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

• You know how the Last Supper was a Seder? Yeah, it probably wasn’t. [Menachem Mendel/JI Daily]

• Gal Beckerman profiles the left-wing group Jewish Voice for Peace. [Forward]

• Neo-Nazis are marching in Trenton, New Jersey, tomorrow. Enjoy the rain, scumbags. [NYC ANTIFA]

• People are really excited about an Israel slasher film called Rabies, and now I am, too. [Capital]

• Kehinde Wiley—L.A.-born, of Nigerian descent—paints Israelis. [LAT]

• Some 1300 Ethiopian immigrants in Israel will hopefully set the Guinness World Record for largest Seder on Monday. [JPost]

• Unbeatable headline: “Cohen Media Acquires ‘Chasing Madoff.’” [Variety]

• In some Orthodox communities, only immodest women vote, or so they say. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• President Obama acknowledges the Lubavitcher Rebbe. [JTA]

Helen Mirren as a former Mossad agent? Yes, please.

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.

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

The pictures form the basis of an exhibition opening today and running through December 2 at Theprintspace Gallery in London. The exhibition, provocatively titled Kosherface, offers an unusually intimate glimpse into the world of the Lubavitch, a movement that manages to be at once visible and insular. Aranda’s arresting shots depict Lubavitchers in unexpected settings: a rabbi rowing a boat, a family seated in a studio, a child covering his mother’s pregnant belly.

Aranda, whose work has appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and GQ, is primarily a fashion photographer. And while the work he has done with Hasidim is different from his mainstream material, there is some overlap. “The first thing apart from the rabbi’s sunny countenance was what he was wearing,” Aranda said, recalling his first meeting with his future landlord. “For Hasidic men it’s a very simple but very classic formula: the hat, the black suit, the shirt. These are basic staples of men’s fashion.” Aranda’s exhibit also includes portraits of color-smeared faces, garments, and hair. “I always thought it would be fun to experiment with color on what is very monochromatic clothing for the men,” he said. “It’s refreshing to see the hasidic in the context of fashion and beauty photography. I don’t want this to be a show just for Jews.”

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.

We were in Uman at the request of Reb Nachman of Breslov, who lived from 1772 to 1810, and who bid his followers to spend Rosh Hashanah each year at his grave. Though the Hasidim who have claimed him as their spiritual leader were almost entirely obliterated in the Holocaust, the movement began reconstituting itself in the late 1960s, and with the fall of the Soviet Union 20 years ago, an increasing number of ultra-Orthodox Jews have made the trek here. For one weekend out of the year, Uman again becomes an enclave of Jewish observance, with a hotel, dozens of prayer sites—including the courtyards of apartment buildings, streets, and alleyways—and an open-air bazaar catering to the assembled pilgrims.

My guide through this perplexing adventure was my first cousin, Avraham Chaim Bloomenstiel, who at age 30 works as a Hasidic rabbi, Torah scribe, and business consultant in Dallas. Like me, Avi grew up in the tiny, vigorously assimilationist Jewish community of rural Louisiana. Along parallel lines, he and I have created radically different cultures for ourselves, signified in my case by the three-button black suit, only eight years out of fashion, that I wear at academic conferences and religious services, and in Avi’s case by the regalia that hasn’t gone out of style since the followers of the Baal Shem Tov created Hasidism in the 18th century.

Admittedly, I find it curious that Avi has chosen to become a Hasid—and I’m not the only family member to feel that way—yet it is no more outlandish than my decision to study Yiddish and attempt to create a modern Yiddish-speaking family. We have each staked our identity in a culture defined by a distant place and an absent time: his in the Ukrainian shtetl of two centuries ago, mine in Jewish metropolises such as Warsaw and New York only a hundred years later. And yet for each of us, this position is not a retreat from the present; our choices offer a means of self-assertion, and they reconfigure the dislocations we experienced moving from our oddly shtetl-like origins in the Deep South into the world at large. Over the weekend, Avi and I discussed how isolated our upbringing was in some respects yet how much we have carried of that experience in our subsequent wanderings. Though we came of age at the end of the 20th century, vestiges of an older culture and sensibility still characterize small-town life in Louisiana. It comes as no surprise that we now identify with cultures rooted in the past, yet full of Jewish content we had lacked at home. Both Hasidim and academics are rooted in tiny enclaves, just as Jews in Louisiana are; both today are globally mobile and multilingual, as most people in Louisiana are not.

