When the late rebbe of Chabad's wife Chaya Moussia Schneerson passed away in 1988, the rebbe asked his followers to name female children after her. Now There are thousands of Chabad girls named Chaya Moussia and its variants and nicknames, and many of them are first cousins, neighbors and classmates, making things a bit more complicated than was perhaps foreseen.
Here's some of what these Chabad women don't know about the woman they were named for. This is based on information I have or was told to me by people who knew her or who knew her sister.
• Chaya Moussia did not want to get married. It took several years for her to agree to marriage and then to finally have the wedding. This was at a time when hasidic engagements normally lasted a few weeks, not years, and when a parent's decision that you should marry X person was followed if Y was hasidic, and especially if Y's parent pushing the wedding was a rebbe.
• She was not particularly religious. In Berlin and Paris, unless attending a Jewish functions, she did not dress in an Orthodox and certainly not in a hasidic fashion.
• Her sister Sheina, who was killed in the Holocaust, was not religious. Sheina's husband Mendel Horenstein was also not religious. He was also killed in the Holocaust. (There is no evidence I've seen that Sheina and Mussia's father, the Frierdiker Rebbe, tried to rescue her and Mendel. There is clear proof, however, that he tried to save his silver goods, his collection of largely secular books [Sherlock Holmes in Yiddish and things like that], and his furniture. Neither the Freirdiker Rebbe or Chaya Mussia's husband, the 7th rebbe, did anything significant to memorialize them. There are no plaques in 770, etc., in their memory and they were rarely mentioned by either man in their public talks. This is quite odd, especially because until they were separated by the war, Chaya Moussia's husband and Mendel Horenstein were close friends, and the two couples frequently socialized together in Berlin and Paris and attended school together there.)
• After her marriage, when in Berlin and Paris she did not cover her hair – except when going to a synagogue, which she rarely did, to a religious function, or to a place where Orthodox Jews who might recognize her could easily be found.
• In her Berlin and Paris days, she was philosophically close to the women's suffrage movement and would have been in today's terms a feminist.
This is just a taste of things about Chaya Moussia most Chabad followers do not know.
It's also important to say that she was a kind, intelligent woman who was a professional, who worked outside Chabad, who kind and polite and really cared for people in the neighborhood that she knew. And even though she wasn't a true believer, she cared about her father's legacy and wanted the hasidic movement he led to be successful and well run, and the hasidim to be well treated inside it.
If she had been the daughter of a regular Chabad rabbi or of a plain Chabad hasid, she would, from what I know, have been more public about her lack of belief.
But my guess is that she would have done that the way she did everything else – politely and kindly.
Perhaps one day some of the photos and film footage of her in Berlin and Paris and the letters she wrote there will be made public so that Chabad followers can see that the myths they were told are just that, myth, and that their rebbetzin was a far more complex person than they realize.