Happy Sunday, and an early happy New Year! For those who celebrated Christmas (or still are if you observe the 12 days of Christmas), I hope it’s been merry.
As I’ve been trying to make merry myself, I decided to skip the “More Sunday Reads” and “A Good Word” segments this week. Also, there will be no newsletter next week. We’ll see you in the new year on January 12 with our regular newsletter format.
As we’re still in the middle of Hanukkah, it’s a natural time for this week’s Dispatch Faith essay on a movement whose growing footprint has been at the center of headlines a couple of times in the last year: Chabad, which grew out of the Hassidic movement within Judaism in the 18th century. Daniel Kane has a deep dive on Chabad’s history, the charismatic rabbi who helped grow its influence in the 20th century, and what Chabad had to do with an Israeli-born Orthodox rabbi being in the United Arab Emirates, where he was murdered last month.
Daniel Kane: The Tragedy of Zvi Kogan and the Triumph of Chabad
Late last month, news of the abduction and murder of 28-year-old Rabbi Zvi Kogan in the United Arab Emirates sent shock waves through the Jewish world. After he was found dead, Kogan’s body was brought home to Israel for his funeral on November 25. Thousands turned out in the rain to celebrate Kogan’s life and leadership in Dubai—and together mourned yet another tragic death at the hands of antisemitic terrorists.
The funeral procession concluded on the Mount of Olives, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City, where Kogan was laid to rest. But many of those who saw video of the proceedings were likely equally struck by the puzzling location in which the ceremony began: in a small Israeli town in front of a building that, quite unmistakably, more closely resembled a Brooklyn brownstone than anything typically designed or built in Israel.
As those who followed the story came to learn, this funerary evocation of New York was no accident. For Kogan was not merely a rabbi but a shliach (Hebrew for “emissary”) of Chabad, a Jewish religious movement centered—operationally and spiritually—in Brooklyn. The building that hosted Kogan’s funeral did not simply resemble a classic brownstone; it is an exact, brick-to-brick replica of Chabad’s longtime headquarters in Crown Heights.
To many outside the Jewish world, almost everything about this headline-grabbing tragedy was confusing. How did an Israeli-born Orthodox rabbi come to find himself living in the Emirates? What was he doing in a country with almost no historic Jewish presence, particularly at such a fraught time? And what was the connection between Kogan and the Brooklyn-based movement that claimed him as one of their own?
Finding answers to these questions requires taking a dive into the history of one of the most interesting, dynamic, and mysterious religious movements to emerge in America over the last century.
An American renewal of Hasidic Judaism.
The story of Chabad in America really begins in the Russian Empire during the 18th century. There, Chabad was part of the larger Hasidic movement, (coming from the Hebrew “Hasid,” meaning “pious one”) a spiritual revivalist movement that sought to reenergize Eastern European Jewish life. Combining a mystical approach to Judaism with an intensely egalitarian spirit, the early leaders of Hasidism emphasized the accessibility of religious experience to Jews of all backgrounds and levels of erudition. To too great an extent, in their view, medieval Judaism had become the exclusive purview of the learned rabbinic elite. It was time, they argued, to return their ancient religious tradition to its rightful inheritors: the Jewish masses.
Chabad emerged as a distinct Hasidic group toward the end of the 18th century. Its early leaders retained much of the early populist spirit of Hasidism, but they also sought to impose a degree of order, discipline, and hierarchy on the still nascent and often unruly movement. Like most other Hasidic groups, Chabad was organized dynastically, with leadership and authority centralized in the hands of one leader, the group’s rebbe, and passed down within his family. What distinguished Chabad was its intellectualism and its emphasis on traditional Jewish scholarship. Indeed, the group’s name is an acronym of the Hebrew words chochma (wisdom), bina (understanding), and da’at (knowledge).
During the 19th century, Chabad flourished in Eastern Europe as Hasidism became more established and, in the eyes of Jewish religious authorities, more legitimate. This process of legitimization accelerated in reaction to the Haskalah (the “Jewish Enlightenment”), when Chabad and most other Hasidic groups drifted away from their radical origins and adopted a much more conservative approach to community life. The ecstatic worship and experiential mysticism for which Hasidism first became famous were gradually deemphasized in place of more traditional modes of Jewish piety—especially the rigorous study of religious texts and a strict adherence to religious law. Like the other “ultra-Orthodox” groups it began to associate with, Chabad entered a period of relative insularity. Its leaders exhorted their Hasidim (plural of Hasid) to turn their efforts inward, toward strengthening their personal and communal devotion, rather than attempting to engage the rapidly secularizing outside world.