External differences notwithstanding, Avi and I remain affectionately, delightfully mishpokhe: we wax enthusiastic over the newly kosher-certified Café du Monde in New Orleans; we trade unexpurgated stories about our flamboyant, profane relatives; we share many of the same diverse musical tastes; and our speech veers among the Yiddish and Hebrew seasonings of Orthodox discourse, academic English, and native Southern idiom.

Reb Nachman is an appropriate object of our respective devotion: the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, he was a child prodigy—memorizing the Book of Psalms by age eight, mastering rabbinic and kabbalistic sources by his early teens—who seemed destined to galvanize Hasidism as it moved into the 19th century. But by the time of his death from tuberculosis, Reb Nachman had alienated many of his followers with his cryptic teachings and had started turf wars with older Hasidic rebbes. Instead of the unifier of early Hasidism, he was the founder of one of its smaller and more dissident sects, whose members are now known as Breslovers.

About a century after Reb Nachman created a religious movement, he became a folk hero to many secular Jews. His struggles with revelation, truth, and religious authority placed him in an unlikely pantheon with such figures as Shabbtai Zevi and Spinoza, whose company the actual Reb Nachman would never have welcomed. The erratic content of his preachings, veering between ecstatic embrace of nature and existential anxiety over God’s silence, offered an equally unlikely religious imprimatur for Jewish agnosticism. And his fragmentary, fantastic stories provided a blueprint for Yiddish and Hebrew modernists such as Y.L. Peretz, Der Nister, and S.Y. Agnon.

My journey to Uman began on the Thursday afternoon before Rosh Hashanah, in the Zurich airport, where a handful of observant Jews gathered awaiting the flight to Kiev. The matter-of-fact character of traditional Jewish culture, in which the boundary between sacred and profane is routinely trespassed, seemed on first contact to be absent among most of these Breslovers, who as baalei tshuvah—Jews who, like Avi, became religious as adults—are not traditional: for them, every act of prayer or religious devotion is an existential confrontation, a potential spiritual drama. It was going to be a long weekend.

After a two-and-a-half hour flight, we arrived in Ukraine. During the three-hour taxi ride from Kiev to Uman, the driver entertained himself with contemporary Slavic pop—my cousin recognized a Ukrainian cover of Prince’s “When Doves Cry”—laced with English-language hip-hop interjections more profane than would be broadcast in America. When we arrived in Uman, we walked down Pushkin Street, a main drag for visiting Hasidim, to our rented apartment; already dense crowds of young men had gathered to dance ecstatically to Hebrew-language Breslover disco, which would have merged seamlessly with what we had heard on the radio. After unpacking, my cousin took me to the promenade to look at books for sale—“nothing new this year,” he said, disappointed—and to recite evening prayers at the main synagogue, near where Reb Nachman is buried. Though there were enough jetlagged men congregated to make the requisite quorum, the vast sanctuary, filled with rows of light-brown desks and pews, but otherwise pristinely white, seemed deserted yet expectant of the fervent celebration to follow the next day. This would be the last time we could find a seat there.

On Friday morning, my cousin pointed out a relatively new custom at Uman: a mass recitation of tikkun ha-klali, a liturgy of 10 psalms that Reb Nachman designated as effective for penitence. The spectacle from our balcony of thousands of Jewish men swaying and responding to scriptural verses recited by loudspeaker offered a panorama of groups represented: young, white-draped charismatics chanting “Na-Nach-Nachman” at slightest provocation; sober, black-yarmulked men otherwise indistinguishable from any other Orthodox congregation; and decked-out Hasidim like Avi.

Given the size and diversity of crowds represented at Uman—old-school Breslovers mingling freely with Satmars and Lubavitchers, Yemenites, Ethiopians, French-speaking North Africans, Na-Nach hippies, and even historically anti-Hasidic yeshiva types—nearly all of whom conduct their own prayer services in addition to gathering at the main shul and at Reb Nachman’s grave, it seems that Reb Nachman’s teachings and Breslov Hasidism have never been stronger in the Orthodox world than they are today.

Moreover, given its diversity the Uman pilgrimage offers a model for intergroup cooperation: rival movements like Satmar and Lubavitch live harmoniously one weekend a year, without having to sacrifice their individual identity to do so.

