Menachem Schneerson was a Hasidic rabbi of the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn. Born in 1902 in Russia, he studied science and engineering in Germany and France, and escaped the Nazis in 1941 to settle in America.
Accepting the title of Rebbe in 1951, Schneerson's energetic outreach programs and opening of schools and synagogues led to a movement known as Chabad-Lubavitch messianism, which held that Schneerson was himself the messiah. Schneerson seems not to have claimed this openly for himself, however, predicting that the messiah would appear on September 9, 1991 (one month, as it happened, after the three-day Crown Heights riots). Schneerson died in 1994.