This insularity largely remained in place even after 1940, when the leadership of Chabad fled war-torn Europe and found refuge in New York. Chabad Hasidim in America continued to speak Yiddish almost exclusively among themselves, maintained their Eastern European style of dress, and generally worked hard to separate themselves from their neighbors. Even in the New World, Chabad’s initial posture toward outsiders remained one of deep distrust, if not outright hostility.
The monumental transformation that occurred within Chabad in the decades after the war can ultimately be traced to the vision of one man: Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh and final rebbe of the Chabad movement. Though raised in the world of shtetl piety and renowned for his mastery of religious texts, Schneerson was an unusual Hasidic leader. Before coming to America in 1941, he studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics at the University of Berlin and the Sorbonne, and his approach to leadership always reflected his active interest in—and concern for—those living outside the ultra-Orthodox world.
Schneerson inherited the title of rebbe from his father-in-law in 1951 and made it clear he intended to push the movement in a different direction. In his first speech to his followers, the Rebbe spoke of the urgency of their moment. In the wake of the destruction wrought by World War II and the Holocaust, in an age of confusion and despair, the responsibility to rebuild had fallen squarely on their shoulders. “Everything now depends on us,” he told them.
One the one hand, the Rebbe was simply expressing a traditional understanding of the Jewish people’s role in the world. Just as the prophet Isaiah had described the Jews as a spiritual “light unto the nations,” the Rebbe told his followers that they must “finish the mission of [Abraham], to urge the entire world to proclaim the name of God.” But as the Rebbe got more specific, the radicalism of his vision became clear: “One must go to a place where nothing is known of Godliness … and while there, put one’s own self aside and ensure that the other calls out to God!”
It’s hard to understand how different Shneerson’s message was. After generations of insularity and defensiveness, the Rebbe was calling on his followers to leave the safety of their spiritual ghetto and mount an ambitious religious offensive. It was no longer enough to remain pious in spite of the modern world, he proclaimed.
From that day onward, the Rebbe began the seemingly impossible work of mobilization—of turning a few thousand Yiddish-speaking, mostly foreign-born Hasidim into a well-organized army of Jewish advocacy and faith. The Rebbe encouraged his followers to build relationships with secular American Jews who often lacked any knowledge of their religious heritage. To that end, they set up street-side information booths and, famously, deployed “Mitzvah Tanks” around New York to encourage traditional Jewish observance (“mitzvah” meaning “commandment” in Hebrew, a reference to the 613 commandments given to the Jews in the Hebrew Bible).
Most significantly, the Rebbe encouraged his followers to serve as his representatives, his shluchim (plural of shliach), by setting up Chabad Houses wherever there were Jews. These Chabad outposts were often established in locales without any preexisting institutional Jewish presence, where they functioned as a combination of synagogue, school, and Jewish community center. As in New York, the goal of the shluchim was to connect with as many Jews as possible and, ultimately, reinvigorate traditional Jewish religious life.
The Chabad House model proved to be a massive and surprising success. Though few American Jews fully embraced the orthodoxy of the shluchim, Chabad’s unique fusion of unabashed traditionalism with a warm and welcoming Hasidic egalitarianism proved appealing to huge numbers of spiritually hungry American Jews. Engagement boomed, and Chabad centers were soon established in major cities, small towns, and college campuses in nearly every state.
Chabad’s primary focus was always on Jewish life, but the Rebbe never wavered in his belief that the goal of spreading godliness was a mission of universal significance. Particularly in America, a country he praised for its rich religious heritage and culture of religious tolerance, the Rebbe regularly spoke out on issues not specifically tied to Jewish interests. In 1962, for example, the Rebbe made headlines for his passionate opposition to the Supreme Court’s banning of nondenominational prayer in America’s public schools. Explaining his position in 1964, the Rebbe wrote of the alarming rise of juvenile crime and drug use, which he saw as essentially tied to the waning power of religious institutions in America. Children must be raised with “an awareness of a Supreme Authority, who is not only to be feared but also loved,” he argued. “Under existing conditions in this country, a daily prayer in the public schools is for the vast number of boys and girls the only opportunity of cultivating such an awareness.”
As Chabad grew, the Rebbe found more opportunities to express his concerns to influential American policymakers and cultural figures. The long list of visitors the Rebbe received in Crown Heights includes Robert Kennedy, Bob Dylan, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Herman Wouk, and then-aspiring New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani. The Rebbe even exchanged letters with Presidents Carter and Reagan. In all these encounters, the Rebbe urged his interlocutors to use their influence to promote an awareness of God and the sanctity of human life.
