More in ‘Lubavitch’

The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement is known for its outreach among non-Orthodox Jews, encouraging them to become more religious. Chabadniks are posted to about 75 countries, where their efforts are generally met with curiosity, indifference, or, at worst, irritation. But in Ramat Aviv, an upscale, liberal, and famously secular neighborhood of Tel Aviv, the sect’s arrival ...

Four thousand Chabad emissaries from across the country and around the world, known as shluchim, gathered last week for the group’s annual conference in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. While the shluchim were meeting, their sons had a camp-like gathering of their own. Organizers estimated that 577 boys, separated into age groups, took part. As they arrived ...

Sholom Rubashkin, former manager of the Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, was convicted yesterday in federal court of 86 financial fraud charges. Rubashkin’s sentencing date has not yet been scheduled, but he will likely be sentenced to hundreds of years in prison, the AP is reporting. In addition, he still faces a second trial ...

The Chabad Men’s Annual Kinus, a conference for Chabad’s emissaries from all over the world, began yesterday in Brooklyn. Everything is staying local this year, with the enormous final banquet set for Sunday night at the Bedford Armory, at the edge of Chabad’s home neighborhood, Crown Heights. (Last year’s banquet at Chelsea Piers apparently required ...

London-based photographer Frederic Aranda began taking pictures of Hasidim more or less by accident. While studying at Oxford and looking for a place to live, he stumbled across a house owned by a Lubavitcher rabbi. Aranda set up a studio in the house’s attic and started taking portraits of the rabbi’s family. Word spread and ...

The reception area in downtown Manhattan’s Preschool of the Arts is a cheerful, modern space: dozens of self-portraits and paintings by children named Jem and Oliver and Esme crowd the walls. A small sign invites visitors to stop by the art gallery to see “action paintings created in the style of Jackson Pollock” and hangs ...

I spent Rosh Hashanah in Uman, a city of 90,000 in Ukraine, and there are at least three good reasons why I shouldn’t have. As a secular academic, specializing in Yiddish literature, what could it profit me to spend time with tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, few of whom would understand the specifics of ...

We’re not sure how we missed this headline in the Jerusalem Post last week, because it’s really an excellent one: “Chabad: Make Nazi Commander a ‘Righteous Gentile.’” Yep, it appears that the Nazis’ intelligence chief—Admiral Wilhelm Canaris—was instrumental in helping Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, escape from the Warsaw Ghetto along with ...

• A “suspicious” fire destroyed the barracks in which Anne Frank slept in a Dutch work camp before her transfer to Auschwitz. The barracks, most recently used to store farm equipment, was ready for transport back to the site of the work camp, which now contains a Holocaust memorial. [JTA]
• With the news that Britney ...

It has been said by some in the Jewish world—and the implication is almost always unkind—that there’s something “un-Jewish” about Lubavitchers, particularly those who believe that the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson was (is?) the messiah. (Chabad is the “religion closest to Judaism,” according to an oft-told joke.) Lubavitchers, understandably, take offense when presented with this ...