Published: 29 June 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
SAMUEL HEILMAN: The ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement is famed for its globe-hopping emissaries. But what happens when the missionaries go native?
THE COVID PANDEMIC has cost a tragic, disproportionate numbers of lives among the ultra-Orthodox community, in the United States and Israel. But it has also made visible a remarkable dynamic of social, cultural and theological change that has been brewing for decades among one of the most visible subsets of the community: the Lubavitchers of Chabad.
In my years of writing about Chabad, I have always described them as a hybrid group. Those who live in the Chabad heartland of Brooklyn's Crown Heights (or in Israel's Kfar Chabad) tend to be more Haredi than those who are located in the periphery - the shluchim or outreach emissaries posted around the world.
In their heartland, they behave more like other Hasidim, holding fast to their piety and stressing their difference from other less orthodox Jews in the same way as almost every other Hasidic group. They are scrupulous about their separation from others, share many of the Haredi values about gender separation and the need to remain resistant to the cultural influences of what they view as corrosive modern Western civilisation.
FULL STORY Covid has exposed a simmering schism within Chabad (Haaretz)
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Photo: A baby girl clutches a photo of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson during Lag BaOmer earlier this year in New York (Mark Lennihan/AP)
