Chabad shlichus: emissaries from Brooklyn to the whole world
The Rebbe sent young couples to places where Jewish life had ended. Today there are several thousand in more than a hundred countries.
By our own time the emissaries number several thousand, in more than a hundred countries. The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, escaped occupied Warsaw and reached New York in 1940. He declared at once that America was not a "treife country" and began building here what had been destroyed in Russia and Poland. In 1950, after his death, his son-in-law Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson took his place.
His method was new. Instead of gathering people to himself he sent them out from himself: a young couple went for good to a town where nothing existed and opened a house there—first a class and a minyan, then a school, a mikveh, a kitchen. The emissary answered to no local board and did not depend on there being anyone to teach: he went not to the ready but to those he would have to find.
By the 1990s the network covered North Africa, Australia, South America and the Far East; after the fall of Soviet power, the whole former USSR. A distinct feature was the approach to the wholly unobservant: mitzvah tanks in the streets of Manhattan, tefillin offered to passers-by, Hanukkah lamps in public squares. The argument over this was sharp, and other movements judged it differently.
The Rebbe died in 1994 leaving no successor and appointing no one. The network of emissaries has only grown since.
Sources
Documents of the period
- HaKriah VeHaKedushah, addresses of the sixth Rebbe, New York, 1940–1950 — «America is not different» — the refusal to write it off
Basis: documents and evidence.
People and places
New York · the Lubavitcher Rebbe · Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn