Five years ago, they said Lubavitch wouldn't survive without the Rebbe. But now, stronger than ever, Chabad's outreach is worldwide.<When the lights dimmed in the Brooklyn Marriott's grand ballroom last November 7, two things were still visible—a sea of black coats and hats crowded around more than 100 linen-bedecked tables, and a makeshift mechitza, separating dozens of elegantly dressed women from their husbands on the other side. It was the gala banquet of the annual International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Shluchim (emissaries; Chabadniks use "shluchim," the Ashkenazi pronunciation of "shlichim." Similarly, they speak of "shlichus," meaning the service they do, rather than "shlichut"), and more than 1,300 Chabad shlichim had flown in from their postings around the world for a weekend of study and celebration.
The roll call, the evening's highlight, began. "Argentina!" "Australia!" "Austria!" Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, development director for Chabad's shlichim network, read off the names of the 109 countries around the world where the movement has emissaries. As each name was read, one, two, or sometimes a dozen men sprang from their seats to a smattering of applause.
"Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Romania!" The applause got louder as the shlichim congratulated their Israeli-born colleague who had just opened Chabad's newest center, in Bucharest. Kotlarsky paused, dramatically. Then, in a booming voice, he shouted "Russia!" Almost three dozen young men—about half of Chabad's 52 full-time emissaries to Russia (a country that banned Jewish education for 70 years and routinely imprisoned and tortured Jewish activists under Soviet rule until the doors opened to religious freedom in 1991)—jumped out of their seats to thunderous applause and raucous cheers. The room burst into a spontaneous hora, with clapping and singing and wild, boisterous dancing that went on and on—a giant pep rally without the pom-poms, a political convention without the TV cameras. Pure joy. Pure passion.
This is Chabad-Lubavitch, the Crown Heights, Brooklyn-based Hasidic movement that got its start in the forests of 18th-century Poland, where the Baal Shem Tov and his tzaddikim (righteous men) preached a Judaism that depended on individual love of God rather than mere rote adherence to religious law. Many branches of Hasidism developed over the next century, each growing around the "court" of a particular rebbe, or tzaddik, who passed his teachings on to his followers. The court of Chabad-Lubavitch sprang from the writings of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, who in 1796 published the Tanya, the book still revered by Chabadniks as containing the key to Jewish spiritual awareness. "Chabad" is an acronym, deriving from the Hebrew words for wisdom (chochma), intelligence (bina), and faith (da'at); Lubavitch is the name of the town in Belorussia where the movement began.
There have been seven Lubavitcher rebbes since Schneur Zalman, each one designated by his predecessor. Menachem Mendel Schneerson was declared the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe in 1950. Because Chabad, like all Hasidic movements, has always taken much of its strength from the reigning rebbe, pundits predicted Chabad would collapse when Schneerson died childless in June 1994. Schneerson, or, as he is more commonly called, the Rebbe, had been the heart and soul of Chabad for 44 years, its spiritual leader as well as its intellectual and organizational fulcrum. He shepherded it from a closed community of Eastern European-oriented Hasidim into a highly public worldwide movement as well-known in the U.S. Congress as in Crown Heights. By January of 1994, with speculation of succession and rumors of power grabbing swirling around the dying 91-year-old Rebbe, Chabad leadership decided that Schneerson would be the last rebbe. They gave no official reason for the move, which sparked an almost desperate expectation among some Lubavitchers that the Rebbe was the Messiah. Opposed, at least in public, by most of the movement's leaders, messianic fervor threatened to tear the movement apart.
But it didn't. Today, more than five years later, Chabad is stronger, bigger, richer, and more popular than ever. It's almost as if the movement forced a shot of adrenaline into its collective arm after Schneerson's death just to prove, to the Jewish world and to itself, that his legacy would survive him. "All the 'ologists' thought we'd run to California and jump off a cliff when the Rebbe died, or shave off our beards," says Rabbi Yosef Langer, who has run San Francisco's popular Chabad center for almost 25 years. "But they don't understand the relationship of a Hasid to his rebbe."
According to Lubavitch World Headquarters in Crown Heights, the movement's infrastructure has expanded nearly 30 percent since the Rebbe's death. Slightly more than 3,700 emissary couples work in more than 100 countries, aided by almost 50,000 professionals throughout the organization. About 400 shlichim "went out," or took up their postings, in the past five years. More than 511 new Chabad institutions have been established, including 406 new facilities purchased or built from scratch, bringing the total number of institutions worldwide—seminaries, day schools, camps, and so on—to nearly 2,600. Officials in Brooklyn claim that nearly one million children around the globe attended Chabad activities last year.