Later Friday morning I plunged into the panorama while shopping at the makeshift kosher mini-market: not even 15 years of studying Yiddish descriptions of the shtetl marketplace prepared me for the chaos at the checkout counter. Sensing my outsider’s bewilderment, the cashier apologized to me in Hebrew for the disorder. I was touched by his gesture. Outside, a frail, one-armed Jewish octogenarian dressed in festooned military uniform stood in the middle of the road describing his heroic deeds on behalf of Stalin’s army to Israeli Hasidic teenagers who offered him blessings in Yiddish while placing American dollars in his hand. Dollars were indeed the universal currency last weekend; no one accepted Ukrainian Hryvnias—the five-hryvnia note bears an image of the 17th-century pogromist Bogdan Chmelnitski—or even euros, currently more valuable than American money. Yet all the local shopkeepers could haggle in rudimentary Hebrew more readily than in English.

Part of the drama of our preparations for the holiday was Avi’s effort to go to one of the city’s two mikvehs, ritual baths, before services begin; each time we went, it was too crowded for us to make the requisite immersion, a fact that frustrated him more than it did me. (He eventually went Saturday morning.) At the main sanctuary that afternoon the crowd was standing-room-only and we found ourselves pushed against the pews by another row of participants standing between us and the seats behind, like in a New York subway at rush hour. The next morning we tried a different synagogue, which again disappointed Avi because this group didn’t sing the traditional Breslov melodies. It was crowded there, too, but at least there were seats for us during the roughly seven-hour service. On Sunday I went with another of Avi’s friends staying in our apartment—there were nine of us, including three young boys, crowded into a three-bedroom space, a typical arrangement here—to the Lubavitch services, which met in a tent and attracted perhaps 100 people. The single mystical moment that I experienced during the weekend occurred there: although blessings over the Torah are auctioned off at most services, a typical custom among the ultra-Orthodox, I don’t bid on the first blessing. Yet when the time came for cohanim, members of the priestly caste, to bless the whole congregation, a man looked at me and motioned to come wash our hands in preparation for the ritual. Later I asked him how he knew I was a cohen. “You just had that look about you,” he said.

Sunday night, after Rosh Hashanah, Avi explained from our window how Breslov culture constitutes itself: on the main drag, the Na-Nachs dance to Breslover pop until they wear out; in front of the main synagogue the older Hasidim and their disciples dance to traditional klezmer music before commemorating the destruction of the Temple with tears and psalms, then recite the morning liturgy at the earliest permitted moment. What worries Avi about the new enthusiasts is their pursuit of frenzy to the point of exhaustion. Not only do they risk an inevitable disenchantment with religious observance when they outgrow the culture of techno dancing, but the physicality of their jubilation seems to leave little time for study of the traditional sources. In Europe before the war, he remarked, Breslovers were known as “the silent Hasidim.” The noisiness of the new celebrants threatens to make a caricature of the movement. Yet Avi admitted that the young hipsters have moderated their exuberance over the past decade while expanding the ranks of the main synagogue during services, so that the two wings of the movement seem to be moving closer to one another, rather than breaking apart.

And in terms of spectacle, the pilgrimage to Uman is now one of the great mass performances of contemporary Judaism, along with Simchat Torah on the Upper West Side, the 19th of Kislev—which commemorates the release of the founder of Lubavitch Hasidism from a czarist prison in the early 19th century— in Crown Heights and Lag B’omer at the grave site of the Talmudic sage Shimon bar Yochai in Meron, Israel. Unlike these other places, however, Uman is more isolated from the rest of the Jewish world, there is no community here except at Rosh Hashanah, and the holiday is more significant than these other occasions. These factors insure that no one comes to Uman casually; it seems impossible that one could observe the performance without participating in it.

Despite Avi’s disappointment with what he sees as the intellectual degradation of the Breslover movement, it seems as unlikely that he would cease coming to Uman every year as it is that I would return. “When a person chooses to be committed to a religious way of life,” he told me, “he can’t be dissuaded by one disappointment. My faith in Judaism comes from my devotion to Reb Nachman’s teachings, along with the Torah, the Talmud, the halacha. That can’t be shaken. If your commitment to Judaism can be disrupted by disappointment with a single experience, it wasn’t a real commitment.”

As I told him over the course of our weekend, however, a harmonic convergence has brought the two of us together in Uman that probably will not recur any time soon. The paths we have chosen for ourselves happened to have intersected this Rosh Hashanah, but what characterizes these journeys is the distance we have each taken from where we began, not an ultimate destination that might bring us together again.

Marc Caplan is a professor of Yiddish literature, language, and culture at the Johns Hopkins University.

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]

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.”

