• An Israeli Facebook group is asking Netanyahu to wait until after Madonna’s May 29 concert in Tel Aviv to attack Iran. [Haaretz]

• Attention Long Islanders: your synagogue’s caterer might have cooked coconut shrimp in the temple’s kosher kitchen. [NYT]

• Major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson’s business, Las Vegas Sands, is under federal investigation. [Reuters]

• A timeline of the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s changing story on the Planned Parenthood funding cut (and an open letter to CEO Nancy Brinker). [ProPublica]

• A Marine sniper team posed with a flag that looked a lot like a Nazi SS flag in Afghanistan. [AP]

It’s Oprah! on Chabad TV!

To find the place, we had to turn on a few side streets, go down a discreet staircase next to an apartment complex, and press a button beside an unmarked black door. Three short rings later, we were greeted and quickly ushered inside by a round Russian man with a shiny bald head.

“It’s exclusive,” Dasha whispered to me as we traipsed down the stairs. “They don’t want to bother with just anybody.”

Dasha, Anastasia, and Nastia, native Russians in their twenties, made the orders: pomegranate hookah, tea with milk, tea with lemon, chocolate-covered almonds, and fruit beer. Dasha, an icy blonde, and I sat next to each other at the low table while the other two women sat across from us smoking gold-tapered cigarettes.

We began with talk about the stinginess of Dasha’s recent ex. “A Russian woman should only have to pay for her candy and stockings,” Anastasia, draped in fur, informed me. As the newcomer, having just moved here from New York on a fellowship, I had Russian romance lessons to learn. We continued with necessary nastiness about his new girlfriend. “In this day and age, if a Russian woman isn’t beautiful by 30, she’s just stupid,” Nastia, very tall with black hair, said, making the case that plastic surgery solves everything. Dasha had new prospects: an Italian diplomat and a Finnish entrepreneur. “We look for foreigners,” Dasha explained.

Soon the conversation turned to me. I mentioned a few disastrous dates I’d been on since arriving and then made the typical four-single-women-at-a-lounge conclusion: “Men are impossible.” Anastasia and Nastia murmured their agreement, blowing smoke rings.

“Except Jewish men,” Dasha interrupted. The three of us looked at her. She crossed and uncrossed her legs and signaled to the waitress for another drink. “The best men are Jewish.”

I turned to Dasha. “You’re Jewish?” I asked. She smiled, fiddling with the diamond cross around her neck. “Of course I am Jew,” she said. “Jewish men are stylish and important men. And they are the most generous. You must date Jewish men.” Anastasia and Nastia nodded seriously, as though Dasha were imparting the secret to successful dating.

I leaned back and took a deep drag off the pomegranate hookah. I was in St. Petersburg—a city that 100 years ago had forbidden Jews’ residency. The only exceptions had been Jews who openly converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, or Jewish merchants with connections. In rare cases, Jews who had served in the czar’s army for 25 years were permitted to live in the city.

When Daniel Chwolson, a great early 20th-century intellectual in St. Petersburg, was once asked why he had converted to Russian Orthodoxy from Judaism, he answered: “Out of conviction.”

“Out of what conviction?” he was asked. His answer: “Out of the conviction that it is better to be a professor in St. Petersburg then a melamed [Hebrew schoolteacher] in Shklop.”

Now, in a trendy lounge, a young Jewish Russian woman was flaunting her Jewishness and her trysts with Jewish men like it was a fabulous accessory, akin to her black fur coat.

***

When thousands of Russian immigrants began flooding Israel in the 1990s, the joke was that for the first time in history, people were trying to alter their official papers to say that they were Jewish. Since my move to St. Petersburg this fall, I’ve been taken aback by a similar trend: Everyone I meet is excited to have their metaphorical Jewish papers. Jewishness has a new social currency—especially when it comes to dating.

Before my move, my sole association with Russian Jewry, like so many American Ashkenazi Jews, was that of my lineage. Unless I was discussing the refusenik movement of the 1970s or taking the occasional subway ride to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, Russian Jewry was the family photographs on my living-room walls.

In one, my great-grandfather, a Hasidic rabbi from a shtetl outside of Minsk, Belarus, looks out sternly from an oil portrait above our piano. In another, my grandfather and great-aunt, from the same shtetl, gaze with somber eyes in faded black and white. On a table in our foyer is another black-and-white photograph of another great-aunt, a classic babushka.

Russian society was deeply anti-Semitic when those photographs were taken. Pogroms were government issued. There was little to eat. I am reminded of a Yiddish shtetl song my mother, a Yiddish translator by profession, once taught me: Zuntik bulbes, montik bulbes, 
Dinstik uhn mitvoch bulbes, 
Donershtik uhn fraytik bulbes. 
Ober shabbes in a noveneh a bulbeh kuggele 
Zuntik vayter bulbes. (Translation: Sunday potatoes, Monday potatoes, Wednesday potatoes, Thursday and Friday potatoes. But on the Sabbath for a change a potato pudding.) Between this and the lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof’s “Anatevka”—overworked, underpaid—my stereotype of Russian Jewry was complete.

As I prepared to move, I thought about how my Belarusian grandfather had come to New York City 80 years ago in order to learn English and make a life for himself and his family. And as I began to study rudimentary Russian, I couldn’t shake the lingering and lovely thought that this was my grandfather’s childhood alphabet. Learning simple greetings and the words for “black tea” connected me to him and his lost world, both of which I longed to understand.

The next time I met Dasha, over wine in a fashionable, factory-style café above an art gallery called the Loft, I pried her about the comments she made at the club. She waved to various artists drinking at different tables and then turned back to me. “It’s simple. If you don’t like a man, I tell you it’s because he is not Jew,” she said in her accented English.

Continue reading: The rabbi’s daughter dances

At the store on the west side of Los Angeles, where we live, I tried to talk Ezra out of the velvet yarmulke. The clerk, whose yarmulke said Shlomo and whose name probably was Shlomo, helped me try. But on the topic of a yarmulke that says a name that isn’t his, Ezra was irrational. He didn’t yet understand that letters signify words, which signify identity. On the topic of velvet being an impractical fabric, he was unmoved. Ezra wanted this yarmulke because that is the kind they wear at his school, which is run by Chabad, the ultra-Orthodox movement. Yet we are Modern Orthodox, not Hasidic, and the yarmulkes men wear in our Modern Orthodox community, the yarmulkes my husband wears, are crocheted.

The kind of yarmulke men wear in an Orthodox community signifies the type of observance they undertake, not by law but by tradition. To me, woven yarmulkes like my husband’s mostly signify that we are Zionists; they also indicate that we identify as Modern Orthodox, that we are constantly straddling the tension over what it means to be a religious Jew in the larger secular world. Velvet yarmulkes are favored by more right-wing, ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose religious practice is led by a central rebbe. Though many of these Jews are missionary in their approach, they are also mostly insular, dressing in a certain fashion and eschewing much of the modern world. If you aren’t religious, you might see the velvet and the woven simply as yarmulkes; but to us, they are often indications of great differences.

To me, Ezra’s longing for the velvet yarmulke pointed to the hold his school has over him and how the lessons it sometimes imparts conflict with the lessons I try to impart. As an Orthodox woman who largely objects to the sexism inherent in the tradition, I am braced for the ideologies Ezra and his brother could bring home as they grow older. But I wasn’t braced for Yosef Yitzchak’s yarmulke.

It foreshadowed other conflicts I’ve known were coming. We’d always planned on sending our boys to an Orthodox day school, the kind I’d gone to in New York, after they finish nursery school. These kinds of day schools are familiar to me: Boys lead prayer, there are co-ed classes until kids are separated around age 10, children undertake Torah-related art projects, like cardboard Noah’s Arks and clay Sinais, and the school day ends long after it gets dark, except on Fridays, when dismissal is long before that. Boys in these schools learn that they are considered superior: They recite a prayer thanking God they are not slaves, then they recite one thanking God that they were not created as women.

(In grade school, I remember, we girls would then recite a prayer that comes almost as an apology: “Thank you, God, for creating me as I am.” Which is not the same thing as thanking God for not creating you a man, or thanking God for creating you as a woman. It is a sentence of resignation, not pride.)

As white men, my boys probably won’t need any help to feel privileged or entitled. Why do they need to assert that privilege out loud in prayer? To what extent are ancient prayers like this at the root of inequality, as much as reflections of it? Though the obligation to utter this particular prayer is tenuous, it still remains in morning services around the world. Increasingly, other staple practices of Orthodoxy—allowing only boys to lead services or to become rabbis, teaching boys and not girls Talmud, and even the insistence that girls wear skirts—are being challenged by some Orthodox Jews. When I looked at Ezra in his yarmulke, I wondered: If he can’t be counted on to follow our example by wearing what we want him to wear at age 3, how can we count on him to dismiss these retrograde religious practices at 10?

I have to face the fact many Orthodox schools are going to teach my boys things I don’t want them to learn and that I can’t count on my kids to be revolutionary in their thinking, to disregard that which is unfair or outdated. And though these are problems I have with Orthodoxy on the whole, I go to a progressive synagogue where these issues are addressed often. And the things I don’t like about Orthodoxy, I don’t allow into my home. My kids will see that, but can that compete with what they’re being taught nine hours a day? I am vexed by contradictory questions: What is the message I send my son if I allow people to teach him that girls are not allowed to chant Torah, when I don’t believe this is mandated in the Torah? Am I teaching him to disregard teachers’ authority? I believe the laws of public and women-led prayer are due for an overhaul. I believe women should be rabbis—and I believe the confines of Orthodoxy allow for these innovations. But am I living these beliefs if I tell my boys what I think and then send them to a school that insists otherwise?

How do you decide what school to send your kids to? When there is no institution that matches your values completely, do you give up on the religious values, or do you give up on your own values? These are the questions Yosef Yitzchak’s yarmulke brought up for me.

For now, we have opted to send Ezra to a public school next year. The decision was based on a different kind of value: financial responsibility. As much as religion is something we cherish, so is the lesson that our children should not spend what they don’t have.

As it turned out, as quickly as Ezra started wearing his new yarmulke, he stopped. A few weeks after his third birthday, he wouldn’t wear it to shul, to school, or anywhere. He took it off and has refused to wear another one since. He just turned 4, and his head, for the most part, remains bare.

I should have known from the beginning that the control I think I have over my child, the influence I think his teachers have, is all an illusion. Maybe school doesn’t matter as much as I think it does. Ezra will grow up, with God’s help, and his head-covering will not be subject to my opinion anymore. I will teach him now what I want him to know and hope that he makes decisions that are right, hope that he doesn’t dismiss our values. He will survive what we teach him; he will figure out what we don’t. We pour our love and knowledge and ethic into him, and we watch with wide eyes to see what comes out slowly over a lifetime. He is as God made him.

The pending extradition has attracted plenty of media attention, both for the obvious reasons—there are echoes of the 1991 Crown Heights riots—and the more surprising: Shuchat, it turns out, was a member of the Shmira, a private anti-crime patrol comprised entirely of Hasidic men.

The ultra-Orthodox community has a proud history of vigilantism. There are Shmira or Shomrim—“watchers” in Hebrew—units in every Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn, including Williamsburg, Flatbush, and Borough Park. (Shomrim groups are also active in Baltimore and Miami and in Hasidic enclaves in London and Melbourne.)

Most of the time, the members, all volunteers, help direct traffic and fix tires. More rarely, they track down muggers and purse-snatchers. Most wear uniforms and carry walkie-talkies. Some Shomrim units, like the one in Borough Park, operate large fleets of police vehicles, including riot vans and radio cars. The Shomrim do not have the legal authority to make arrests, but they often hold suspects until the police arrive.

For the most part, the patrols are viewed as a benevolent presence—they are seen as “guardians,” in one formulation, there to keep the peace. It is no accident that Esther Kletzky, the mother of Leiby Kletzky, the Borough Park boy murdered in July by a member of the community, phoned the Shomrim before the NYPD when her son went missing. Not so for the black community, which has, from the beginning, tended to view the Shomrim as aggressors. (A string of alleged assaults, of which the Charles case is only the most recent example, has not helped the Shomrim and Shmira in this regard.)

So, how did these Hasidic crime-fighters get their start? All modern Shomrim and Shmira can trace their heritage to one man: Samuel Schrage. A Lubavitcher rabbi, Schrage founded a group called the Crown Heights Maccabees in 1964. Schrage, who typically appeared in public wearing a sleek black suit—his dark beard neatly combed, his hair painstakingly lacquered—did not set out to fight crime. He was a teacher, a man of God, and the administrator of the United Lubavitcher Yeshiva, a large school on the north side of Eastern Parkway.

