Founding Tzivos Hashem was part of Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson's unswerving devotion to the welfare and education of children. Rabbi Schneerson, the seventh leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch chassidic movement, best known as the "Rebbe", was committed to education. He viewed education not just as an acquisition of knowledge and skills, but as an inculcation of ethics and morals to help children grow up to be decent and productive citizens. Tzivos Hashem was introduced when the Rebbe urged his emissaries to set up after school programs to reduce children's susceptibility to the many lurking banal and violent diversions that are prevalent in the media and on the streets.

The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, was born in the Ukrainian-Russian town of Nikolaev in 1902. The Rebbe spent his childhood in pogrom-ridden Czarist Russia, his twenties battling the Stalinist attempt to eradicate Jewish life in the Soviet Empire, his thirties in Berlin and Paris. In 1941 the Rebbe escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and settled in New York, where for the next 50 years he transformed the very fabric of Jewish life in every corner of the globe.

The museum is an instrument of the Rebbe's vision.