The apartment, rented by a wealthy uptown patron of Okunov’s who lets him use it as a studio, was stocked with spools of thread, heaps of fabric, sheaves of pattern-making paper and a hulking Singer foot pedal sewing machine. Garments that Okunov had designed hung on the walls, among them a jester-like turquoise coat, a futuristic silver dress, and a tennis skirt made from a tallis. Work on his current project would continue late into the night: Okunov had been invited to participate in a show this month at the Jewish Museum called Off the Wall: Artists at Work, a two-week slate of events featuring over a dozen young artists, musicians, poets, and one fashion designer—Okunov—all considered evidence of the wacky, polyglot new Jewish identity that sociologists and trend-sniffing reporters are fond of writing about. For his studio residency and March 27th runway show at the museum, Okunov had gone to the Satmar Hasidic center of south Williamsburg to retrieve scraps of parchment, the dried calfskin that mezuzahs, ketubahs and other holy texts are written on, intending to mold the material into sexy fitted bodices. “Once it’s wet, it becomes a rubbery leather and you can sew it, stretch it, play with it,” he explained, soaking pieces of parchment in a bowl of water. “It stays wet half an hour to forty-five minutes. In those forty-five minutes, I pin it to the dress form. Then it dries. We’re going to write beautiful love poems on it. We’re going to recreate a woman like a Torah, wearing parchment and a crown and adorned in velvet.” Okunov gazed at the parchment as if there were nothing strange about his use of it. Pulling and kneading it in the water, he started singing a wordless, hypnotic Hasidic tune. “Ya dee dah, ya dee dah, ya dee dah dee dah dee dah.” His brother joined in, as did the two others. Soon, they were belting it at the top of their lungs. They linked hands in the middle of the room and danced in a circle, stomping and jumping in ecstasy.

Okunov is small, lithe, and muscular, with a sharp angular jaw and squinty eyes. He wears his curly hair in a kind of modified mullet, short and mussed on top and long in the back. He has the manner of a graceful jackal and is prone to gushing speech and effusive air kisses. A friend once compared him to a Martian who, upon landing on Earth, had met a stereotypically flamboyant fashion designer and began to mimic him, having no other reference for how a human should behave. The truth is not so far from that, inasmuch as Hasidic Crown Heights is another planet. Okunov doesn’t come from the side of Lubavitch well known today, the glossy international outreach network that operates systematically to bring irreligious Jews back into the fold. Okunov’s Lubavitch lineage extends, rather, to the Hasidic sect’s late-eighteenth-century roots in a small Russian town. His father was born into a Lubavitch family in Russia and managed, despite harsh oppression, to remain devout throughout the war. In the late 1960s, he immigrated to Brooklyn where he married and ran a yeshiva for Russian boys. Okunov was raised primarily speaking Yiddish, studying Torah and Talmud, and regularly seeing the Lubavitcher rebbe, who—though he died in 1994—is still believed by some of his followers to be the messiah. “My father is an old-school, heavy-duty Hasid,” Okunov told me. “My mother is the most extreme of Lubavitch. She believes the rebbe is still alive.” Never an especially gifted scholar, Okunov started running with an eccentric Crown Heights crowd as a teenager. In 2001, another young Lubavitcher friend who was defecting toward the fashion world dressed Okunov, then sixteen, in a burgundy fedora and plaid velvet pants for Purim. Having lived his life until then in a black hat and plain white shirt, his experience parading around in the wild costume was profound. He felt drawn to fashion and costume by its transformative power, its creative richness, and, he readily admits, his lust for girls. “I entered this thinking I would be around beautiful models,” he said. “I was breaking out of this world where sitting in a room with a woman is forbidden, to say nothing of draping fabric over her.” Things unfolded quickly in Okunov’s late adolescence. Aware that he was smoking marijuana, his alarmed, cloistered parents sent him to drug rehabilitation. “They didn’t know the difference between marijuana and heroin,” Okunov shrugged. While there, someone gave him a sewing machine to play around with and he got an internship at a garment manufacturing company in Long Island City, Queens, where he learned about bias, cutting fabric, and operating an industrial sewing machine. For awhile, he moved back to his parents’ house, but soon found his own apartment in Crown Heights. Drifting away from religious life, he burrowed his way into the downtown culture scene. He landed a job as a stocker in the Marc Jacobs SoHo store and worked on developing his own fashion line. He also became a fixture on the fashionable nightclub circuit, partying at Bungalow 8 with celebrities he had never even heard of, having grown up in a media vacuum. He recalls once chatting with David Bowie and Iman, his supermodel wife. “So what to do you do?” Okunov cheerily asked Bowie. Iman looked at him incredulously and responded, “He’s a rock star.”