A decade earlier, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, had fled Warsaw and established a small Lubavitch court in Crown Heights. Schneersohn’s Crown Heights was quiet, mostly peaceable, and populated by “alrightniks”: middle-class Jewish émigrés who settled in the brick mansions on President Street. By comparison, the Crown Heights of his successor, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who served as Lubavitcher rebbe from 1951 until his death in 1994, was a dangerous place, increasingly rife with the street crime and violence that characterized Brooklyn during the 1960s and ’70s.

The Lubavitch Hasidim, who had consolidated in a 16-square-block radius around Kingston Avenue, saw themselves as victims, under assault by the much larger black populations to the north and south. Black leaders, in turn, complained that the situation in Crown Heights was akin to apartheid, wherein an influential minority was controlling the state, soaking up government funds, and elbowing blacks out of local real estate.

In April 1964, four Hasidic students leaving a yeshiva on the north side of Eastern Parkway were provoked and allegedly assaulted by at least 50 black youths. Two weeks later, a black man broke into a Crown Heights home and attempted to rape the wife of a popular Lubavitcher rabbi. The woman managed to beat back her assailant; in the process, she received slashes across the face and the neck. Both crimes were touted as proof that Jews were no longer safe in Crown Heights.

Schrage’s choice of the name Maccabees for the patrol formed in response was not accidental. It evoked the spirit of ancient Jewish strength, of protest in the face of a vast and fearsome enemy army. Judah Maccabee, the hero of the Hanukkah story, had once used guerrilla warfare to reclaim Jerusalem. Schrage hoped to use guerrilla warfare to reclaim Crown Heights. For those who scoffed at the mention of the long-dead Maccabees, Schrage unearthed modern precedents for his cause: the paramilitary organizations that had battled the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the Hashomer, a Jewish defense group founded in Palestine in the early 20th century.

The Lubavitch movement had survived the trials of life in the Pale of Settlement, the perils of the Russian Revolution, and the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust. They had not made it to Brooklyn, Schrage and others argued, only to lose their kingdom on a hill to a bunch of hoodlums.

***

In late April 1964, Schrage convened a meeting of 500 Jewish residents of Crown Heights, including the heads of all the yeshivas there, and asked that the Maccabees be formally recognized by the community. His argument—which he would reiterate many times in coming years—was simple: Jews should not be afraid to walk the streets of their own neighborhood because of muggers and rapists. And because the NYPD seemed unable to manage the job, the Lubavitchers would have to defend themselves.

The vote was nearly unanimous. The next week, Schrage rented a musty former corset shop at 459 Albany Ave. and converted the first floor into a dispatch office. With help from a few wealthy donors, he purchased four squad cars, four two-way radios, and a hulking metal base unit. He bought maps and telephones and first-aid kits. He trained his men in rudimentary self-defense and in the art of the capture; he demonstrated how to drive a fleeing assailant to the ground and how to keep him there.

Continue reading: The Maccabees’ rise and fall and rise

• President Obama’s standing with Jews has turned sharply for the better. Israeli Jews. [Politico]

• Syria is basically officially in a state of civil war. [NYT]

• Uriel Heilman has a counter-conventional wisdom take on the controversial Israeli ad campaign. [JTA The Telegraph]

• Go Spurs! The English Premiere League’s historically Jewish side has been on a tear. [WSJ]

• Following a lawsuit, a Chabad rabbi will be permitted to keep his beard while serving as a U.S. Army chaplain. [JTA]

Taking its cues from Phish, legendary D.C. post-punk band Fugazi has made recordings of most of its shows available for download. Literary editor David Samuels interviewed frontman Ian MacKaye a few months back.

From England, with love.

Him!

Her!

Well, yeah.

From Brazil.

Britain’s chief rabbi.

The United States’ chief rabbi.

Love her.

LOVE her.

Prime Minister Netanyahu returned the favor, appearing on the Meet the Press and insisting he did not want to get tied up in American domestic politics—which, if you look at his actions last May, isn’t actually true, meaning it was his way of making nice with the Obama administration. “They’re all friends of Israel,” he said of the Republican presidential aspirants (as well as Obama). And he took additional care to denounce his own Likud colleague (albeit rival) Danny Danon for appearing with Gov. Perry last week.

And if you don’t think Israeli and U.S. leaders are working on their frequently acrimonious relationship, take a look at Eli Lake’s inaugural Newsweek blockbuster (bunker-buster?), reporting that the administration, through the thick and thin of the diplomatic relationship, has continued the trend of increasing military-to-military cooperation, and has even sold Israel bunker-busting bombs—weapons that would be mighty useful if Israel found itself wanting to destroy, say, underground Iranian nuclear weapons facilities. I don’t come to slight Lake’s reporting—he’s one of the very best, and some of the details concerning the hardware transacted no doubt is stuff that he, and we, aren’t supposed to know (especially since a WikiLeaks-released cable reported that neither side wanted the sales to become public). But his piece does fit into the narrative the nascent Obama re-election campaign is trying to tell when it comes to Israel, and it would make sense if that was the result of the Israelis trying to make nice with the folks who just got their backs at the U.N., and are continuing to do so with regard to the peace process.

This feels like a zany week, as opposed to the seriousness of last, so let’s close with Perry dancing with Chabad rabbis (it comes toward the end). Who said he’s a fair-weather friend?

Palestinians Roll Out Hero’s Welcome for Abbas [NYT]
Plan for Mideast Talks Gets Mixed Reception [WP]
White House Briefs Jews on Quartet [JTA]
Netanyahu: All W.H. Contenders ‘Friends of Israel’ [Politico Live]
Netanyahu Rebukes Perry Ally [Ben Smith]
Let’s Make a Deal! [Newsweek]
Israel and Middle East Falsehoods [Attack Watch]

The cancelled loan included works by Paul Poiret for an upcoming exhibit on the French fashion designer.

Laura Gilbert reports:

“The ‘loans won’t be going forward,’ Mr. Holzer said, ‘in response to’ Russia’s embargo on lending art to U.S. museums. ‘As long as the loan embargo is in place, the museum believes it can no longer lend’ to Russian museums. A ‘one sided’ relationship would, he said, be ‘unfair.’”

Breaking: Met Cancels Loans to Kremlin Museum [NY Observer]
Earlier: Art Wars

This is the latest round of a legal battle that has been waged since the 1980s, when elements of the Schneerson library—long thought to have been lost or destroyed by the Nazis—were found in Russia’s State Library. The contentious dispute, which saw Chabad employing various legal means trying to get the collection back to the U.S., has caused serious strain in the art world as more institutions become inadvertently involved in what is essentially a property dispute.

The collection, which had grown to include 12,000 books and 50,000 documents, was curated by the Russian-based Chabad-Lubavitch movement for centuries, and believed to have been confiscated during World War II.

Court Calls Russia’s Fear of Chabad Art Seizure Legitimate [New York Observer]
Dispute Derails Art Loans From Russia [NYT]
How Chabad Triggered a Superpower Art War [Jewish Chronicle]

“She was born just before the revolution, in June 1991,” Rabbi Lazar told me after the ceremony as he, his wife, and their new machetunim paced nervously outside the yichud room, where the bride and groom go to spend a few minutes alone. “Before that, people were walking with their heads down, hiding their Jewishness,” he said. “To talk about a wedding in the street—it was unheard of. We feel that these 20 years with her, they’ve been a rebirth.”

Berel Lazar was the midwife of this change. Born in postwar Milan, Italy, to parents who were among the first of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s emissaries to the backwoods of Judaism—“There was no kosher even,” his sister Chani told me—Lazar found the next frontier when he came of age: the Soviet Union. He traveled to the slowly imploding empire in 1987 as a rabbinical student; there he worked to establish underground yeshivas and to help refuseniks make contact with the outside world. By 1989, he had helped open a Jewish school in Moscow. Unfortunately, after the revolution, most of its hoped-for students soon abandoned Moscow and the Soviet Union, their parents deciding against staying in a country that had singled them out—and held them back—for being Jewish. Ironically, those who left assimilated abroad, and those who stayed—often intermarried couples—soon found more and more opportunities to be Jewish and live Jewishly in a country that was also undergoing a Christian revival. (Also, the target of nationalist discrimination shifted from the Jews—most of whom had left—to migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.) Whatever one makes of Chabad’s presence in places like American college campuses, the Hasidic group’s impact in Russia has been undeniably positive: Moscow now has three large and flourishing synagogues, not all of which are Chabad-sponsored, Jewish schools and kindergartens, an annual Yiddish Fest to celebrate Purim in a hip, young way, and Chabad representatives in nearly 50 cities across Russia, in strange, small places like Barnaul and Dzerzhinsk and Lenin’s birthplace, Ulyanovsk. And that’s not even counting the missions in the broader former Soviet Union.

And so when it was time for the sheva brachot, the seven blessings, at Blumi Lazar’s wedding, the guests who came up to read them and their translations were not personal friends or friends of the bride and groom but allies in Rabbi Lazar’s fight to resuscitate Jewish life in Russia.

But the bride had been the guinea pig in that fight, pointed out Riva Zaklos, the wife of the rabbi of Bryansk, a city in Western Russia on the border with Ukraine. (“No one comes to Bryansk,” Zaklos, a native of Israel, told me in Russian. “Every time someone comes, I say, ‘What did you lose here?’ ” She and her husband have scraped together 5,000 Jews there and started a preschool that serves kosher food. There have even been some Jewish weddings.) “Blumi was the first one to go to Jewish pre-school, the first one to go to Jewish school here, and everyone watched her, watched how she did,” Zaklos said, nursing a virgin raspberry mojito. Waitresses circled with hors d’oeuvres, mixing with beautiful women in long, sparkling dresses and a dazzling array of sheitels, wigs, that looked like they were from shampoo commercials. (The men were separated from us by a wall, a mehitsa.)

Blumi’s sisters wore salad-green princess dresses; Isaac’s wore navy with beaded accents. “You always need two colors,” Zaklos explained, “one for the bride’s sisters, and one for the groom’s. Otherwise, how can you tell?” The dresses presented another issue: With so many children in each family, there were that many weddings, and you couldn’t, of course, wear the same dress to too many weddings, especially not contiguous ones. “So, we just swap dresses,” Zaklos explained.

Behind her, women were discussing complicated fusions of family trees—“No, no, no, Chani’s dad is Berel’s brother-in-law!”—while others carried babies who were either their children or their grandchildren. “You know the difference between religious weddings and Reform weddings?” Chani Springer, Blumi’s aunt and Rabbi Lazar’s sister, asked me. “At religious weddings, the mother of the bride is pregnant. At Reform weddings, the bride is pregnant.”

The mother of the bride, Chani Lazar, née Deren, seemed done with that after 12 children. But even after all those kids, she has not lost her girlish figure, hemmed in by a lush mustard-green gown with a fluffy hem that resembled the mouth of a tuba. Her eyes red and moist, she said, “Every mother should be so happy,” and went back to chirping with her friends and micromanaging the proceedings.

It was through Chani Lazar that Blumi found her groom: Chani’s sister—also a Blumi—married a man named Yisroel Rosenfeld, and the families became extremely close. In her youth, Chani Lazar used to spend lots of time at the Rosenfeld house. Then one day, Blumi suggested that she had someone in mind for Blumi Lazar: her nephew, the son of the Chabad emissary to Bogotá, Colombia. After a period of discovery and due diligence on each other—“research,” those in the community call it—Isaac flew to Moscow in the dead of the Russian winter to meet Blumi and, after a few meetings, they got engaged.

At their wedding, four and a half months later, the two were lost in the swells of infinite family members and friends from around the world, members of the Russian Jewish community, people who were their parents’ friends and allies in Moscow and Bogotá, people whom they probably hadn’t even met. On the jumbo screens in the reception hall—where there was not nearly enough seats for the women—you could see them: Isaac’s black hat lost in a mosh pit of hundreds of dancing black hats; Blumi’s veil over her long blond hair bobbing through the roundelays of women, circling her and cheering. The innermost circle, though, was a group of teenage girls who danced around the placidly happy Blumi. They were her students at the Jewish school, where she has taught Jewish studies for the last two years.

Julia Ioffe is Foreign Policy’s Moscow correspondent.

