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FEBRUARY 2006
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Video: Meet the Lubavitch


from:  Nathaniel Segal
   A Lubavitch Jew who lives with his family in Shawnee Mission, Kansas.  However, he is not an emissary.  “I grew up in an assimilated Jewish family.  I met my first Lubavitch Jew in Israel in 1971 when I was twenty years old.  I've been a member of the world-wide Lubavitch community ever since.”

Please watch the video "Meet the Lubavitch."

In this video, Carolyn Drake provides a richer, more nuanced view of the Lubavitch Jews.

• Lubavitch Central

Crown Heights -
a multiethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn.

• A Pervasive Presence

rebbe -
a rabbi's rabbi

• A Woman's Place

the bride and groom have no contact until the time they're married -
Prospective marriage partners are introduced to each other. If they wish, they continue to see each other, chaperoned in someone's house or out in public. After a few of these "dates," they decide whether to get engaged. No one is forced to marry someone if they don't want to. However, engaged couples do not have contact until the wedding, which is usually scheduled within a few months of the engagement.

• Ties That Bind

the meaning in our lives -
Nevertheless, each individual searches for their own special calling. Also, meaning and purpose are renegotiated with the passing of life's milestones.

Lubavitch Jews @ National Geographic Magazine
Text and photographs by Carolyn Drake
A movement embracing old-world Orthodox Judaism is alive and thriving in New York City.

Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.
 
To outsiders, Chabad-Lubavitch Jews with their black fedoras and symbolic trappings can look very strange. But for onetime outsider Sheila Bar-Levav, they changed her life.
 
Raised Catholic, Bar-Levav converted to Judaism, her husband's religion. She enrolled their children in a preschool in New York run by Lubavitch Rabbi Aaron Raskin and his wife, Shternie. Because of their influence, Bar-Levav and her husband are now observant Jews—a transformation that embodies the Raskins' life's work. Believing that a holier world will hasten the Messiah's coming, Rabbi Raskin speaks passionately about bringing Jews back to their faith: "We have to renew that spark."
 
The late Lubavitch rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson lit that fuse for thousands. A small, vocal faction of Lubavitchers believe that Schneerson is the Messiah and revere him as such. But most simply honor the memory of the man who helped energize a religion devastated by Hitler and Stalin.
 
Born in Ukraine in 1902, Schneerson arrived in the United States in 1941, devout and driven. He belonged to the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch group—Chabad from the Hebrew words for wisdom, comprehension, and knowledge; Lubavitch for the Russian town where the movement was based in the late 1700s.
 
Now headquartered in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the group was relatively small and little known when Schneerson became rebbe in 1951. During his 43-year tenure he pioneered a system of shluchim, or emissaries, charged with going out into the world to open Chabad centers, spreading knowledge of the Torah and Judaism. Some feared that the Lubavitch movement would dwindle after the rebbe's death in 1994. But today there are more than 3,000 centers in 70 countries—nearly half of them founded after Schneerson's death.
 
[ Like all religious groups, this one has its detractors, its dropouts, its dark episodes. Schneerson sparked enormous controversy in his day. He supported a strict interpretation of the Torah, preaching that only those born to a Jewish mother or converted by Orthodox rabbis could earn Israeli citizenship—a message that outraged many Jews. In 1991 when a car in the rebbe's entourage hit and killed a black child, some members of the black community in Crown Heights became enraged, and violence erupted. Critics of the movement today deride perceived restrictions on women and the cultlike devotion of the messianic faction.
 
[ The faithful feel Schneerson's presence most acutely at his grave in Queens. "It has become a beacon that people flock to," says Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, a top Lubavitch leader. The group's rapid growth attests to the power of the rebbe, who named no successor, and suggests that the Lubavitch movement is meeting the spiritual needs of many Jews eager to reconnect with their faith. ]


Get the whole story in the pages of National Geographic magazine.
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Review
by Nathaniel Segal *

thriving in New York City -
and New Jersey, Detroit, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Miami, Southern California, Iowa, Montreal, Toronto, and many places in North America besides elsewhere in the world.

old-world Orthodox Judaism -
who follow the Hassidic approach to Orthodox Judaism

Chabad -
the philosophical approach:  "Wisdom, Understanding (Comprehension) and Knowledge"

Lubavitch -
name of a town in Belarus, center of the group for 102 years

. . . black fedoras, etc. -
Women tend to wear contemporary clothing, except not pants, short sleeves or hems, or plunging necklines.

a holier world will hasten the Messiah's coming -
A holier world is an end in itself.  The Messiah's arrival is imminent.  Holiness is our preparation to be ready.

A small, vocal faction . . believe that Schneerson is the Messiah -
and a large non-vocal faction. Some of those who are troubled by declaring that the Rebbe – Schneerson – is the Messiah are themselves extremely vocal, even litigous.

was based in the late 1700s -
actually from about 1812 through 1914, between the time of Napoleon's defeat and the outbreak of World War I.

Schneerson sparked enormous controversy in his day.  He supported a strict interpretation of the Torah, preaching that only those born to a Jewish mother or converted by Orthodox rabbis could earn Israeli citizenship -
The criteria that confer Jewish identity are not "a strict interpretation" in the eyes of any Orthodox Jew.  This controversy arose when the Israeli government unilaterally ruled, without consulting its own chief Rabbis, that anything that went by the name of conversion was valid.  Jewish identity became a bureaucratic decision.

enormous controversy -
enormous because he was an American citizen and lived outside Israel.

could earn Israeli citizenship -
could immediately become Israeli citizens.  A naturalization process has been available to other people.

restrictions on women -
Women's roles and avenues of expressions are less restrictive than in other Hassidic communities.  Photo #4 in the Gallery shows women of all ages at an annual women's convention in Brooklyn.  The Rebbe is the featured speaker.  He speaks from the dais as he does when addressing men of the congregation.
As author Drake writes – On Assignment – she had limited access to photograph the men's section of the synagogue.  However, women are not receptive to a man in their section either.  As an aside, men's lives are rigidly proscribed, too.

the cultlike devotion of the messianic faction -
To some outsiders, the entire Lubavitch movement has always seemed cultlike.

Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky -
director of the English language Lubavitch News Service and co-administer of several Lubavitch institutions in the United States and Canada.