Oksana Baiul and Lev Okunov during Fashion Week in New York City, February 2, 2007

He amassed a motley assortment of new friends, among them Bert Padell, an accountant who has represented scores of celebrities including Irv Gotti and Foxy Brown, and Dov Charney, the American Apparel founder known for marketing simple cotton clothing with soft-core porn. For a spell, Okunov dated Oksana Baiul, the Ukrainian figure skater who beat Nancy Kerrigan in the 1994 Winter Olympics; last year, she helped Okunov stage a fashion show on ice. All of his networking and air kissing has not amounted to much in terms of measurable fashion world success. His limited mentions in the press have included his a mention on Women’s Wear Daily’s list of the “New Wave of Designers” in 2005 and praise in Variety for his “to-die-for” costumes in a production of A Night in the Old Marketplace in Philadelphia last fall; a smattering of other publications regard him as a curiosity rather than a serious fashion contender. Most of his press attention has come from Jewish publications, which focus more on his personal background than his work. His design talent was held up to wide scrutiny last year when the actress Sally Kirkland commissioned him to dress her for the Academy Awards, but the dress he designed was panned by red carpet bloggers as “disturbing,” “offensive,” and “a multi-colored winged disaster.” Still, other fringe and former Hasids who float between Orthodox and secular lives regard him as a role model, however modest his success has been in real-world terms. “The great hope of former Hasids is to go beyond their stories,” he explained. “Some are brilliant writers, some are brilliant musicians, some are just brilliant. They’re so used to rushing to be on time for shacharis and mincha and maariv. It’s hard to break that pattern.” Okunov is seen as a model not just for having transcended his story, but for having incorporated it into a larger story without abandoning it completely. The standard narrative of lapsed religious Jews (or any Jews, for that matter) is that they are forever suspended in inner turmoil and guilt. This is the narrative popularized by the Nathan Englanders and Shalom Auslanders of the world, and especially beloved by secular Jews for confirming a smug fantasy that religion is oppressive and unhealthy. But Okunov does not seem fraught with existential angst, perhaps because he has a loving relationship with his family. Although his parents were distressed when he first left the fold, they now have a close relationship with him, speaking with Okunov on the phone regularly and always welcoming him home. His mother believes that he is somehow saving souls through his work and has said she would eagerly attend one of his fashion shows if there were a divider separating men and women. Okunov seems to find nothing contradictory about being a fashion designer and bon vivant who spontaneously breaks into Yiddish song and still considers himself a Hasid, if not in practice then certainly in spirit. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that in his mind, everything is OK. It might seem incongruous from the outside, but to Okunov, juggling the pieces of his seemingly disparate identities feels perfectly fine.

Last September, timing it to coincide with Fashion Week, Okunov unveiled his spring 2008 collection in a runway show before a packed audience at Cafe DeVille, a French bistro in the East Village. Skinny, surly models loped down the catwalk toward popping camera flashes. The crowd was filled with dewy-skinned young people in ethereal outfits, unusual shoes, and aggressively angular haircuts. Alongside them were Orthodox Jews in yarmulkes and dark coats, looking on with interest. In the past, some of Okunov’s shows have included elements of Jewish culture, including female models sporting curly, shellacked payes. In this show, the models wore small hats meant to evoke the furry round shtreimels of some Hasidic men. It seemed a little shticky. But Isaac Schonfeld, a Hasid and a friend, explained that to whatever small degree the Jewish strain was seen in his work, it resonates louder and clearer in his life. “I think that whereby he has to some degree jettisoned observance, he has not jettisoned the worth of Hasidism,” said Schonfeld. “Not only that, but it’s a part of him more than most Hasidic people.” At the end of the show, Okunov was escorted to the stage amid whooping applause. Afterwards, the Hasids and fashionistas mingled. It would not be long until they would migrate to an after-party at a bar on the Lower East Side, where Okunov would have everyone leaping on tables and belting Hasidic tunes until the wee hours of the night. One friend, a former Satmar Hasid from Williamsburg, jokingly referred to the group as adherents not of Orthodox Judaism but of Paradox Judaism. Okunov added that despite all the seeming contradictions, he thought they were the spiritual progeny of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism who taught that everyone, even the least pious, has a direct link to the divine. “The Baal Shem Tov fell in love with people like us, people who were a little crazy,” he said. “The tailors, water carriers, woodchoppers, shepherds. Their little niggunim, their little psalms were the holiest. I’m a simple tailor. Singing a niggun at the tops of my lungs is a miracle. It’s the Garden of Eden. If the Baal Shem Tov was around now, we would be the highest of the high.”