• Contributing editor Jeff Goldberg reminds us that the Palestinians, not the Israelis, are the ones who get to wait out the clock. [Bloomberg View]

• Some Democrats are questioning even President Obama’s Mideast stance. This does not, however, including the Jewish head of the Democratic National Committee, and mainly includes anonymous people. [WP]

• Thomas Friedman has the solution to the impasse, in his Friedman-y way. [NYT]

• An official in Pakistan’s military intelligence expressly condoned the targeting of the Chabad house in the 2008 Mumbai massacre. [ProPublica]

• Dana Milbank watches Bibi with his daughter’s Israeli au pair. (It actually sorta works.) [WP]

This seems like a nice thing, as long as fashion-world balkanization isn’t totally abolished: As you can see from our custom-built image, the rise of the foot-length maxi skirt as this summer’s defining silhouette has some potentially dangerous implications if you are fearful of a hipster-hasidic supernova-esque clash.

Culture Hopping in a Fedora [NYT]
The Floor’s the Limit [NYMag]

Well, that was January 2010. Now, we hear, Aguiar’s back in Bal Harbour, where last night he was scheduled to unveil plans for a new visitor center at the Western Wall to be devoted to the Lubavitcher rebbe. Tentatively titled 770 Western Parkway—a nod to the Chabad movement’s Brooklyn headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway—the facility is supposed to offer “substantive food for thought” to people visiting Judaism’s holiest site, according to a quote from Aguiar on the Lubavitch Website. “People walk away from the Kotel and are not sure how to translate the spiritual high they feel into something concrete,” Aguiar said. “It would allow me to finally gift to others what I have been so fortunate myself to have—a life enriched by the inspiration and impact of the Rebbe.”

Construction of New Visitor Center to Begin [Lubavitch.com]
Related: Prodigal Son [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Former Tropper Sponsor Forced Into Psych Ward

Santa Monica police are searching for Ron Hirsch, also known as Israel Fisher. Hirsch is a local transient known for frequenting Jewish community centers and synagogues in search of charity. A neighbor said he would sleep under the canopy at the synagogue’s entrance. Most mornings would find him reading the Wall Street Journal and talking on his cell phones (Santa Monica, remember). Released photos show him as heavy-set and bearded with green eyes.

Congregant Sara Levitansky said that she’d “seen [Hirsch] around, but lately… haven’t seen him much.” Santa Monica Police are being joined in the investigation by the LAPD, FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They described Hirsch as “extremely dangerous.”

Hirsch’s motives are currently unknown. The Anti-Defamation League released a statement saying they have no reason to expect anti-Semitism, but that local synagogues should remain vigilant.

“We have no evidence of this being a hate crime at this point,” said Amanda Susskind, the regional director of the ADL in Los Angeles. “We have no file on this man as a member of any hate group. Some folks in the community knew him, and it seems like he was just a very troubled soul.”

Santa Monica Synagogue Explosion: Ron Hirsch Sought By Police [ABC]
[UPDATE] Chabad Rabbi Discusses Explossion Suspect + Video Footage From Explosion Site [Jewish Journal]
Police Hunt Suspect After Blast Outside Chabad Synagogue Determined Intentional [VosizNeias]
Police Search For Suspect In Santa Monica Synagogue Explosion [LAT]
Transient is Sought in Bombing at California Synagogue [NYT]

• In the course of reviewing Los Angeles’s new Holocaust museum, Edward Rothstein essentially asks if there are too many such places. [NYT]

• Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the designated new head of Reform Judaism, talks about his movement’s rivalry with Chabad. From 2008. [New Voices]

• On Bo Belinsky, the California Angels pitcher from the 1960s who was the original athlete-playboy (at least publicly). His mother was Jewish. [Deadspin]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Daniel Estrin reports on Jerusalem’s brand-new light rail system. [Business Week]

• A small gallery in a small town in northern Israel has slowly grown into what will be a permanent museum of Arab-Israeli and Palestinian art. [NYT]

Here’s an epic Vanity Fair piece from last year about the even more epic marriage(s) of Richard Burton and the late, lamented Elizabeth Taylor. And here they are in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The cable’s release may represent pithy timing on WikiLeaks’s part, given that this week also brought a report from a judge’s assistant that the criminal charges and eight-year prison sentence against Russian Jewish oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky were politically (though not, explicitly, ethnically) motivated.

Speaking of pithy! Commentators have noted that WikiLeaks has taught us that some of our top diplomats possess literary touches you would not expect; and Beyrle, a George W. Bush appointee who has served in Moscow for nearly three years, is no exception. “From ‘Oy, Vey’ to OK” is how he headlines one section, where he traces the history of Russian anti-Semitism. Another section is titled, “Some of [Russia]’s best friends are Jews.” And he provides a compelling portrait of Chabad Rabbi Berel Lazar, who comes off as something of an operator, paying obeisance to the Kremlin and receiving funds from prominent but more docile Jewish oligarchs like Lev Leviev, Roman Abramovich, and Boris Berezovsky. Ambassador Beyrle: When you retire, we hope you’ll consider contributing to Tablet Magazine!

More to the point, Beyrle is judicious on the fact that Russia’s progress is fragile—“the [economic] crisis could easily exacerbate latent anti-Semitism,” he notes (this was in December 2009)—and that claims such as Lazar’s assertion that there is more anti-Semitism in Europe than in Russia must be “taken with a grain of salt.” “Anti-Semitism has been a part of Russian culture for such a long time,” he argues, “that it would be unrealistic to expect it to disappear overnight.” But he is persuasive that life for Russia’s Jewish community—which, a little oddly, he seems to peg at one million, when it’s more like 200,000—is better than it has been in a very long time. His credibility is aided, of course, by our knowledge that he didn’t expect us to be reading this.

I asked Gal Beckerman, author of the award-winning history of Soviet Jewry, When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone, about the Jackson-Vanik comment at the conclusion. “Amazingly, it’s still on the books and annoys the hell out of the Russians,” he told me of the law, whose repeal is supported by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. “It means they can’t get Most Favored Nation trading status, which they need in order to be admitted to the World Trade Organization, something they very much want. Getting rid of J-V is also on the Obama administration’s list of to-dos in their attempt to ‘reset’ the American-Russian relationship.” He added, “Whatever other problems Russia has with democracy and human rights, free emigration is not one of them. Since this was the initial intent of the bill, it should have been repealed a long time ago.”

Anti-Semitism on the Wane in Russia [WikiLeaks]
Related: Russian Tycoon’s Trial Was Rigged, Assistant Says [NYT]

• Bernard Avishai on how to salvage the peace process. [NYT Magazine]

• The Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements in America are facing membership declines and internal upheaval. Must-read. [Forward]

• Russia stopped the loans of several importance pieces of artwork to various American museums due to a dispute with Chabad. [Jewish Chronicle/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Is Shas the Israeli equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood? [Haaretz]

• Radical chic rears its head in the Tel Aviv galleries, where kibbutz imagery is all the rage. [NYT]

• More misadventures in real estate with the sketchy Rabbi Pinto. [WSJ]

• I am shocked—shocked!—to learn that Strat-O-Matic, which is basically a baseball video game for when before video games were invented, was invented by a Jewish man. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• There is an Al Hirschfeld-like caricaturist whose last name is Hirschfeld and who may or may not be related to Al Hirschfeld. Only in New York. [City Room]

• We all know Pope Pius XII was pretty bad for the Jews. But so was Pope Pius XI! [The Book]

• I hate Dan Snyder so much. [The Economist]

• Dispatch from the Yeshiva U. book fair, in one of the only publications that would care about such a thing. [NYT]

• Meet Danny Rosenbaum, a 24-year-old southpaw in the Washington Nationals’ farm system. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• Lisa Loeb! [The Kveller]

Is it just me, or are most iconic Gen X cultural artifacts about abandonment? Or wait, I guess that’s the point?

• The IDF uses Facebook to find draft dodgers. [Fast Company]

• Settlers. Love. Palin. [Ben Smith]

• The link between Prime Minister Netanyahu and George W. Bush is an author and political adviser named Ron Dermer. [Politico]

• The United States has reportedly put the freeze-extension deal in writing, as Netanyahu has demanded. [JTA]

• Three experts say America should publish a “declaration of principles” concerning the Mideast peace process. More getting things down on paper. [IHT]

Below: An Iranian weightlifter appears on a platform along with an Israeli weightlifter, while “Hatikvah” is played. For this (via Kaplan’s Korner), he has been banned from weightlifting for life.

• Beck, meanwhile, attacked the Anti-Defamation League, inaccurately saying that its “Soros-started” “smear campaign” accused him of being an anti-Semite. Poor Abe can’t catch a break. [Media Matters]

• Will America’s delicate relations with Pakistan prevent a full investigation into the 2008 Mumbai bombing that targeted a Chabad house? [WP]

• The Israeli cabinet unanimously approved the aliya of nearly 8,000 Ethiopian Jews who had been living in dire conditions. [JPost]

• A woman who fights to end the ritual slaughter of chickens on Yom Kippur had her Brooklyn house vandalized with red paint. [Gothamist]

• San Francisco may vote on an initiative to ban circumcision. It is shocking to find that the activist behind the proposal is named Lloyd Schofield. [Jewcy]

SNL does Patti.

A multibillion-dollar empire known for its exuberant and global outreach to secular Jews, Chabad has become familiar to even the least observant Jews through its giant public menorahs, Mitzvah Tank vans, and Purim parties on college campuses. But while Chabad eagerly seeks Judaism’s more wayward lambs, its growth depends heavily on the affability and zeal of the bearded, black-hatted shepherds who checked their coats and washed their hands in the foyer of the event venue, many of whom had eschewed material comforts for their missions as emissaries, or shluchim. This army is charged with spreading the word of Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died 16 years ago and remains the movement’s most venerated figure.

Champagne was served. Inside the main room, heavily draped in a golden palette, 12 enormous video screens hung on the four walls, and several cameras on 15-foot cranes swung and lurched to capture both intimate and sweeping views. The stage was dressed in “rabbi-study-style”—floor-to-ceiling books, an electric chandelier, and an oversized portrait of the rebbe.

“It is up to you to see that there is no Jew not affected by the mitzvahs of the shluchim in their communities,” Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, director of the conference, said early in the night, his clenched hand rising and falling like a conductor keeping rhythm. “We will not rest until every Jew is brought one step closer to the divine!”

An eight-piece band provided mood and interlude; a children’s choir was milked for hopefulness; and a handful of major philanthropists appeared by video to send their best wishes. (The keynote speaker, the handsome Ukrainian billionaire Gennadiy Bogolyubov, who was there in person, has given more than $10 million to Chabad in recent years, according to a Chabad spokesperson.)

Next up: Roll call, when shluchim from 76 countries were asked to stand for recognition. A feverish pep-rally-like environment ensued: Moldova! Ghana! Kazakhstan! Estonia! Rhode Island! Finland! Ecuador! Panama! Saskatchewan! The Israelis won the biggest applause from the crowd; the South Africans were the rowdiest.

It can’t be easy to seat so many people for dinner, but the event organizers have a history of tackling complicated logistics. The most frantic moment of the evening came when the thousands of slightly sloshed shluchim stood up, linking arms and torsos, rosy-cheeked and singing heartily along with the band, to dance incautiously around their tables; meanwhile the staff attempted to clear the appetizer, an architectural salmon-olive tapenade-cucumber dish, and serve the entrée, a less-memorable plate of beef and chicken with rice and veggies. The waiters and waitresses ducked, they swerved; they were very brave and they did their very best, but, alas, a tray of plates crashed nearby—surely others elsewhere in the room were meeting the same fate. Once the music ended, most of the shluchim returned to their tables for the next course, with the exception of the South African contingent, who continued to dance and sing a cappella after several requests that they be seated.

Like other rabbis I spoke with, Shea Harlig, 45, who presides over five Chabad houses in Las Vegas, described the conference as an inspirational experience that reinvigorated his sense of purpose. “We remove the sin from sin city,” he said, elaborating with a description of the $10 million, 65,000-square-foot day school Chabad opened in Las Vegas in August. He and his Sin City colleagues also do work in jails, with chapel visits, and buy bus trips out of town for “Jews who have gotten in trouble,” Harlig said.