Chabad's investment in its physical infrastructure these past few years has been astounding: A $4 million dollar building in Boca Raton, a $14 million dollar institution in Buenos Aires, a $7 million dollar Jewish Community Center in Moscow, a $1.5 million dollar Jewish synagogue complex in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and a $15 million dollar girls' school in Paris. Virtually all the money for the Boca Raton and Buenos Aires projects was raised in the local Jewish communities; funding for the Russian projects came largely from donors outside the Former Soviet Union (FSU), but again, it was all raised by Chabad shlichim in the field.
And don't let the 18th-century dress fool you. Lubavitchers may not have televisions in their homes (except to watch educational videos), but they have been quick to exploit modern technology, particularly the Internet. Chabad was the first Jewish organization with its own Web site, chabadonline.com, which provides everything from instructions on how to celebrate holidays to detailed answers to talmudic questions. The Lubavitch News Service (LNS) sends out free weekly articles by e-mail—highlighting Chabad activities around the world. Last summer, www.chabadonline.com, a computer network linking every Chabad shaliach in the world to a webzine that is updated weekly, went on-line allowing each rabbi to add his own schedule of events, so a Jew anywhere can find out what activities are offered locally. Passover.net and Chanukah99.com, one and three years old respectively, are probably the most comprehensive Web sites devoted to the two holidays, and Kehotonline.com, launched in November, sells Chabad publications. "We have much bigger plans in the works," says LNS director Zalman Shmotkin, who oversees most of these projects from the movement's headquarters. Already, he says, chabadonline.com receives more than a million hits a week.
Chabad's expansion in the FSU alone is phenomenal. In 1994, when the Rebbe died, Lubavitch was working in eight cities, mostly in Russia. Today they have 150 full-time emissary couples in 55 cities across Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, and Central Asia, with 7,400 children studying in their religious schools. Chabad is the leading force in the newly created Federation of Jewish Communities of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which has brought together 82 Jewish communities in their first-ever organizational framework. Only the Reform movement approaches Chabad in terms of outreach in the FSU; its first big push came late, in 1997, and they now have more than 80 congregations, but just three full-time rabbis. The Conservative movement has yet to make a push into Russia, while the Orthodox have, more or less de facto, deferred to Chabad.
No one knows exactly how big Chabad is in terms of actual card-carrying Lubavitchers. There's no membership roster, no official census. But, says Samuel Heilman, professor of sociology and Jewish studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, numbers don't tell the whole story. "You can't measure their influence by the number of guys they have in black hats," he says. "Chabad's influence is measured in the number of Jews they've had an impact on. That's what makes them significant."
Indeed, the Chabad-Lubavitch penetration into the Jewish world is so complete that officials in Brooklyn confidently proclaim their holiday programs reach ten million Jews a year, three-quarters of the world's Jewish population. Ben-Gurion University professor Velvel Green, author of Life on Mars, was only half kidding when he said last November, "Sooner or later, we'll land an astronaut on Mars, and he'll be met there by a Lubavitcher shaliach."
What's the key to the movement's success? They have money, sure, much of it donated by non-Orthodox Jews. They have a formidable international infrastructure. But above all, the reason for Chabad's continued vitality and phenomenal growth was in that ballroom in the Brooklyn Mariott: the shlichim. Thousands of smart, idealistic young men and women, filled with zeal, energy, and ahavat Yisroel (love of the Jewish people)—kids, really, in their early 20s, who leave comfortable homes and families and move to Fairbanks or Peoria or Hong Kong or Khabarovsk, where they dedicate their lives to running Chabad Centers they usually build themselves, from the ground up. And they do it, they say, because the Rebbe wants them to.
"We're carrying on the Rebbe's revolution," says one Lubavitch woman in her early 20s, who recently moved from Brooklyn with her new husband to a city in Russia's far east. That revolution began in 1950, immediately after Schneerson took over Chabad's helm, when he sent one shaliach couple from Brooklyn to Morocco, beginning the outreach campaign for which Chabad is now known. Today two or three couples leave Brooklyn every week, bound for distant destinations, ready to teach Torah and spread the Rebbe's message that every Jew is a precious part of the entire Jewish people.
"Chabad has the biggest army of people in the Jewish world ready to live on the edge of poverty," says New York University professor and noted Jewish historian Arthur Hertzberg, author of The Zionist Idea.
