown.

During the war, he fled to Georgia, where he served as mashpia and mashgiach in Tomchei Temimim Yeshiva Kutaisi.

In 1946, he fled Russia under a fake Polish identity as part of an organized escape plan of thousands of chassidim called Yetzias Russia 1946. After wandering through camps, he settled in Paris, where he merited to be near the Rebbe when he came to escort his mother Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson on her way to New York.