For some, such as Yosef Kantor, 41, Chabad outreach is the family business. Kantor, who grew up in Australia as the son of a shliach, now runs the four Chabad houses in Thailand, which collectively serve Friday night dinners to 1,000 people each week. His eight brothers and brothers-in-law are all schluchim in different parts of the world, including Lugano, Switzerland, Skokie, Illinois, and Ranchos Santa Margarita, California. “Mom is very happy,” he said, to have the whole family in one place for the weekend (although she wasn’t there to say as much, for as a woman she wasn’t invited).

Chaim Danziger, 30, moved from Pasadena, California, to run a Chabad house in Rostov, Russia, about 1,000 miles from Moscow. Rostov, he approximated, had 10,000 to 15,000 Jews but no rabbi before he settled there with his wife. “Are there days when we reminisce about living in an easier place?” he said. “Of course. But it’s a very fulfilling life to be where we’re needed.”

Schmuli Cohen, 36, from Perth, Australia, found Chabad when he most needed it. A self-described “very complicated person,” he credited his rabbi with “bringing me back from the brink of destruction.” Quickly finishing his glass of champagne and reaching for another, he described the process by which he achieved greater peace of mind through the steady “niceness and openness” of his rabbi, who he characterized as “a real man who has heart and has soul and he knows how to put them together.” For Cohen this process is still ongoing, and he estimates he spends between 10 and 20 hours a week studying with and volunteering for his rabbi. The best thing about this conference? “The 30 hours I’ll get alone with him to talk on the ride back,” he said.

Lizzie Simon, the author of the memoir Detour, lives in Brooklyn.

Built in 1920, the ornate synagogue, which was a place of worship for Shanghai’s Sephardic business community, has been shuttered for more than 50 years. Jewish leaders were granted permission to hold Shabbat services there for the sixth-month duration of the Expo. Rebecca Kanthor reports for Vox Tablet from Shanghai on the history of the synagogue and its congregants and on its prospects for the future. Running time: 8:23.

Now, following six months and nearly 70 million visitors, the Expo is entering its final week, after which Shanghai will return to normal. But what will happen to Ohel Rachel? Find out Monday on Vox Tablet.

The most popular of these videos, however, and in a way the most extraordinary, are those that record the Rebbe’s farbrengens—the ceremonial gatherings in which his followers would eat, drink, and sing with him. What is striking about these scenes is their extreme ordinariness. Here is the Rebbe, an old, frail man, gingerly chewing pieces of bread and taking sips of wine. The setting, a large room in Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, in Brooklyn, is modest at best, wood-paneled like a basement rec room. There is none of the pomp with which religious leaders are ordinarily surrounded—no vestments, altars, or processions. Yet the way the Hasidim chant the niggun—“ve’samachta be’hagecha,” “you shall rejoice in your festival,” a line from the Book of Deuteronomy—and the way they are absorbed in the Rebbe’s every movement, leave no doubt that in this little corner of Crown Heights, if anywhere, holiness is taking place. For what else is holiness than the utter conviction that holiness exists?

To many Jews, this conviction is also the scandal of Lubavitch—or Chabad, as it is often called, using the Hebrew acronym for the school of Hasidic thought to which the sect belongs. To most people, Chabad means two things: its far-flung network of emissaries, or shluchim, greeting Jews in the most remote places and urging them to light holiday candles or wear tefillin; and its belief that Menahem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah. Both of these things give Chabad a prominence in the Jewish world far out of proportion to its actual membership. In The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Princeton University Press), their much-debated new biography, Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman estimate that the total number of Lubavitcher Hasidim is around 40,000—“about ten thousand in Crown Heights, five thousand in Kfar Chabad [the Lubavitch settlement in Israel], and perhaps another twenty-five thousand worldwide, including about three thousand shaliach families.”

In other words, Lubavitchers make up about one quarter of 1 percent of the world Jewish population. Yet it would be hard to find an engaged Jew, of any denomination or none, who does not have an opinion about Chabad, usually a strong one. Many admire Chabad for its institution-building, the devotion and selflessness of its emissaries, and its bold representation of Judaism in the public square—whenever a huge menorah is illuminated somewhere, from Washington to Moscow, it is usually a Lubavitcher who built it. That is why so many Jews who are not Orthodox, and sometimes not even particularly observant, praise Chabad and help to fund its activities.

Yet many of those same Jews are acutely embarrassed by the notion, which swept Lubavitch in the years before Schneerson’s death, that he was actually “Melech HaMoshiach,” King Messiah, sent by God to redeem the world and the Jewish people. Still more alien is the belief, clung to by a small but vocal minority of Lubavitchers to this day, that because the Rebbe was the Messiah, he could not actually die—that he is now simply hidden, waiting for the moment when he can return to earth. One of the illustrations in The Rebbe shows the wall of the synagogue adjacent to 770 Eastern Parkway, where a large cornerstone has been removed: It was defaced by Hasidim who objected to the inscription, which referred to the Rebbe as being “of blessed memory.”

You do not have to look very far, on websites and discussion boards, to find Lubavitchers who are sick of being associated with the delusions of the meshikhistn, as the Schneerson messianists are known. Yet it is impossible for Chabad to decisively repudiate them. The notion that the seventh Rebbe was the Messiah, or would be instrumental in bringing the Messiah, and that we are currently living in the period known as ikvot meshicha, “the footsteps of the Messiah”—that is, the end of days—is too deeply ingrained in Lubavitch thought and practice.

Messianism, of course, has always been one of the central concerns of Hasidism. In the 18th century, the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, wrote that he had actually spoken with the Messiah face to face, during one his mystical ascents, and asked, “When will you come?” The answer, as the Besht recorded it, was that redemption would arrive “when your teachings are publicized and revealed to the world and your wellsprings will be spread to the outside.” But it was not until Lubavitch was transplanted to America, during the Second World War, that this metaphorical injunction became the basis for an extremely practical kind of Jewish missionizing.

Every time a Jew lit Shabbat candles or wrapped tefillin, the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught, he was helping to spread the wellsprings, drawing closer to God and hastening the Redemption. It didn’t even matter if these symbolic Jewish acts sprang from, or led to, a deeper sense of commitment and observance, since the Rebbe’s “radical view,” as Heilman and Friedman write, was that “the deed itself is what counts not the motivation.” In this way, Lubavitch developed a uniquely American messianism, pragmatic and action-oriented, in which a secular Jew hurrying through Times Square could stop for a few moments at a Chabad “mitzvah tank” and make his contribution to the coming of the Messiah. “Getting Jews to perform these mitzvahs,” as Heilman and Friedman put it, “was a first step in cleansing the Jew of his non-Jewishness, releasing the spark of holiness from the captivity of impurity.”

As cloistered as Chabad seems to be, in its Crown Heights precincts, Heilman and Friedman argue that the movement, and the Rebbe in particular, had an acute sense of the needs and possibilities of American life for Judaism. The Rebbe was sending his shluchim to the most remote spots on earth, calling them to a life of service and sacrifice, at the same time that President Kennedy was launching the Peace Corps, in the early 1960s. Chabad focused its missionary activities on the universities just as the postwar baby boom brought millions of new students to campus and as the counterculture radically expanded the range of spiritual possibilities for young people. (It is no coincidence that charismatic, media-friendly Jewish figures like Shlomo Carlebach and Shmuley Boteach started out as Lubavitch emissaries to colleges.) And Chabad’s embrace of technology feels distinctively American, even when it uses high tech for surprisingly atavistic purposes. It is customary, for instance, for pilgrims to the grave of the Rebbe to leave written prayers, in the conviction that he can intercede with God to answer them; but if you can’t get to Queens, you can send your prayer by fax.

Lubavitch does not officially believe that the seventh Rebbe is still, somehow, alive; but 16 years after his death, there is still no eighth Rebbe. And Schneerson’s presence—on videos, in books, in the memories of his disciples—still dominates Lubavitch, both practically and theologically. Friedman and Heilman quote a Chabad video featuring a woman who had never met the Rebbe when he was alive, but saw footage of him after his death: “I was just at my first farbrengen,” she said, as though the Rebbe’s virtual presence was no different from his physical one.

The absolute centrality of Menachem Mendel Schneerson to Chabad helps to explain the hostility that Heilman and Friedman’s book has aroused among Lubavitchers. The latter half of The Rebbe is devoted mainly to the way Schneerson shaped Chabad’s public activities—the mitzvah campaigns, the high political profile (President Reagan once sent the Rebbe a birthday message), and of course the messianic activism. Starting in 1951, when he inherited his father-in-law’s position as Rebbe, Schneerson’s life was effectively dissolved in Chabad’s life. Childless, far from his few surviving relatives, surrounded by disciples who worshipped him, he had no one who could relate to him in an ordinary, personal way. The only exception was his wife, Chaya Moussia, the daughter of the Sixth Rebbe; but she was intensely private, and Heilman and Friedman give the sense that she more or less relinquished her husband to his followers.

The controversy comes mainly from the first half of the biography, where Heilman and Friedman suggest that, as a young man, Schneerson was tempted by the wider, secular world and resisted the call of Lubavitch. The evidence for this thesis is necessarily circumstantial. It took a surprisingly long time for Mendel, as the authors call him, to marry Yosef Yitzhak’s daughter, as if one or both of them were hesitant about the match. After the marriage, the couple did not live with the sixth Rebbe, in Latvia, but went to Berlin and then Paris, where Schneerson studied engineering. Heilman and Friedman make much of the idea that Schneerson’s short beard and (relatively) modern dress embarrassed his father-in-law, and imply that he lived too far from local synagogues in Berlin and Paris to pray regularly.

What emerges, not quite explicitly, from all these details is the portrait of a young man struggling against his destiny. Heilman and Friedman argue that not until Schneerson fled France for New York in 1941—rescued from the Nazis, along with most of the Lubavitcher elite, thanks to pressure put on the State Department by American Jewish leaders—did he finally give up his “dream” of living a less-cloistered life. It is this contention that many Lubavitchers have disputed, mainly on the grounds that throughout the 1930s, even as he lived away from the Lubavitch court, Schneerson was deeply immersed in Hasidic study. (See, for instance, the hostile but impressively knowledgeable critique by Chaim Rapoport, “The Afterlife of Scholarship.”)

There is a strong case to be made that, even when Schneerson was living farthest from the Lubavitcher world, his mental universe remained thoroughly Hasidic. What is undeniable is that as late as 1950, when Yosef Yitzhak died, Mendel seemed to resist becoming the next Rebbe. The sixth Rebbe’s other son-in-law, Shmaryahu Gourary, had been far more involved in the institutions of Chabad and looked like a more obvious successor. Not until Schneerson’s brilliance and charisma became undeniable did the Lubavitchers press him to become their leader.

Heilman and Friedman’s account of the day Schneerson finally agreed to become Rebbe is brilliantly dramatic. For a year after the sixth Rebbe’s death, quiet jockeying and lobbying among the Lubavitchers had pitted Schneerson against Gourary, with the former continually refusing to declare himself a candidate for the leadership. Finally, on the anniversary of Yosef Yitzhak’s death—the 10th of Shvat, on the Jewish calendar—Schneerson “arose to offer a Torah talk, sicha.” But a sicha was different from a ma’amar khsides, “a talk filled with Chabad philosophy and thought that is recited in a distinctive and unmistakable singsong … and which in Lubavitcher practice can only be offered by a rebbe.” Before the talk began, some Hasidim had privately asked Schneerson to give a ma’amar khsides, which would imply accepting the role of Rebbe, and he had refused, snapping, “stop this nonsense.” But as he spoke, “one of the oldest Hasidim present” called out “venimtso kheyn veseyhl tov, der rebe zol zogn khsides”: “may we find grace and good wisdom, and would the Rebbe offer khsides.”

At this cue, Schneerson paused, then resumed his talk “in the special singsong associated with such addresses,” Heilman and Friedman write, “at last offer[ing] the ma’amar khsides for which so many had been waiting and which he had undoubtedly prepared in advance. The drama of this vocal transition was unmistakable.” Indeed, the whole episode is like nothing so much as the moment in Julius Caesar when Caesar refuses the crown that the people keep begging him to accept. The comparison brings out the unselfconscious elevation and dignity of the scene at 770 Eastern Parkway. In the minds of those present, the selection of the new Rebbe was literally of cosmic importance, and it is nothing but this certainty of significance that makes history out of happenings. Without it, the grandest, most lavish spectacles—even coronations and inaugurations—feel self-conscious, stagy, insincere; with it, the affairs of a tiny sect in an old house in Brooklyn become the stuff of history.