Hertzberg wasn't always a friend of Chabad. In fact, when the messianic movement began emerging around the dying Rebbe six years ago, Hertzberg told the New York Times that Chabad "had all the aura of Sabbatai Zevi [the notorious 17th-century false messiah]." His personal encounters with Chabad shlichim have turned him around, he says. Hertzberg's daughter, a past president of a Conservative congregation in Fresno, California, sends her children to the local Chabad school, a fact Hertzberg relates with pride.
"These 3,500 people are the most holy group in the Jewish world today," he states. "Everywhere I go in recent years, I bump into one of these young couples working their heads off. They live on nothing, and they stay with it. I can disagree with their theology, but I can only admire them."
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Chabad's shaliach system is that emissaries are not "hired" for two or three years, like at the Jewish Agency or the State Department. Chabad shlichim take up their postings for the rest of their lives. They leave Brooklyn with one-way tickets and approximately one year's salary. After that, they're expected to make their own way financially—by charging for Chabad activities, such as day schools and private tutoring, by drumming up donors, and by taking related jobs in the local community. Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn will supply them with books and other resource materials, but after that first year they're pretty much on their own, financially and organizationally.
"Chabad is a franchise now," says Professor Heilman. "Like there's a McDonald's in every town, there's a Chabad House in every town. I call it the McDonaldization of Hasidism. And just like there's no original McDonald's anymore, there's no real Chabad headquarters any longer. Each outpost runs itself. The center of gravity has moved out of Crown Heights."
Chabad shlichim are not prisoners, of course. If a shaliach couple doesn't work out, they will be reassigned. But leaving the field entirely is so rare that no one interviewed for this article could remember it ever happening. "They don't go thinking, let's try this for a year or two, they go knowing that's where they'll spend their lives," says Shmotkin. "On what? On a dollar and a dream."
That's just about what Leah and Avrohom Berkowitz will have when they leave for their new lives in Russia at the end of the summer. Avrohom, 23, and Leah, 20, were married last fall; their first child was born a few months ago. Avrohom has been named executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS. Leah will become director of a Chabad day school that presently has 250 students. Within five years, she predicts confidently, the school will have more than 800 children. Both have assumed tremendous responsibilities at an age when most American Jews are still finishing college. That doesn't faze them. "Being young is a benefit," Avrohom argues. "It means we have more time to do the work."
Typical of Chabad couples, the Berkowitzes first meeting was arranged. They married after a brief courtship, during which they confirmed their commitment to the emissary's life. (In Chabad, if a young man wants to be a shaliach, he will only marry a woman with similar goals.) Leah, who grew up in Kiryat Malachi, Israel, comes from a shaliach family; Avrohom's own father was a ba'al teshuva, born of secular parents, and is now a Chabad shaliach in Detroit. Both were raised with the shaliach ideal, but that doesn't make it much easier for Leah to contemplate raising her children in Russia.
"I'm not moving there for the scenery, that's for sure," she laughs. "When I tell people we're moving to Moscow, they look at me like I'm meshuga. But there's so much work to do there, the potential is so great, it would be a waste to do anything else with my life. It will be good, im ezrat HaShem (with God's help), I'm sure of it."
Young Chabad shlichim don't go into the field unprepared. They have all spent a great part of their teenage years working as camp counselors or day school teachers, often in foreign countries, to test whether they and the work are a fit. Most young men, or bocherim, studying in Chabad-Lubavitch seminaries spend their summers and winter breaks traveling in pairs on the Chabad circuit, staying with shlichim families along the way, doing outreach work in local communities. After years of working in mitzvah tanks (vans that drive through the streets announcing what time Shabbat begins) and leading impromptu Torah classes in far-flung locales, a young Chabadnik has a pretty good idea whether he or she is ready to commit to a lifetime of similar work.
Leah Berkowitz spent the summer of 1998 in Nikolayev, Ukraine, teaching Russian-speaking children in a Chabad school. And Avrohom has been doing international outreach work for Chabad for years—two years in Argentina and a year in Uruguay. He's also spent three summers traveling to dozens of cities, running a Passover seder in Nepal, lecturing in remote Alaskan communities during the High Holidays. When he was offered the Moscow position last November, he and Leah made two short trips to check it out, then decided they would go. For good.
Like other shlichim destined for foreign postings, Avrohom has been studying Russian intensively. Leah already speaks the language.
"I had the choice between living in New York and traveling back and forth to Russia or moving there. Leah and I decided we had to go to the field, where our children would grow up with the children we're working with. I must understand the needs and speak the language of the people. I want to feel it, live it, walk the cold streets. I want to be a part of the Russian Jewish community—this is going to be my life."
