Lubavitch

Lubavitch enjoys Celtic net gain

Cathy Forman — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 10:50:21 +0000

Celtic’s new Israeli signing Rami Gershon is a net gain for Lubavitch Scotland.

The 24-year-old defender, who is on loan to the Glasgow club from Standard Liege, lays tefillin every day and “tries to go to synagogue when I can and when training allows”. He took up an offer from Lubavitch Scotland outreach director Rabbi Mendel Jacobs to attend morning prayers last week.

“He had an aliyah and put on tefillin,” Rabbi Jacobs said. “I am going to be his chaplain while he is in Glasgow and will be inviting him for a Friday night dinner.”

The Rishon LeZion-born player has also been invited to visit other congregations in the city. Although becoming accustomed to the cold of a European winter, he said he could “never get used to the rain”.

Rebbetzin of Hendon Chabad House has died, aged 53

Anna Sheinman — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:47:42 +0000

The rebbetzin of Hendon Chabad House has died aged just 53.

Sarah Leah Overlander, wife of Rabbi Gershon Overlander , died on Saturday after a two year battle with cancer.

Born in Chicago, Mrs Overlander had worked as a shlicha (emissary) for Chabad in Buffalo, Manchester, Oxford and most recently Hendon. She and her husband previously worked with London universities, organising events for London students.

Mrs Overlander's funeral was held on Sunday. She leaves her husband and ten children, aged eight to 28.

Rabbi Bentzi Sudak, chief executive of Chabad UK said: “She was the ultimate superwoman, a fantastic devoted mother and shlicha.”

Trial date set for Australian child abuse case

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 12:07:29 +0100

The trial of a Jewish man, accused of multiple counts of child molestation against students at an Orthodox boys’ school in Melbourne, will begin next year.

Judge Sue Pullen ordered the trial of David Cyprys, a former security guard contracted to Yeshivah College, to begin on July 29, 2013.

Mr Cyprys faces 41 charges, including six counts of rape. He has pleaded innocence since the allegations were made public last September.

The charges date back to the 1980s at the Chabad-run school in Melbourne, which is located in the same complex as the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters. The case was brought by 12 alleged victims, three of whom now live in America. Only two have spoken publicly.

Two other sexual abuse cases have emerged since Mr Cyprys was arrested.Ezriel Kestecher, a 26-year-old former Chabad youth leader, was recently charged with four counts of indecent acts on a minor; and moves are afoot to extradite from America David Kramer, a former Yeshivah College teacher who fled Melbourne in the mid-1990s amid accusations that he had sexually abused boys at the school.

If only our synagogues were more like spas

Simon Rocker — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:02:16 +0100

When Rabbi Laibl Wolf was younger, he used to drop into an ashram from time to time. Not that he ever thought of giving up davening for yoga: he simply wanted to know why so many young Jews had fled the suburban Judaism of their childhood to seek spiritual gratification elsewhere.

He was convinced there was a way to reach them if only he could find the right approach. The result was a unique career as a peripatetic teacher and writer who marries the psychological insights of Jewish mystical teachings to the contemporary literature of personal growth and well-being — a kind of Chasidic Deepak Chopra, if you like.

His first book, Practical Kabbalah, published in 1999, offered a course of meditation designed to achieve greater emotional harmony. His new publication, Kavana Mindfulness, is a set of self-help CDs which similarly draw on kabbalistic and Chasidic ideas as a way to retrain the mind. “I teach that you can change anything about yourself,” he said. “You are not a slave to your genes or your formative childhood experiences.”

He was born in 1947 in Poland to parents who survived the Holocaust. When he was two, they moved to Melbourne: his father was a Radomsker Chasid, but as there were no Radomsker Chasidim in Australia, the family instead moved into the orbit of Lubavitch. Rabbi Wolf enrolled in yeshivah but also gained a law degree and a master’s in psychology.

“I was intending to practise law but the Lubavitcher Rebbe asked me whether my wife and I would not mind taking a year off to do work with university students,” he said. He found a position with Hillel in the United States and instead of one year of campus service, ended up doing 12.
It was in America that he became aware of the large number of unaffiliated Jews spiritually attracted to the East. “Jewish people who go to ashrams by and large are honest, questing, pure in intent but could not, and do not, find the equivalents in the Jewish community arena, and especially in United Synagogue type-settings,” he said. “The idea of chattering, socialising, clubbing is not their sense of what their quest in life is.”

Back home, he was asked to teach a course in Jewish spirituality at Melbourne University. “That’s how I met the Dalai Lama. At that point, it clicked,” he said. The meditation and other spiritual practices that appealed to many Jews had parallels within Judaism.

“I had to use the right language to bridge people’s sensibilities and recognise there is a Jewish background component they can also investigate,” he said. “Not to thrust it upon them, or speak prescriptively of right and wrong, but to be able to put on the table an attractive package of spiritual food they might be interested in.”

He spends two and half months on the road every year, speaking and teaching in 65 cities around the world. He paid a rare visit to the UK recently after being invited to a Shabbaton held by the Ukrainian born, London-based Lubavitch supporter, Gennady Bogolyubov.

“It is not difficult for people to improve their lives by having a structure, a vantage-point on things in their life that can be analysed very simply through the crucible of Jewish perceptions on the nature of self,” he said. “That’s what I provide people, a structure.”

For example, while some psychotherapeutic systems say that it is healthy to vent one’s anger, Judaism, he explains, “teaches that you are not allowed to express anger”. A person can learn to react differently by shifting from a preoccupation with themselves to considering the needs of other people.

His Kavana Mindfulness is a 12-week programme which takes a spiritual concept, kavanah, usually used to denote concentration in prayer, and applies it to everyday life. Mindfulness, a “buzzword” in personal growth circles, comes from a Buddhist term, meaning a capacity to live each moment to the full.

