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Thursday November 15, 2007

The rebbe’s soldiers march on N.Y.

by ben harris
jta

new york | While leaders of the Jewish federation world prepared to descend on Nashville for their annual General Assembly this week, Rabbi Yitzchok Tiechtel, a Chabad emissary in the Tennessee capital, packed his bags and headed north for another major Jewish gathering.

The International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Shluchim, more commonly known as the Kinus, brought together Tiechtel and some 3,000 colleagues — Chabad emissaries, or shluchim, serving Jewish communities in the farthest reaches of the globe.

Part professional development, part reunion and part celebration, the six-day conference allowed the shluchim to revel far from the isolation many endure in posts spread across 72 countries and six continents.

Though Chabad has labored to increase its partnership with the federation system in recent years, it was hard to escape the impression of two alternative centers of Jewry reflected in the concurrent conferences in Nashville and New York.

Tiechtel, who returned to Nashville on Nov. 12 to attend part of the G.A., brushed off the suggestion.

“What we do only adds to what they do,” he said. “I don’t see it as a competition.”

Indeed, most Chabad shluchim operate in areas where fellow Jews, let alone Jewish competition, are scarce.

Inspired by the teachings of the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Chabad shluchim have made lifetime commitments to bring Jewish life to areas where often they are the only established Jewish presence for hundreds of miles.

They regard themselves as the rebbe’s soldiers, a motif invoked again and again to describe the sacrifice and commitment of shluchim and their families, who spend their lives far from the centers of world Jewry.

“We are not climbing a career ladder,” Rabbi Nechemia Vogel, the London-born founder of the Chabad House in Rochester, N.Y., said in his keynote address. “We are the rebbe’s shluchim. We stay at our posts.”

The Kinus, which began in 1983 with about 60 rabbis meeting in a room at Chabad world headquarters in Brooklyn, has evolved into a major multimedia extravaganza broadcast live around the world. This year it was held in a cavernous hall along the Hudson River in Manhattan, just yards from where the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, arrived in America 68 years ago.

At a time when much communal angst is focused on how to attract an unaffiliated and uninterested younger generation — topics that are high on the agenda for the leaders in Nashville — Chabad’s growth continues unabated.

Twenty new centers have been established this year in California and Florida alone, with five in France and four in Argentina, according to Chabad.org. Chabad’s campus initiative added 17 new centers in the United States and elsewhere. A total of 278 new shluchim have joined the ranks.

The Kinus also provided a chance to offer good wishes to departing shluchim like Osher Litzman, a 25-year-old Israeli who with his wife and infant daughter are departing for Seoul in the coming days.

They will remain in South Korea, Litzman says, “until the Messiah comes,” adding quickly, “We hope he is coming today.”

Like generations of Chabad shluchim before him, Litzman is headed for a country where he knows no one and doesn’t speak the language, though the couple are studying Korean online. They expect to have their Chabad center up and running in time to host a Passover seder.

Asked how he intends to pay for everything, Litzman tilts his eyes skyward and smiles.

In fact, support for Chabad’s sprawling global operation is of a more earthly kind, coming from a cadre of benefactors that includes men such as Lev Leviev, the Uzbekistan-born mogul who immigrated to Israel as a teenager and is believed to be Israel’s richest man. Forbes magazine, which lists Leviev as the 210th richest person in the world, estimates his net worth at $4.1 billion.

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