A. I’m usually not in the know about these kinds of things, I’m not at all connected in that kind of way, but it so happens that circumstances brought about that I had a conversation with him back in 2005 that touched on this. That year our campus was among 5 Chabad Houses participating in an Avi Chai study led by Dr. Barry Chazan on the impact of informal Jewish education in the Friday Night Shabbat dinner experience. We traveled often to NY to meet with sociologists and experts in the Jewish field. At our last session, Joseph Telushkin was there, along with Gary Rosenblatt of the Jewish Week and others.
There’s a beautiful and insightful story about an accounting or tax question that the Rebbe’s office asked Joseph Telushkin’s father while he was still in the hospital recovering from a stroke. I don’t remember if he brought it up and told it then, or if one of us asked about it, since it was somewhat known but we wanted to confirm he details and hear it first hand. Either way, he told the story. And he then mentioned that he is mulling over the possibility of writing a book about the Rebbe but wasn’t sure yet of it or which way to approach it. This story about his father is in the introductory pages of the “Rebbe” book published in 2014.
So, yes – in this rare instance we did have a tiny inside scoop and a sliver of a heads-up!