What motivates a young Chabadnik to choose the missionary's life, far from home, spreading a message that doesn't always find a welcome audience? Every shaliach will tell you that he or she is personally responding to the Rebbe's call. "The Rebbe's legacy, the inspiration he put out, is palpable," says Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, the Rebbe's longtime personal secretary and, as head of Lubavitch World Headquarters in Crown Heights, the man most often considered Chabad's administrative head.
But it's more than that, says Shmotkin. "The Rebbe influenced people to feel a personal responsibility for every Jew in the world," he explains. "Yes, a Hasid wants to please his rebbe. But a young person who gets up and goes? It's impossible to explain this emotion solely in terms of blind faith in your leader. It's much deeper than that." The big jump in Chabad's outreach campaign came in the mid-'60s, just after President John F. Kennedy announced the formation of the Peace Corps. It's not a coincidence, Chabad officials say. Both projects drew on the same idealistic urge among young people to serve for little or no remuneration. "Growing up in Chabad today, you know that the ideal, the greatest thing you can do, is be a shaliach," says Shmotkin. "Those who don't go out on shlichut always wish they had."
And unlike the Peace Corps, the ranks of Chabad shlichim grow more and more rapidly every year. "There's no shortage of young people ready to do it," says Krinsky. "It's remarkable, but it's a fact."
"I was brought up that way, believing that Yiddishkeit is not just a hobby, but a way of life," agrees Montreal-born Zalman Paris, who recently completed his rabbinic studies in Crown Heights and has spent the past five summers traveling through Africa with Chabad's Summer Peace Corps program, which sends young single seminary students in teams of two every summer on "courtesy calls" to Jewish communities in Africa that have few or no Jewish services available to them. The young Chabadniks bring books and other materials, speak at schools and synagogues, offer spiritual guidance, and sometimes perform rabbinic functions in communities without congregational rabbis. At 24, Paris is headed for marriage and a much hoped for shlichut in a yet-to-be-determined location. "It was always my dream. I grew up thinking that it was the best way to spend your life."
But not everyone is happy to see these eager young Chabad couples, who usually show up in a community without warning, sending out flyers, putting up notices advertising Bible classes and day schools and bar mitzvah lessons. Chabad shlichim insist they don't go into any community without invitation, but the invitation could come from one person sympathetic to Chabad's message or even from an established Chabad shaliach in a nearby city who wants to expand his range of coverage into a smaller rural or suburban area. They don't always clear the invitation with the local Jewish Federation or pulpit rabbi.
Many Chabad shlichim face negative reactions, even outright hostility, in their new postings, particularly in North American towns with strong Reform and Conservative congregations. And most of the flak comes from Jews, with the strongest opposition coming from the established Jewish leadership. It's not surprising, says one Midwestern rabbi, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Non-Orthodox rabbis see them as a threat," he explains. "They waltz in, presenting themselves as the Ôreal Jews.' So what are we? And with their schools and summer camps, they're taking money from our pockets."
Hostile Jews may imagine that the new Chabad rabbi and his wife are seasoned missionaries, backed by a well-oiled, single-minded religious organization. They forget, or don't wish to acknowledge, that the shlichim are real people—very young people—living in a strange new place, with no friends or family, feeling a little bewildered and alone. Will they be accepted? Will their children find friends? Will people think they're touched in the head?
Rabbi Berel Levertov, who opened the first Chabad center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, three years ago, says that the small Jewish community reacted with suspicion and dislike when he first arrived. "Orthodox, black hat, you know," he notes, with a wry smile. He tried to dispel the hostility by inviting Jews to his Shabbat table. Many refused. "Still today, I get that. For many people, this is not their thing. Especially Jews who have had bad experiences with Judaism, it's hard to get past it. But slowly, slowly, the smiles are coming."
Much of the hostility derives from the belief that the real mission of the Chabad shlichim is to convert the rest of the Jewish world to their way of life. "Nothing could be further from the truth," insists Rabbi Krinsky, referring to the Rebbe's teaching, which states that simply causing a Jew to perform a Jewish act is reward enough.
"We're not trying to get people to live like us," affirms Rabbi Yitzhak Loewenthal, who set up Denmark's first Chabad Center three years ago in Copenhagen. "I don't tell people to dress in black coats or do this or that. That's not what the Rebbe taught." Each individual mitzvah is important, he says. "I don't see myself [as being] here to win adherents to Lubavitch. People should take steps toward their Judaism at their own speed. Each step has value in and of itself, and not just as a means to an end."