When the Rebbe died in 1994, he left no children or any designated heir to replace him. Many contemporary observers suggested that without a rebbe—without the Rebbe—the Chabad movement would slowly begin to fade. It was the immense force of Schneerson’s personality, they argued, that alone held the group together and propelled it forward.
While these pundits may have been right about the centrality of the Rebbe within Chabad, they were wrong to think that his death would mark the end or even decline of the movement he led. Even after their rebbe’s passing, Chabad Hasidim remained unwavering in their commitment to the task he had assigned them. “The predictions were completely off,” Adam Ferziger, a professor of modern and contemporary Judaism at Bar-Ilan University told the Jewish Telegraph Agency in 2014,.“The movement did not just not fall apart, but it grew in leaps and bounds.” Indeed, over the last 30 years, the number of Chabad emissaries has risen from around 1,200 in 1994 to nearly 5,000 today.
Since the Rebbe’s death, the movement has grown not only in terms of its size but also its reach. Chabad Houses now operate in Africa, India, and East Asia (where they serve large communities of Jewish expats and tourists). The movement has greatly expanded its presence in Europe and has invested enormously in building a vast network of synagogues, community centers, schools, and summer camps in the former Soviet-bloc nations. As in the Rebbe’s time, the goal of these Chabad centers is primarily to support Jewish life, but the shluchim also follow the Rebbe’s lead in building relationships with non-Jewish leaders and using that influence to spread their religious message (see, for example, the relationship between Chabad and the Catholic president of Argentina, Javier Milei). While the Jewish state might be adequately represented abroad by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that Chabad now serves as the self-appointed State Department of the Jewish religion.
Chabad’s most recent major opportunity for expansion emerged as a result of the signing of the Abraham Accords during the last Trump administration. After Israel normalized diplomatic relations with several Arab and Muslim nations, Chabad ramped up its presence in those countries, especially the United Arab Emirates. With a new trade deal in place with Israel, Chabad rightly predicted a dramatic uptick in the number of Jews traveling and living there, and it quickly began laying the groundwork for growing a Jewish community.
One of the shluchim who was sent to the Emirates as part of that effort was Rabbi Zvi Kogan, a member of the Chabad community in Israel. After he arrived in the country in 2020, Kogan worked closely with a team of other Chabad shluchim to provide for the local Jewish population. He was responsible for ensuring the availability of kosher food, for example, and helped establish the country’s first Jewish education center. He also played an important role in explaining Judaism to a population that was still warming to the idea of having Jews in their country. In 2021, he met with local leaders and helped organize the Emirates’ first Holocaust Remembrance Day memorial. In short, Kogan was doing in the Emirates what every shliach always strives to do: strengthening Jewish religious life and building bridges to non-Jewish communities.
A light in the dark.
Once a year, Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights hosts a conference of shluchim from around the world. It is typically an occasion for Chabad leaders to gather, celebrate their achievements, and plan for new growth. The mood at this year’s convention, which was held just days after Rabbi Kogan’s funeral in Israel, was unusually somber and resolute.
“After a year of tremendous challenges, this conference unites the leaders who stand on the frontlines of the global Jewish community,” declared Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, the director of the conference, during his welcome address. “From the war zones of Ukraine and Israel [and in the face of] rising antisemitism worldwide, shluchim bring unwavering support and hope to every individual, ensuring no one is left behind.”
The Rebbe was famous for reminding others that “a little light expels a great deal of darkness.” It was a line he often used when those in despair came to him for advice. It is perhaps fitting, then, that the shluchim from this year’s Chabad conference will be returning to their communities in time for Hanukkah—a holiday dedicated to the commemoration of Jewish resilience and the miracle of an enduring light.
One of the shluchim who will be lighting the Hanukkah candles with his community this year is Rabbi Levi Duchman, the director of Chabad of the Emirates. “Silence may be our first response,” Duchman told the crowd of mourners at Rabbi Kogan’s funeral, “but action must be our answer.” After announcing plans to build a new Chabad center in the UAE in Rabbi Kogan’s honor, Duchman encouraged the crowd to renew their own efforts to live up to the Rebbe’s vision. “Our job has never been clearer,” he told them:
To remind every Jew who they are and why they are here. The world needs to hear our voices. Do more, stand prouder, fight harder, reach further. This isn’t about him; it’s about us and our people. We are not just here to survive. We are here to transform the world.
The Dispatch Faith Podcast
Daniel Kane joined me for this week’s Dispatch Faith podcast to talk more about Chabad’s history, the allure and influence of Rebbe Schneerson, and Chabad today. It and previous Dispatch Faith podcasts are available on our members-only podcast feed, The Skiff.
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