***

One might say, then, that the Rebbe was always a virtual figure, just as much when he was physically present as now, when he can be seen only on a screen. Significance and holiness and power are, after all, virtual qualities: They cannot be touched or measured, but they can always be perceived by those who consent to their existence. The woman who spoke of viewing a video as being in the Rebbe’s presence was, perhaps, just speaking metaphorically. But the difficulty, when it comes to religion, has always been knowing when a metaphor stops being a metaphor.

Some people speak to the dead for guidance, even though they know they are really just speaking to themselves; others speak to the dead and believe the dead can hear, even if they can’t respond; some believe they are receiving messages from the dead, through signs or omens or the words of a medium. If you leave pidyones, written supplications, on the Rebbe’s grave, are you still acting metaphorically, or have you crossed the existential line that separates acting-as-if from genuine belief? Is it ever possible to cross that line, or does all belief carry with it suspicion of mere acting—and is that self-suspicion the reason why some people become fanatics, meshikhistn, to prove to themselves that they are finally, completely in earnest?

In this way, the scandal of messianism leads inexorably to the scandal of faith itself. If you believe in God—in an omnipotent and actual God, not the euphemistic God of rational and liberal theology—then you must believe that it is possible for God to speak to us, to intervene in our world, to change history. Indeed, if you are an Orthodox Jew or Christian or Muslim, you believe that God has already done these things, a long time ago, though he has inscrutably stopped speaking directly to mankind. It must therefore be possible, in principle, for God to redeem this world—to send the Messiah. And that means that it must be possible, in principle, for a man who claims to be the Messiah actually to be right—even though every previous Messiah, from Bar Kokhba to Jacob Frank, has turned out to be a false one.

To live messianically, then, is to live at a tremendously high tension, in the belief that the Eternal could always be just about to break into the temporal. In modern, secular Jewish literature, the great anatomists of this tension emerged in German-speaking Europe in the 1920s and 1930s—that is, at the historical moment when European Jewish life was at its breaking point, when it had to be either redeemed or destroyed. Out of this crisis came Franz Kafka, who wrote paradoxically that “the messiah will come on the day after he has arrived … not on the last day, but on the very last day”; and Walter Benjamin, who concluded his last essay, written shortly before his suicide in 1940, with the words: “every second of time [is] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem became the greatest modern scholar of Jewish apocalyptic mysticism, including that of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi.

Franz Rosenzweig, author of The Star of Redemption, was the philosopher-theologian of this crisis moment. In Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (Columbia University Press), his densely brilliant new study of the Rebbe’s mystical thought, Elliot R. Wolfson aptly quotes Rosenzweig on the function of the false Messiah: “The false Messiah is as old as the hope of the genuine one. He is the changing form of the enduring hope. Every Jewish generation is divided by him into those who have the strength of hope not to be deceived. Those having faith are better, those having hope are stronger.” Those having faith are better: Rosenzweig outrages reason in that phrase, deliberately so. It takes strength to resist the temptation of believing in a false Messiah, but to risk belief, he suggests, takes something even rarer—the willingness to be wounded and disappointed, the willingness to be made a fool of. For if no one is willing to believe in this Messiah, false though he may be, how will anyone be found to believe in the Messiah, when he really comes? And “no one knows,” Rosenzweig writes, “whether this … will not happen even today.”

Menahem Mendel Schneerson grew up in a very different part of the Jewish world than Rosenzweig or Benjamin, but he was part of the same generation. Born in the Russian empire in 1902, to a family with an old Lubavitcher pedigree, he lived through the string of crises that devastated Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the 20th century: Tsarist pogroms and persecutions, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Civil War, Stalinism, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and finally the Holocaust. If, as Gershom Scholem writes in “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” messianic predictions in Judaism are born in “an equal degree from revelation and from the suffering and desperation of those to whom they are addressed,” it is no wonder that the Jews of Schneerson’s generation should feel themselves to be living in “the footsteps of the Messiah”—a time, Scholem notes, in which “dread and peril of the End form an element of shock and of the shocking which induces extravagance.”

Given the magnitude of the catastrophe, in fact, one might wonder why Lubavitcher messianism—which was already taking shape, Heilman and Friedman show, in the 1920s, under the Sixth Rebbe—did not command a wider Jewish appeal. Why does the cult of Menahem Mendel Schneerson seem like a freak of Jewish history, when earlier messiahs, from Bar Kokhba to Shabbetai Zevi, convulsed the entire Jewish world? The answer, perhaps, is that by the time the “King Messiah” movement came into its own, in the early 1990s, Jewish messianic longings had long since been siphoned off into other channels. Communism, to which so many Jews looked for redemption in the early 20th century, had long since proved a dead end; but the creation of the State of Israel had given Jews, especially American Jews, a new focus for their love and longing.

No wonder, then, that Heilman and Friedman see the Rebbe’s relationship with the State of Israel as especially fraught and complex. On the one hand, Chabad built a large settlement in Israel—with the help of the state’s third president, Zalman Shazar, who had grown up in a Lubavitcher family—and Schneerson became an influential figure in Israeli politics (Rabin, Begin, Sharon, and Netanyahu all made the pilgrimage to 770). He saw the reclamation of Eretz Yisrael—including the Occupied Territories—as a sign of divine providence and was dead-set against any move to give up land for peace (except for the Sinai desert, which had no covenantal significance).

Yet Heilman and Friedman also argue that Lubavitch was in competition with Zionism, which it saw as a “false Messiah [that] was going to steal the faith of the Jews that Lubavitchers had been worrking so hard to arouse.” In particular, they write, Schneerson envied the prestige of the Israeli army and used several rhetorical techniques to try to claim it. His “mitzvah tanks” were meant to be spiritual equivalents of the IDF’s conquering tanks, just as his mitzvah campaigns were versions of military campaigns. At times Lubavitch sought to missionize Israeli soldiers, promising that troops who wore tefillin would be divinely protected and strike terror into their enemies. At the end of the Yom Kippur War, Heilman and Friedman write, Schneerson went so far as to advise Moshe Dayan to invade Syria and take Damascus, “based on mystical and Kabbalistic texts” that supported this step.

This kind of rivalrous grandiosity was a sign that, as Heilman and Friedman write, the Rebbe came to “see himself as controlling events not only in Israel but also in many other places in the world.” In 1990, the Rebbe’s followers claimed that he had predicted Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War. He even advised Israeli Lubavitchers not to equip themselves with government-issued gas masks, since he was certain no Scud missile could harm them. The fall of Communism in 1989 was another vindication of the Rebbe, the destruction of Lubavitch’s oldest and bitterest enemy.

Such world-historical events served to raise the emotional temperature at 770, where the Rebbe was approaching his 90th birthday. In the natural order of things, he could not live much longer. Yet for almost half a century—since the very first talk he gave upon becoming Rebbe, in 1951—Schneerson had been insisting that the Messiah would come in his time. The theme of that inaugural speech had been the mystical power of sevens, a stock subject in Jewish mysticism. “All who are seventh are most beloved,” Schneerson quoted, and it was lost on no one that he himself was the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe. Every year on the same date, the 10th of Shvat, he would repeat the talk, which Heilman and Friedman call “a key text in Lubavitcher mythology and messianic theology.” (You can hear a selection of it, with subtitles, here.)

How, then, could the blessed seventh generation possibly give way to an eighth? As Schneerson came closer to his end, his messianic proclamations took on a more urgent, even desperate tone. “Everything necessary for the redemption has been completed,” he said in August 1991. The Jewish year 5752, which began in 1992, was the year when “the world would become united under the flag of the Messiah.” His Hasidim took the cue, preparing the famous yellow flag with a crown that became the logo of the Moshiach movement. No one, perhaps, believed more trustingly than a man named David Nachshon, an Israeli Lubavitcher who visited 770 in 1991. As Heilman and Friedman describe the scene, on Shabbat, April 20, Nachshon held up a bottle of liquor “and, standing before the Rebbe, announced that with this drink they would all toast the Rebbe our righteous Messiah who would redeem them on the next Sabbath at the rebuilt Holy Temple in Jerusalem.”

Here, if anywhere, was the man Rosenzweig described as having faith. Was he “better”? Should we not feel pity or contempt for him, imagining his plight on April 27, when the Temple was not restored and the Rebbe was not magically transported to Jerusalem? (A replica of 770 Eastern Parkway was built there, so that he would feel at home when the relocation happened.) Or should we, perhaps, feel anger at the Rebbe, the charismatic leader who encouraged his followers to believe of him what should never be believed of any human being? As the frenzy built among his Hasidim—as they displayed banners with his picture calling him Moshiach, and ran ads in the New York Times declaring “Moshiach Now,” and signed petitions begging him to declare himself the Messiah—Schneerson could have put a stop to it with a word. He never did.

But does this mean that the Rebbe actually believed he was the Messiah? On the evidence of his words and actions, as analyzed both by Heilman and Friedman and by Wolfson, it is hard to give a clear yes-or-no answer. It would be easier to understand Schneerson, and to judge him, if he were simply a pretender—if he told people he was the Messiah, knowing full well that he wasn’t—or simply deluded—if he straightforwardly knew that he was the Messiah, in the way that psychotics know they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ. But he was too good and sincere to be the former and too realistic and intelligent to be the latter.

The truth seems to be that, like his humblest followers, the Rebbe himself was waiting, in a state of intolerable expectation, for the Messiah to be revealed—and he was unable to rule out the possibility that the Messiah would turn out to be himself. The genuine bewilderment this caused comes across in the harangue he delivered a few days after Passover in 1991, when once again the Messiah had failed to come—despite the tradition that the final Redemption would take place in the same month, Nisan, as the redemption from bondage in Egypt. “How can it be,” he asked his followers, “that you have not yet succeeded in this time of grace to actualize the coming of the righteous Messiah? What else can I do so that the Children of Israel will cry out and demand the Messiah come, after all else that was done until now has not helped since we are obviously still in exile.” He concluded, “I have to hand over the task to you: Do all you can to bring the righteous Moshiach, mamesh.”

The last word, which Heilman and Friedman leave untranslated, is Hebrew for “in fact,” “really,” “actually.” It became part of Schneerson’s standard refrain in calling for the Messiah, as Elliot Wolfson shows in greater detail. (In general, Wolfson has much more to say about the content of Schneerson’s thought and writing, while Heilman and Friedman focus on the events of his life and the organizational growth of Chabad.) Let the Messiah come “tekhef u-mi-yad mammash,” Schneerson said again and again—“immediately and without delay in actuality,” as Wolfson translates.

The redundancy and insistence of the phrase speak very movingly of the urgency of Schneerson’s desire and capture the feeling that Walter Benjamin also communicated—that any single instant could be the gateway for the Messiah. Wolfson quotes Schneerson’s words from February 1990: “Let it be your will that by means of all these things we will merit in all of Israel, immediately and without delay in actuality, immediately without delay in actuality, immediately and without delay in actuality, the true and complete redemption.” With each repetition of tekhef u-mi-yad mammash, the moment is bid to hold still, the gate to swing open. One can imagine the same words coming from the pilgrim in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” who spends his entire life sitting in front of an open door, waiting for the doorkeeper’s permission to enter.

The Kafkaesque turn in that story comes at the moment of the man’s death, when he is told that “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.” But it is left deliberately unclear whether this means that he should have seized the opportunity that was destined for him—say, by forcing his way through, despite the doorkeeper’s warnings. For isn’t forcing redemption the great temptation and sin of those who can’t wait patiently for God? Wolfson quotes Rosenzweig’s indulgent view of those who believe in false messiahs but in The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig is sterner about those he calls “Tyrants of the Kingdom of Heaven”: “The fanatic, the sectarian … far from hastening the advent of the kingdom, only delay it. … The ground prematurely cultivated by the fanatic yields no fruit. It does that only when its time has come. And its time, too, will come. But then all the work of cultivation will have to be undertaken afresh.”

Mamesh means “in fact”; but it is also made up of the letters mem, mem, shin, which are the initials of Menahem Mendel Schneerson. By so insistently linking this word to the coming of the Messiah, Schneerson seemed to be confirming that he himself was the one the Lubavitchers were waiting for. Once, Heilman and Friedman write, he added “that he meant mamesh ‘with all its interpretations’ ”—a typically elusive confirmation. So elusive, in fact, that Wolfson bases his book on the hypothesis that Schneerson not only didn’t think he was the Messiah, he didn’t even believe the Messiah was coming at all.

