Chabad emissaries relish rare break from isolation

By Jacob Berkman
November 21, 2006

SOMERSET, N.J., Nov. 21 (JTA) – The life of a Chabad-Lubavitch shaliach can be isolating.

Sent under the mandate of the late leader of the movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to the ends of the Jewish world, these fervently Orthodox emissaries are often the only affiliated Jews for hundreds of miles.

When they sign on to spend the rest of their lives trying to start Jewish communities in remote places, they often put themselves in areas where they are the only Jews that observe the laws of kashrut and Shabbat.

Still, since 1950, when the rebbe sent out his first emissary to Morocco to build up Jewish education in North Africa, some 4,000 have dispersed around the world, from Beijing to Ukraine to Laos to Boise, Idaho, and virtually every spot in between, where Jews might live or pass through.

This past week, from Nov. 15 to Nov. 20, some 2,800 emissaries converged on Chabad-Lubavitch International headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn for the movement’s annual International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries.

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“There’s nothing like the energy here, the synergy here,” said Mendel Lifshitz, who runs the Chabad in Boise.

It allows rabbis such as Hershey Novack to share with his colleagues ideas such as the Kosher Cooking Club that he has started at Washington University in St. Louis, where bi-weekly he organizes a coed class in cooking Jewish ethnic foods from challah to kubeh.