Changing Jewish lives

Editorial

"Excuse me, are you Jewish?" With these words - at once intrusive and compelling - uttered in airport terminals and on street corners, Chabad-Lubavitch, a 250-year-old Hasidic sect with roots in Europe, has revolutionized Jewish self-identity and practice from Crown Heights to Los Angeles, from Moscow to the Congo.

The force behind the transformation, the late Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, "showed the Jewish community that it was possible to revive and rebuild - after assimilation, persecution or both," says Lawrence Schiffman of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Life at New York University. Schneerson, a rabbi educated both in yeshiva and at the Sorbonne, and who fled Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941 for New York, helped to lift Judaism out of the ghetto and into the public arena. Even though his own observance and that of his followers is deeply traditional, he articulated a vision of Jewish peoplehood so encompassing that no Jew - religious or secular - need feel excluded.

Schneerson's death 10 years ago this week, at age 92, failed to dampen the commitment of his students to the mission he established nor to diminish his influence in the Jewish world. To the contrary, Chabad-Lubavitch has grown to 4,000 emissaries working in nearly every U.S. state and 70 nations, opening doors and reaching out to Jews of every level of observance, religious and secular. In the states of the former Soviet Union, Chabad has enabled the rebirth of Jewish life.

Chabad's range seems boundless. Its Internet site, www.chabad.org, draws 50,000 visitors a day. Its oversize Hanukkiahs have become ubiquitous fixtures annually in public parks. Chabad emissaries mount the world's largest seder every spring, when 1,500 Jews gather around the table in Kathmandu, Nepal.

In the Valley, under the leadership of Rabbi Zalman Levertov, whom Schneerson sent here in 1977, Chabad of Arizona has grown from a single location in 1977 to seven centers throughout the Phoenix Metropolitan area, offering programs for preschoolers, youths, teens and adults, plus an ongoing program for immigrants from the former Soviet Union. A year-old center for students at Arizona State University's main campus in Tempe is flourishing.

"What the rebbe did had a messianic quality: He saved Jews," said one Chabad emissary visiting Schneerson's grave in Queens this week. Indeed. Schneerson's ultimate legacy for all of us is to be buoyed up by the imagination and inspiration of a singular man with a beautiful dream, attending to our own lives as committed Jews and nurturing the Judaism of those we love.

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