Wertheimer’s point is that poor Orthodox Jews are going to be increasingly reliant on outside philanthropy, which in turn may be increasingly scarce. But Miller proposes an alternative:

In 2008, 2.7 million Americans called themselves religiously Jewish, down from 3.1 million in 1990. Wouldn’t the central challenge of American Jewry be to encourage the broadest range of people (including the intermarried, like me) to identify as Jewish and to raise Jewish kids? Costly barriers to entry need to be taken away, or, at least, reimagined. “We have this very bizarre pay-to-play philosophy,” says Jay Sanderson, president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Christian churches, Sanderson points out, begin with an invitation to prayer; they ask for money later. “The Jewish community’s first instinct is ‘give us money,’ instead of ‘come in.’”

Those black-clad Chabad volunteers who have no doubt approached you—first asking, always, “Are you Jewish?” (since Jews don’t proselytize outside the faith)—and then invited you to come to Shabbat dinner at the local house, without asking you for money? According to Miller, they represent the future of Jewish growth, if there is a future of Jewish growth.

The Cost of Being Jewish [Newsweek]
The High Cost of Jewish Living [Commentary]
Related: Teachable Moment

A special in-the-family pat on the back to Joseph Telushkin, who held steady at spot 15. Telushkin’s biography of Hillel is being published by Nextbook Press in September.

Some more notable winners (and some losers) from the list—which is the brainchild of Sony Pictures’s Michael Lynton and “his pal” Gary Ginsberg, and which is strictly subjective—after the jump.

Shmuley. New Jersey’s own Shmuley Boteach jumped a spot, from 7 to 6.

Big gains from Avi Weiss. The Bronx-based Modern Orthodox rabbi jumped from 38 to 18, on the strength of his controversial granting of the title “rabba” to a female student of his, Sara Hurwitz. Speaking of which …

Women. I count six women on both lists, with the highest-ranking, Ellen Weinberg-Dreyfus of the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, moving up from 18 to 17. Hurwitz is a new addition, at 36. And Sharon Kleinbaum, the rabbi at Manhattan’s Beth Simchat Torah—the world’s largest LGBT-oriented synagogue—held steady at number 25.

Leave your shul, doesn’t matter. In 2009, while Jeffrey Wohlberg was still top rabbi at the venerable Washington, D.C., Conservative shul Adas Israel (where he presided over the bar mitzvah of your humble blogger), he was at 19. In 2010, as president of the Rabbinical Assembly, Wohlberg was at … 19.

A tale of two Schneiers. In 2009, rabbi-to-the-stars (and—ladies!—newly single) Marc Schneier was ranked 33rd; this year, he dropped to 41. But Arthur Schneier, of the Park East Synagogue, rose from 36th to 34th. Oh, it is on. Which Schneier are you chneiering for?

The 50 Most Influential Rabbis in America (2010) [Newsweek]
50 Influential Rabbis (2009) [Newsweek]

The delegation from Ankara included Murat Mercan, the head of the Turkish parliament’s foreign relations committee and a senior figure in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AKP Party. As it happens, he also took part in the Gaza-bound Viva Palestina aid convoy earlier this year; since the Memorial Day flotilla raid, he’s been sharply critical of Israel and its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

But last night, he said his problems with Israel had nothing to do with his feelings toward Jews. “Criticizing what the current government is doing does not mean criticizing the Jews,” Mercan told Tablet Magazine. “Jews are an essential part of the Turkish community, and relations between Turkey and the Jews will not be hampered in any way by the actions of the Israeli government.”

Mercan was in town for a few days on a diplomatic mission to address any negative impact on Turkish-American relations arising from the flotilla; his itinerary, he said, included meetings with White House officials, the State Department, and Rep. Howard Berman (D-California), one of the authors of pending economic sanctions legislation against Iran. His appearance at the Chabad dinner, he said, came at the invitation of a Lubavitch rabbi he met in Turkey a few years back. In other words, Mercan quipped, “It was God’s will that I be here!”

With that, Mercan hustled out the porticoed doors and into the muggy night. A pair of Chabad rabbis, curious, asked what he had said, and seemed pleased with the result. “So he listens to what we tell him,” one remarked, and then turned back into the colonnaded ballroom to see what was for dessert.

According to an Indian National Investigation Agency report, Headley gained entrance to the Chabad center by posing as a Jew, and the FBI discovered a copy of a book called To Pray as a Jew among his belongings. A rabbi in India, who gave a tour of the wreckage to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week, is still baffled by the tragedy: “It was bizarre that the terrorists should come and make this one of their key hunting grounds.… It didn’t have any meaning in any nationalistic sense, in any political sense.”

India to Move for Extradition of Headley from US [Times of India]
Headley Mapped all ‘26/11 Targets,’ US Suspect Posed as Jew: Police [Telegraph (India)]
‘Mumbai Terrorist Pretended to Be Jewish’ [Ynet]
Harpers Tour Site of Mumbai Massacre [Canada.com]

In a jury trial held in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (defense attorneys feared that Iowa jurors would be biased against Rubashkin because of pretrial publicity), Rubashkin was found guilty of bank fraud, making false statements to a bank, mail fraud, and money laundering, the Des Moines Register reports. He was found not guilty of five additional charges of failing to pay livestock providers within a 24-hour window required by law. Defense attorneys “tried to portray Mr. Rubashkin as a bumbling businessman who was in over his head,” said the AP, but prosecutors successfully countered in his closing arguments that “Mr. Rubashkin had been aware of the fraud at the plant and that to assume otherwise was ‘ridiculous.’”

Rubashkin’s attorneys say they intend to appeal. They are also seeking to dismiss the charges related to money laundering because, they say, Rubashkin did not profit from the crime. “It’s unbelievable,” Rubashkin’s daughter Roza Weiss told the Argus Leader, a Sioux Falls paper. “My only comment is, we’re Jewish and we’re proud of it.” The Rubashkins are part of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

Jury: Fmr. Slaughterhouse Manager Guilty of Fraud [AP]
Sholom Rubashkin Guilty on 86 Charges in Fraud Trial Involving Postville Meat Plant [Des Moines Register]
Rubashkin Found Guilty on 86 Counts [Argus Leader]

Months of prep work: 4
City licenses needed for the event: More than 10
Tractor-trailers needed to transport event equipment:5
Length of lighting and power cables used: 7 miles
Workers required to assemble and then break down the hall: 40
Simultaneous translations of the speeches: 3 (Russian, Hebrew, French)
DVD copies of the event that will be produced overnight for Monday morning distribution: More than 6,000

And what does it take to feed the 4,000 Chabad emissaries, known as shluchim, for the four-day conference? According to Bentzion Cohen Catering:

Total meat meals served: 15,500
Total dairy meals served: 6,500
Chickens used: 12,500 chickens
Pounds of margarine used: 55
Gallons of soup prepared: 2,500
Rugelach baked: 5,000

A tall narrow bookshelf to the left of the reception desk doesn’t garner much attention. Its shelves are divided into sections like child-rearing (two copies of the No Cry Sleep Solution as well as several baby sign-language books) and art (Crafts and La Vie En Rose). It’s only the titles in the adult literature section that seem incongruous: Bringing Heaven to Earth, Opening the Tanya, and My Spiritual Journey.

Manhattan Preschool of the Arts, which opened in 2000, is run under the auspices of Chabad Lubavitch, the ultra-Orthodox movement, and is part of a fast-growing network of Chabad schools nationwide catering to the young children of Jewish families across the denominational spectrum. The schools might differ in educational focus—some, like Preschool of the Arts, consider themselves inspired by Reggio Emilia, the Italian approach that emphasizes physical environment and community, while others place greater weight on Montessori ideals—but they all share the same, overarching philosophy: imbue their charges with a love for the Jewish religion. “We’re trying to spread the warmth of Judaism,” says Shternie Raskin, the director of Kiddie Korner, a Brooklyn Heights preschool that opened in 1991. “Not the laws, though that’s happening too, but the warmth, the fun part of Judaism. And so much of it is fun!”

There’s another goal too, which Chabad is quite up-front about, although you won’t see it printed on admission brochures: reaching out to the parents of the children. “It’s all about the relationships, the personal relationships,” says Devora Krasnianski, coordinator for the Chabad Early Childhood Education network. “It’s not just the child who comes to the school. It’s really connecting with the whole family.” Rabbi Nochem Kaplan, national director of Chabad’s education arm, puts it more directly. “Chabad preschools are created to serve not only as institutions of early childhood learning,” he wrote several years ago, “but as vehicles to reach out to the families of the children who attend.”

There are 157 preschools now affiliated with Chabad nationwide, up from 109 in 2005. These numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. Manhattan Preschool of the Arts was flooded with applications last year—160, of which they accepted 95. In ever-gentrifying Brooklyn, where strollers clog the sidewalks, the Park Slope-based Chai Tots, founded in 1987, has recently opened two new outposts—a Prospect Heights location in 2007 and another one in Windsor Terrace last fall—only to find that demand still exceeds space. Kiddie Korner in Brooklyn Heights just completed renovations on a new space and now offers, in addition to preschool, daycare for up to 50 kids.

And while more than 25 percent of the Chabad preschools can be found in New York State (home, of course, to 770 Eastern Parkway, Chabad’s world headquarters in Brooklyn), the press to educate the young and Jewish stretches to the far reaches of the country. Over the past decade, Chabad-run early childhood education centers have opened in Alabama, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Hawaii. California has 26 preschools. Even Reno, Nevada, not exactly a hotspot for young Jewish families, saw the inauguration this past May of a new 13,500-square-foot Chabad center to house a preschool and a day school, which had previously resided in a converted carport.

“Listen, a child goes with his mom to the mall on December 15 and what does he see? Santa Claus and Christmas all over the place. Where’s Hanukkah?” Kaplan, the Chabad education chief, asks me. “Early childhood Jewish education leaves an indelible impression on the child. We need that. It’s essential for an assimilating community.”

For the better half of the past decade, Kaplan has been an agitator for Chabad preschool expansion. In 2004, he canvassed 23 Chabad communities, from Burlington, Vermont, to Bakersfield, California, to determine their level of interest in starting such schools. “Chabad touches the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews every day of every year,” Kaplan wrote in his resulting report. “Chabad is uniquely positioned to make a serious impact on the future of Jewish preschool education.”

Uniquely positioned how? In a word: outreach. The Chabad Lubavitch movement is virtually synonymous with its outreach efforts, a campaign that was kicked off in the wake of World War II’s devastation. (In 1950, the first Lubavitcher couple was sent abroad, to Morocco from Brooklyn, to spread the teachings of the rebbe.) Today, these efforts are as ubiquitous as they are varied: Mitzvah tanks roaming city streets blaring music; dark-suited young men and women in long skirts who approach strangers, asking, “You Jewish?”; Shabbat services at Burning Man; raucous, alcohol-soaked Purim celebrations on college campuses. Chabad is unusual, to say the least: a strictly religious group that directs its activities to the non-religious.

“People say, ‘oh, I’m Reform, I’m Conservative.’ I don’t care about that,” says Shternie Raskin of Kiddie Korner. “I say, ‘You’re a Jew? You’re Jewish!’”

Their non-judgmental, enthusiastic, religiously fervent approach can inspire skittishness and even ire in some secular Jews. But it’s these same qualities, their unabashed love for and pride in the Torah and its teachings, that makes their preschools some of the more successful and cutting-edge educational centers around.

***

Emerging in mid-18th century Poland, Chabad Lubavitch grew out of the general Hasidic movement. Its adherents embrace the concept of ahavat Yisrael, “love of all Jews,” regardless of a person’s level of observance. “When a Jew sins, the entire Jewish body is affected,” writes Sue Fishkoff in her comprehensive account of Chabad, The Rebbe’s Army. “When a Jew does a mitzvah, obeying even one of God’s commandments, the merit is enjoyed by all.”

This spiritual belief fuels all of Chabad’s outreach efforts, marking them with a palpable, physical urgency. “A hasid is he who puts his personal affairs aside and goes around lighting up the souls of Jews with the light of Torah and mitzvoth,” said the rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who led Chabad from 1951 until his death in 1994 (and who some Lubavitchers hold is the messiah). “There must be someone who disregards personal comforts and conveniences and goes out to put a light to these lamps.”