Disingenuous? A bit, perhaps. As Krinsky admits, "I don't want to say a Jew's level of observance is irrelevant, God forbid. But I believe that once the connection is made, those not yet observant will eventually realize the beauty of a Torah-true life."
Both critics and friends of Chabad agree, however, that the movement's recent growth, its ability to attract nonobservant, well-educated American Jews to its activities, is due above all to the personalities of the shlichim themselves: their sincerity, their intelligence, their warmth, and above all, their welcoming attitude towards Jews who have little or no Jewish background. Although they are volunteers, and therefore, to a certain extent, self-selecting, those who succeed at it share the same characteristics. People tend to like them. If they don't have those qualities, they're not given the best postings, or any at all.
"They're not in it for the money," acknowledges Professor Heilman. "They feel they are doing God's work, and that makes them different from other Orthodox Jews. Most Orthodox are ready to look down their noses at the rest of the world. Chabad Jews are ready to look out for the rest of the world."
Nonobservant Jews who show up for Chabad public menorah lightings, or who put on tefillin by the side of the road at the behest of a Chabadnik manning a mitzvah tank, say that they feel "accepted" rather than threatened. Shlomo Katz , 19, of Los Angeles, says he was drawn away from his father's modern Orthodox synagogue to the local Chabad shul because of the latter's "unconditional outpouring of love."
In a world plagued by moral relativism, perhaps young Jews, who are often the first to explore other spiritual universes, are responding to what seems to them the certainty of the Chabad vision. "There's a universal human element here," postulates Rabbi Manis Friedman, who has run St. Paul's Chabad center for 30 years. "We live in a society wracked by doubt. At times we celebrate that—it feels sophisticated to doubt. On the other hand, it's demoralizing. When people see a shaliach, the first thing they see is the absence of doubt. The shaliach does not live in two worlds—people find that endlessly appealing, as well as frightening."
Another reason why Chabadniks are so successful is their activism. They are literally all over the place. They don't wait for Jews to come to their synagogue; they take their Judaism to the streets. Chabad shlichim run free Passover seders in hundreds of places around the world; they patrol the streets of Bangkok inviting Israeli backpackers to Shabbat meals; they throw huge public Hanukkah parties in the main squares of major American cities.
San Francisco's Rabbi Langer, a ba'al teshuva who used to hang out at Grateful Dead concerts in the 1960s, showed up at the Woodstock anniversary concert last summer with kiddush wine and one hundred challot and invited every Jewish kid he could find to his outdoor Shabbat celebration. This is also a guy, by the way, who drives around the city on a refurbished police motorcycle he calls his mitzvah bike. "It's my shtick," he admits. "In order to draw people in, you have to garb yourself in a costume they respond to."
Many young American Jews respond positively to the in-your-face public expressions of Jewish pride that so embarrass their parents' generation. "Chabad does things no one else has the gall to do," says Beth Preminger, 21, a recent graduate of Harvard University who says that although she ate at her campus Hillel House for four years straight, it was the Chabad activities she attended.
"Hillel has a huge $8 million dollar building, but there are tons of kids who are too intimidated to walk into it," she says. "You have to be identified as a Jew to walk in the front door. But when you go to [Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi's] for Shabbat dinner, it's very heimish. You get a spiritual feeling. They welcome everyone, but they still have a definite direction to offer."
Chabad shlichim are encouraged to be very flexible—lenient with other Jews' observance levels while maintaining their own strict observance of Jewish law. "We see the people as Jews, as people, not as whatever they do," says Rabbi Loewenthal. "People see that in us. It attracts them to us, that we're not pushing them. A large percent of the people who attend our events have a personal friendship with us. Friendship is deeper than religion. We are really friends. It's not just a way to bring people closer to Judaism."
And despite the personal hardships involved in taking up a faraway emissary assignment, it's also true that being a Chabad shaliach gives these Hasidic youth prestige, and the opportunity to get out into the world with people most Hasidim don't get to know. "There are different levels as to why a person would want to do this," says Loewenthal. "The deepest level is wanting to help Jews. On a more simplistic level, it's exciting work. It's multifaceted. You are dealing with people, presenting Judaism to a place where it doesn't exist."
"I wake up every morning ready to conquer," chimes in Rabbi Levi Wolff, a New Jersey Chabadnik sent off to Perth, Australia, two years ago as western Australia's Chabad rabbi. "When people ask what I do, I say I'm in marketing. I market Judaism. I can't imagine enjoying anything more."
© MOMENT 2000
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