Those charged with the task of lamp-lighting professionally are emissaries, or shlichim, young married couples who move to places with little or no Orthodox presence—far-flung locales, like Thailand and Mumbai, or the more familiar Pasadena or Park Slope of 20 years ago—to set up independently run and funded Chabad Houses, of which there are now more than 3,000 worldwide. The intention is that they stay on the job for life. “The shaliach’s success depends on his own entrepreneurial talents,” says Jonathan Sarna, the American Jewish historian. “It’s a 24-7 job.” Their goal is to offer the myriad services that one needs to have a “full Jewish community,” as one Chabadnik puts it, and that includes, of course, Jewish schools.

The parents of young children are often at a crossroads (a harried, sleep-deprived crossroads, but a crossroads nevertheless), facing a time in their lives when they realize that the decisions they make—from the quotidian to the spiritual—are not simply for two adults but for an entire family. “The family is generally trying to figure out their religious ideals,” says Krasnianski, Chabad’s early-childhood coordinator. “They could have been whatever they wanted to be as singles, or young adults, or even couples. But now is a key time.”

Chabad, with the establishment of their preschools, is trying to capitalize on this particular moment, but the families who send their children to the schools have their own goals in mind. “I kind of dismissed the school at first,” says Alexa de los Reyes, about her decision to send her son to Brooklyn’s Chai Tots. “Very religious Jews make me uncomfortable. And, you know, it’s Chabad; they’re proselytizers. I’ve had the experience of being approached by Chabad people on the street, which is definitely off-putting, but this isn’t like that at all. It’s very welcoming and inclusive, no pressure.” Plus, in the competitive New York preschool market, there’s another important factor, admits de los Reyes: “The fact that there was space was the prime thing.”

***

I had many preconceptions as to what a Chabad-run school would be like, but an emphasis on paint colors wasn’t one of them. Yet when I arrived at Manhattan Preschool of the Arts, Sarah Rotenstreich, the smooth-talking, 34-year-old director of the school brings up the neutral base color for the walls immediately, pointing out that it’s a very soothing shade. “Environment is like a third teacher here,” she says as she walks me through the school’s invitingly open space, which boasts cobblestone flooring, cedar-planked walls, and an internal courtyard, or piazza, in Reggio-speak. It looks closer to something out of a Norman Rockwell scene or Little House on the Prairie than any preschool I’ve seen before.

In her glass-enclosed, piazza-facing office, Rotenstreich speaks about Reggio philosophy and “reaching the whole child,” how the curriculum is integrated with Judaism (“science and math can be Jewish”) and about the slew of family activities the school offers—from large holiday parties to parenting workshops and challah-baking at her home. The school even operates a small, upscale kosher cafe next door, called Books and Bagels, open to the public, to encourage mingling. “Community is crucial to what we do,” says Rotenstreich, who grew up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, the daughter of shlichim.

While not every school boasts as polished a space (Park Slope’s Chai Tots is housed in a basement, Kiddie Korner in a well-worn Brooklyn Heights brownstone), Chabad-affiliated preschools are, by most accounts, effectively run, successful centers of education. They are licensed by the state as well as accredited by Chabad. The three New York City preschools I visited all seemed lovely—the teachers warm and attentive, the children happily engaged at the water table, in the dress-up area, running around the playground. They looked, on the surface, a lot like my own daughter’s secular preschool, albeit with more Hebrew.

Mark Rosen, a Brandeis sociologist who has studied outreach to young Jewish families, says when Chabad “takes on early childhood, they take it very seriously. They’re extremely savvy about the religious piece. Religion is not the major focus of what they do—the focus is on the education.”

“I think there’s a real push for professionalism” at Chabad schools, says Pearl Beck, a social psychologist who conducted an oft-cited study of non-Orthodox Jewish preschools in 2002. “They might have been winging it years ago, but not anymore.”

Whatever their trepidation about the religious component, parents are well-aware of the professionalism. “At first, I was in shock,” says a recent Israeli transplant to Brooklyn who sends her son to Chai Tots. “I came home and said to my husband, ‘We can’t do this. We can’t do the tzitzit and kiss the Torah and the talk of Hashem. It’s so strange for us.” But her son remained. Why? “The teachers are good, they’re friendly,” she says. “They listen. They want to know the kids, the whole family. My son went to three different schools in Israel and this is the best.”

The schools receive professional support, such as curriculum assistance, from Chabad’s national offices, but they’re on their own financially, and 770 doesn’t dictate an individual school’s approach. “Every school makes its own decisions,” says Krasnianski, the early-childhood coordinator. “We don’t have a mandate from up top.”

There are certain commonalities, however. “All learning is sensory-based, and stems from a Judaic experience,” says Kaplan, the national education official. “So, if we’re talking about vegetation and green life, we’ll start with a Jewish bible story.” Most schools ask their young students to bring in daily a “mitzvah note,” detailing a good deed. And most also require students to offer a penny for charity. “We’re teaching your child to be a mensch, a good person,” Kiddie Korner’s Shternie Raskin says. “Everything should be a joy,” says Sarah Hecht, the director of Chai Tots. “Nothing should be ‘you have to do it.’” She makes a face. “That’s so old-school.”

The handful of preschool directors I spoke with said they don’t require children to wear tzitzit or yarmulkes, but keep them on hand if the child requests. (Judging from the number of parents who brought it up, many children do request. And a parent handbook from Toronto’s Chabad preschool, part of the larger packet Kaplan sends to new schools, says, “boys are required to wear kippot to school every day.”)

The open-mindedness that characterizes Chabad’s activities in general is certainly evident at the schools. The directors I spoke with said they’ll admit any child whose family is interested in a Jewish education. “Look, I don’t like labeling. We have everyone; we have families with two mommies, we have everybody,” says Chai Tots’ Hecht. “We have families that, halachically, are they Jewish? No—the father is Jewish but the mom is not—but they want it, they want the Jewish school.”

Most draw the line at non-Jews. Shternie Raskin is a notable exception. She says there are about four or five non-Jews in each of her fifteen-member classes. In the early years of Kiddie Korner, which opened in 1991, she took non-Jews simply to fill up the school, but now, she says, it’s a different story. “So many non-Jews are interested. The truth is, kids are kids. I don’t turn them away.”

(Not every school is accepting. I spoke with one mother who told me that her son had been verbally accepted to the Chabad preschool on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2006, only to find that acceptance rescinded when the school learned she had been converted to Judaism by Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and a rabbi of Renewal Judaism. “They told me I would have to reconvert in order for my son to be accepted,” Lili Schab says. “It was horrible.” The school did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another selling point seems to be cost. A number of people I spoke with said that Chabad is generally able to underprice. Brandeis’s Sarna points out that the position of director at most Chabad preschools is usually filled by the rabbi’s wife, who is generally not drawing a salary. “That money is going to a general fund of the Chabad House,” he says. In the handful of Chabad preschools that I canvassed the pricing structure was comparable to other preschools, secular and religious, with one notable exception: Chai Tots is significantly cheaper. (It charges $5,500 for three half days a week, for example, while a nearby preschool affiliated with a Conservative synagogue charges $7,600 for the same time.) A flexible range of hours offered and ages of children served—many Chabad preschools have a daycare component for babies—also makes these programs especially appealing to working parents.

But finances and availability only tell part of the story. “The shaliach is working 24-7,” Sarna says. “They love it; they’re doing the rebbe’s will. If you thought your work might bring on the messiah, you might work that much harder too.”

***

“I think parents don’t realize that this is a total community,” says Kiddie Korner’s ebullient Raskin. “They don’t understand, I teach your kid, they become my kid. We invite people over for Shabbos. They come to my house, they see it all. It changes things.” It certainly changed things for Jessica Kaye, whose daughter, Sage, was in preschool at Kiddie Korner. “I look at my daughter; she’s learning so much stuff, and I think, ‘Maybe I should do this at home,’” she says. “Or, ‘my Hebrew should be as good as hers.’” Kaye says she has helped out with school holiday celebrations. “Shternie and the rabbi so welcoming. It’s so cool to participate, even if I don’t know all of the blessings.” She explains that she grew up in central Pennsylvania, where “the KKK marched through my town. I heard Jewish slurs. It’s nice to see Sage be really free with knowing who she is.”

Anne Estes, who grew up Quaker and describes her husband as a “lapsed Episcopalian” is also a big Kiddie Korner supporter. Her son went to the school for four years; her young daughter attends it now. “It’s been wonderful, spiritual, and supportive,” she says of the school, and not just of her children. When she lost her job last year, “Shternie and the rabbi were there for me, as a friend,” Estes says. “They’ve been there for us during some very painful times.”

I ask if her son ever felt odd, as a non-Jew at a Jewish school. No, she says. “We were worried that he would feel like he didn’t belong. But he never felt that way.” Then she stops. “Except for the time he asked about—what’s it called, what you do on Friday night?” Shabbat? “Yes,” she says. She goes on to explain that her son got upset because his friends celebrated Shabbat, and he didn’t. “So I went to Mrs. Plotkin”—Shternie’s mother, who works in the school office—“and I said, ‘Would it be okay if I did something?’ I didn’t want to be disrespectful. She said, ‘It’s a family ritual, you can make it a family ritual.’ So I made an ecumenical Friday night celebration; we sliced the bread, I said a prayer over the candles. We still do it sometimes.”

But for other families, even those who are happy with the school, the religious component can remain a thorny issue, leading to a disconnect between what a child learns in the classroom and what she practices at home. Alexa de los Reyes, whose son attended Chai Tots and who is married to a non-Jew, says, “my husband says, ‘Let’s say the blessings; let’s have the Shabbat.’ For him, it’s much easier to adopt it as a family tradition. It’s much more complicated for me.”

Isaac Josephson, who also says that his family’s Chai Tots experience hasn’t changed their level of observance, is mirthful about the disconnect. “Hashem has entered his daily lexicon,” he says about his son. Josephson has dubbed these conversations “The Hashem Wars.” “When a toy breaks, he’ll ask Hashem to fix his toy. And I’ll say, ‘Well, if we believed in Hashem….’” Josephson, who has nothing but good things to say about Chai Tots and Chabad in general (“I think they’re astoundingly good at what they do,” he says, “consummate marketers”) doesn’t hesitate when I ask where his son will be attending kindergarten. “Public school, baby,” he says with a laugh.

When I ask the Israeli mother (who requested that her name not be used for fear of offending Chai Tots) if her son’s attendance at the school had changed the way they did things at home, she says, “absolutely not. Not at all. I like the challah they make on Fridays, but that’s it.” She, too, laughs, noting that she wants her son to attend kindergarten at the local public school. “I don’t want problems with the Hashem stuff.”

The issues are not limited to Hashem, of course. It’s a worldview, one in which the female teachers (and they are all women, as they are at the vast majority of preschools) are regularly married by the time they are 22, where having 10 children isn’t all that unusual, and black, as the song the children sing about colors attests, “is the color of Daddy’s hat.”

Consider this, from the teacher’s manual of Chabad’s Upper West Side preschool: “topics relating to the age of the earth and man, various geological stages … and any other ideas which may be dichotomous with Jewish theology are not to be discussed in the classroom without the express permission and guidance from the Director.”

Pearl Beck, the social psychologist, says: “These modern, educated, secular Jews who send their kids to Chabad preschools, and eat at Chabad houses—I’m not sure they know that it has a specific ideology, with ideas about Zionism, for example. The parents might like the product, but they don’t regard it as an ideology.”

Others are more damning about Chabad. David Berger, a Jewish historian who wrote a highly critical book about Lubavitch messianism, says, “I’m not particularly worried about these preschools—I assume the vast majority of their teachers are not teaching about the moshiach—but I see Chabad Lubavitch as espousing ideas that have the potential to undermine Judaism. So anything that might contribute to the success of the movement troubles me.”

One Brooklyn mother I spoke with who didn’t want to be identified considers herself an observant Jew and a staunch supporter of Jewish education. Last year, while shopping around for preschools, she looked at Chai Tots, despite the fact that she’s not a fan of Chabad. “What really bothers me is the non-egalitarianism,” she says. “It drives me nuts. A friend of mine whose kids are there told me about a Friday night event they went to where all the kids made kippot for the dads and bracelets for the moms. I found that horrifying.”

Still, she says, it didn’t stop her from applying. “In principle, the fact that it’s a Chabad school is a problem, but when you go into the school, the religious issue ceases to be the issue and becomes just one consideration.”

***

The focus on family and community, so intrinsic to Chabad, isn’t necessarily as emphasized at other Jewish preschools. Mark Rosen, the sociologist who studies outreach, explains that the early childhood centers run by synagogues or JCCs adhere to an entirely different model, one often driven by financial considerations. “In synagogues in particular, preschools are seen as cash cows,” Rosen says. “If they weren’t profit centers, they wouldn’t exist. It’s not that they’re not interested in outreach, it’s just that the business consideration must come first. I would suspect that if a Chabad preschool wasn’t profitable, they’d run it anyway. They’re not there to make money; they’re there to bring souls closer to Hashem.”

In 2002, Pearl Beck, the social psychologist, conducted a study that offers evidence of Rosen’s point. She surveyed 90 families in three different cities—Denver, Chicago, and Baltimore—who had a child enrolled in a Jewish preschool affiliated with a Conservative or Reform synagogue, or a JCC. The resulting study, “Jewish Preschools as Gateways to Jewish Life,” found that for all the Jewish organizational world’s talk about reaching unaffiliated Jews, little attention was being paid to a population already in the system, “namely families whose children are enrolled in over a thousand Jewish preschools throughout the country,” she wrote.

Beck found that most of these schools “didn’t have highly articulated Jewish educational goals,” and that the Jewish curriculum was often “ad-hoc and limited.” Interactions between children and the rabbi or cantor at these schools “were the exception rather than the rule.” Despite these findings, “parents expressed overwhelmingly positive sentiments about their child’s Jewish preschool experience. Parents for whom the ‘Jewish factor’ was not a major reason for enrollment expressed surprise at how much they liked Jewish component.” Beck also found that nearly 70 percent of the families said they were doing something different in terms of their Jewish observance as a result of their child’s education.

Beck might not have considered any Chabad-affiliated preschools, but Chabad was considering her work. Rabbi Kaplan, the head of Chabad’s education arm, read Beck’s 2002 study, and several years later, used the findings to support his own argument that Chabad was well-positioned to fill the gap. “A comprehensive study by Pearl Beck … concluded that Jewish preschools present significant, yet underutilized opportunities for strengthening families’ Jewish affiliation and enhancing their Jewish identities,” he wrote.

Beck, who was surprised to learn that Chabad had cited her study, said that there had been a “surge of programmatic” changes at Jewish early childhood centers since she had released her study. “I talked about the lack of Jewish curriculum, and that’s not true anymore,” she says. Still, she sees the specific appeal of Chabad. She views their schools as “very cutting edge, a barometer of things to come. Jewish ideology and its underpinnings are seamlessly integrated into the school experience.”

One potential marker of a Jewish preschool’s success could be the rate of its graduates’ enrollment in Jewish day schools. Milwaukee’s well-regarded Jewish Beginnings is one of the oldest Chabad-run preschools in the country. (It opened in 1973.) Its website proclaims: “90% of our students come from non-Orthodox homes. 87% of Jewish Beginnings graduates go on to Jewish Day school education.”

None of the New York City Chabad preschool directors I met with were interested in claiming day school enrollment as their mission. (Talk about scaring secular prospective families.) “My goal is not for them to go on to Jewish day school,” says Sarah Rotenstreich, of Preschool of the Arts. “That’s a wonderful, positive outcome, but that’s not my goal.” And yet when I ask her about the number of children going on to a Jewish day school this year, she looks it up and realizes it’s 50 percent, eight out of 16. “That’s so exciting. It’s our highest percentage yet,” she says. “It’s usually around 20 or 30 percent, if I’m lucky.”

Chai Tots’ Sarah Hecht,who gave birth to her 13th child this spring, told me that of the 12 kids from last year’s graduating class, five were going on to day school. (“It could be better,” she says of the percentage with a laugh, “but it’s not bad.”) She too says her goal is not day school, but for kids to leave loving and having pride in their Jewish heritage. “Every Friday, every child here makes a homemade challah,” she says. “Now it doesn’t make a difference to me if they go home and make a little Friday night Shabbat celebration with the challah, or, if they say, ‘You know, this bread makes the best French toast!’ It doesn’t matter. They’ve had the experience.”

It’s an appealing statement, consummately Chabad in its verve and open-mindednesss, but one which could seem slightly disingenuous. (Does it truly not matter if no one ever says a blessing?) On the other hand, Chabad does hold that experience is everything. For each student who attends Chai Tots for a year, baking challah and saying the prayers, that’s one more Jewish soul adding to the number of mitzvot in the world.

Ilene Vogelstein is the director for the Alliance for Jewish Early Childhood Education, and she points out that the early years of childhood are critical ones in terms of brain development. In the first five years of life, “the neural pathways are being formed, and the brain is designed to absorb the experiences that children are exposed to,” she says. “So, if you’ve been exposed to Shabbat, you’re hard-wired for that experience, even if you don’t come back to it for a long time. It’s sort of like a bungee cord if you’re exposed to it—you have a frame of reference. You bounce back up.”

Others suggest that this reading of brain development, the strength of that bungee cord, might be optimistic. “I believe that such early childhood experiences need to be reinforced as the child grows older,” says Beck, who has worked with Vogelstein in the past. “If the experiences are not reinforced, I doubt they would make a significant dent in the child’s Jewish identity in the long term.”

Chabad, however, seems to be throwing its considerable muscle and resources behind assessments like Vogelstein’s. Or perhaps a better way to think of their efforts is as a guard against needing the bungee cord altogether, to mangle a metaphor. Why would these children need something to snap them back to Judaism if they never leave?

Beck says that when she thinks of Chabad, authenticity is the first word that comes to mind. “They’re very welcoming and operate from the heart. It emanates from the belief that every Jew is created in the image of God. It’s what they truly believe. Any person, secular or observant, can detect it.” Such authenticity can be very compelling and enticing, no matter where you lie on the denominational spectrum.

Chabad’s ability to market this authenticity so well, to wrap a strict form of Judaism in layers of welcoming warmth, is no small feat. “They make Judaism seem accessible and doable,” Beck says. “They have a formula and it doesn’t seem formulaic.”

The Brooklyn mother who was rankled by the gender inequality is quite aware of Chabad’s formula. And she is direct about the fact that the Lubavitch life is not one she wants for her offspring. “Listen, I think it’s weird, it’s like a cult with the proselytizing,” she says. “Do I want my daughters to have 12 kids? No.” And yet her objections to a Chabad-run school faded when she visited Chai Tots. “I went there, and it was really lovely,” she says. “The director was wonderful; I liked the teachers better than at the other schools, and it was five blocks from my house.” Her children, however, did not end up at Chai Tots. But chalk it up to the hyper-competitive nature of New York City preschools and not to any religious considerations. “I would have sent my kids there,” she says. “But they didn’t get in.”

Ellen Umansky is a Tablet Magazine contributing editor.

So, go ahead, shake the lulav! We can’t wait to see what the park has planned for Diwali.

Legal Musings on Bryant Park Sukkah [NYT/City Room]

How an Israeli King of diamonds overplayed his hand [MarketWatch]

Related:
Diamond Billionaire Takes New York [Forward]

After a pleasant visit to a “spiritual director” (like a life coach for the soul), Chafets went to Marc Gellman, a Reform rabbi “of liberal theological leanings.” Although Gellman loses some credibility in our book for saying “[o]ur people don’t get emotional in public,” he makes an astute statement on the relative paucity of actual prayer at the average suburban synagogue: “People come to temple to identify with other Jews, or socialize. The writer Harry Golden once asked his father, who was an atheist, why he went to services every Saturday. The old man told him, ‘My friend Garfinkle goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Garfinkle.’ There’s a lot of that.” While Gellman shies away from innovation like gay congregation Sha’ar Zahav’s prayer sanctifying a one-night stand, he does take a light-hearted stance in encouraging people to worship: “When you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!”

Chafets also chats with a Chabad rabbi who runs an online advice column and “speaks in a prayer vocabulary short on traditional Yiddish and long on New Age maxims of self-improvement, the nature worship of the New England Transcendentalists and Asian meditation.” But in the end, attending an Easter service, it’s The Children who move Chafets with their prayer—“They didn’t pray to de-center their egos or find transcendence or to set off on a lifelong therapeutic spiritual journey”—and lead him to settle on the purest of Gellman’s four prayers, the one perhaps most appealing to a liberal, agnostic soul: “Straight-up Gimme! on behalf of people who really need the help.”

The Right Way to Pray? [NYTM]

Brawl That Is Holy [NYP]
Earlier: Jewish Boxer Is Contender, Scholar
Related: Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter [Nextbook Press]

The Hillel Monopoly [New Voices]

Chabad: Make Nazi Commander a ‘Righteous Gentile’ [JPost via FailedMessiah]

Except: Sholom Rubashkin, the former CEO of the beleaguered Agriprocessors slaughterhouse, is currently under court order to stay in Iowa’s Allamakee County until his trial. (He stands accused of 142 counts of fraud, money laundering, and immigration-related violations there.) He has, however, gotten special permission—on “religious” grounds—to travel to New York today. What holiday is he observing? The 15th anniversary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s death. The commemoration, Rubashkin’s lawyer said, is of “exceptional religious significance for those of the Lubavitcher faith.” It’s a faith, we imagine, much like Judaism.

Rubashkin Allowed To Leave Iowa For ‘Jewish’ Holiday [FailedMessiah.com]

Ask The Rabbis [Moment]
Statement By Chadad-Lubavitch World Headquarters [Lubavitch.com]
A Statement from Rabbi Friedman [InTheMoment]

Click here to view the poster

An outsider visiting Crown Heights might be forgiven for thinking that the women in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood represent the height of modesty. But some in the Brooklyn community, where the Chabad-Lubavitch movement is based, are concerned that modesty standards are slipping, and have launched a campaign to counter the trend.

Thus far, the effort—organized by a woman named Sheyna Goldin, with the approval of Chabad’s women’s organization, N’Shei Chabad—has involved putting up 500 posters encouraging adherence to modesty laws. But not everyone in the organization agrees with Goldin’s approach, and a frisson of disagreement has broken out over it”and whether the declining standards are even anything new.

“It’s Not Just a Good Idea, IT’S THE LAW!” proclaim the posters, which appeared recently on Kingston Avenue and other neighborhood thoroughfares. The fliers go on to list the laws of tznius, or modesty (modest dress must begin at age three; shirts must cover collarbones; skirts must cover knees) and their talmudic sources. Fine print at the bottom explains the spiritual rewards for modest dress and the consequences for disregarding it.

Even in Crown Heights, such public pronouncements of religious law are unusual—which was the point, Goldin argued.

“Everything is out in the street now; it’s kind of corresponding to the times,” she said, in an interview with Nextbook. “In the shuls, not everyone would see it. It’s more emphatic, like we really mean business.”

“You have to set the standard, not lower yourself to it,” echoed Esther Rochel Spielman, who coordinates subscriptions for N’Shei Chabad’s newsletter. Spielman said that she was seeing more short or slit skirts and tight clothing on young women in the community.

“There is a decline in the men also, the teenagers,” she added. “A lot of them will think it’s cool to go without tsisis [ritual fringes].”

But even some who agree that modesty standards are slipping find Goldin’s approach too aggressive.

“Modesty standards have been declining for decades,” said Bronya Shaffer, a mother of 10 who teaches and lectures in the community on Jewish family life. Shaffer, who was sitting in her dining room surrounded by hundreds of religious books, picked up a copy of the New York Times Magazine that was lying on the table beside a copy of a Chabad magazine and gestured disapprovingly at a risqué Chanel advertisement on the back cover. But the posters also made her wince.

“The medium itself is antithetical to the very essence of modesty,” she said of the posters. “It’s not the Chabad way. I cringe at the specter of kids, young boys and girls, reading in huge letters, in bold technicolor, about uncovered legs and necklines and tight clothing.”

Goldin said that the posters are directed toward both Lubavitchers who live in the neighborhood and visitors to the community.

“The darkness in the world is very great and influences everybody,” Goldin said. “The posters are a fortification and a reminder that this is really not just a nice thing, but a total law from the Torah.”

Sara Labkowski, the dean of a school for young women in the process of becoming more religious, said that because Crown Heights, unlike more isolated ultra-Orthodox enclaves, is “a very open community” located in the heart of Brooklyn, the posters would help to remind young Lubavitchers in the neighborhood of the modesty laws. She helped to distribute flyer-sized versions of the poster at a vigil for the Chabad emissaries killed in the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai.

For Spielman, the decline in modesty is just another sign of what she believes is directly on the horizon.

“I guess we’re getting very close to the moshiach,” she said, using the Hebrew word for messiah. “The satan [devil] tries to attack in any ways he could.”