The first step of his programme is how to induce a state of inner calm when so much of the time “we are tossed around at work, at home — we are always in a state of anxiety,” he said. “I teach people how to train for that over 30 minutes per day for one week; the next week I reduce that to five minutes; the third week five minutes is reduced to 10 seconds; and after that, for three seconds.”

The second stage is how to better understand what our senses are telling us; and the third how to learn to react in a more measured way to events.

Six years ago, wanting to put his ideas into practice, he launched a holistic Jewish centre in Melbourne called Spiritgrow. “I took an old warehouse and redesigned it in a spa-like feel — curved walls, use of colour, soft meditational music, nice fragrance, lighting effects,” he said. “It works like magic. When people come in, they ask, ‘Is this a Jewish place?’”

After a couple of years, he introduced Shabbat services, now attended by more than 100 people every week which, while fully compliant with halachah, use meditation, chanting and other spiritual techniques.

As well as its ambience, also important is its ethos. While some institutions operate on the model that the rabbi “knows it all”, he prefers to cultivate “the power of every Jewish individual to be a teacher and facilitator”. And instead of talking “religiously” in terms of do’s and don’ts, Spiritgrow is about sharing and exploring together. “Don’t try to impose,” he says, “create a bridge… If you don’t develop the warmth and trust of relationship, you can’t get the information flowing through. That’s where I think a lot of synagogues and rabbis fail today.”

South Korean Jews celebrate new Torah scroll

Jennifer Lipman — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:16:33 +0000

South Korea's tiny Jewish community has been given its first Torah scroll.

The scroll was welcomed at an event on Sunday in Seoul, attended by the Israeli a mbassador, Tuvia Israeli, and Rabbi Osher Litzman, head of the community.

Rabbi Litzman, who has led South Korea's Jewish community for four years, said he was delighted with the new arrival. Until now, the community has been served by scrolls loaned to it.

"We have waited a long time for this to happen and now it's finally here. It's a big milestone in the development of our Jewish community," he said.

Mr Israeli added: "Each one of us should be very happy and thankful to live in Korea through this important step. Of course, this will not be finished until we have our own synagogue, but as Rabbi Litzman says: this will come.

"If there is any other reason this gathering is important, that's to show there is Jewish life in Korea," he added.

Pierre Cohen-Aknine, who has lived in the country for 30 years, said having a Torah was "like living for the first time".

South Korea's estimated 100 Jews – many of them former US servicemen – have historically gathered at the Christian chapel of a US army base for Shabbat and festivals. There has been a Chabad presence in the country since 2008.

Shul Crawl: Lubavitch World Headquarters, New York

Danny Kessler and Joshua Felberg — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:21:43 +0000

The USA may be a bit beyond our remit of "every synagogue in the UK" but we thought we'd go and see what all the fuss was about.

We visited the Lubavitch (Chabad) Headquarters, situated at 770 Eastern Parkway, in a borough of New York City.

Since the death of its leader/'Rebbe' in 1994, Chabad has been sharply divided. On the one side are the "Messianists", who believe that the late Chabad Rebbe Schneerson is, in some respect, the Messiah.

They can be identified as the ones wearing bright yellow pins and sporting kippot with the slogan "long live our leader, teacher, rabbi, king messiah for ever".

In the synagogue they stand packed into the corners closest to where the late Schneerson sat. Their theology roughly states that when the Rebbe returns, the Temple will be rebuilt in NYC, and then be transported straight to the Old City in Jerusalem.

On the other side are the more conservative Chabadniks, who choose not to proclaim the Rebbe as the messiah. They make up most of the attendees, with traditional black hats and adorned in their long black coats. The central synagogue is covered with messianic slogans, and large posters continue to hang from the wall proclaiming the long deceased Rebbe as Messiah – despite numerous legal battles.

The posters cover much of the architecture, but the walls are still lined with oak bookshelves. At the front of the synagogue is the foundation stone set by the previous Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhak, which some Lubavitchers will kiss before they enter on Friday night.

The majority of those present on the night were members of Chabad on Campus, an outreach movement aimed specifically at Jewish students on campuses throughout the world. The atmosphere was electric.

One thousand students were packed into the synagogue and despite a large Texan Rabbi with a voice like an organ leading the service it was impossible to keep track of what was going on. Upon reaching "lecha dodi" the room exploded, singing, dancing and clapping pulled everybody in.

By the fourth verse people were hurling themselves off of tables into the throng, with numerous Rabbis crowd-surfing across the room. The community is utterly unique: nowhere else can one find so much politics, so much passion and so much informality in a synagogue service. This isn't a quiet, dignified synagogue where the Chazzan wears a silly hat and the bridge club meets on Tuesdays. The Chabad movement has changed the face of Judaism, and this is its epicentre.

Charity Commission raps Chabad accounts

Simon Rocker — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:14:13 +0100

One of the community's leading religious charities, the Lubavitch Foundation, is more than five months behind in filing accounts with the Charity Commission.

The charity watchdog said that it had sent "numerous" reminders to the foundation whose latest accounts, for the year 2009, which have been overdue since the end of last October.

Three and a half years ago the foundation faced serious financial difficulties with debts of around £1.5 million and owing the Inland Revenue more than £450,000 in PAYE contributions.

But Rabbi Bentzi Sudak, chief executive of Lubavitch, said that the debt to the Revenue had now been paid.

The accounts would be filed shortly after Passover, Rabbi Sudak said. "Our accountants are working very hard to consolidate the accounts of over 30 centres throughout the country. Because of the complexity and size of the system, the process takes a long time.

"We are therefore working with our accountants to continue to modernise, automate and streamline the system across the board to minimise any future delays in filing our accounts."

According to the last available accounts for 2008, the charity was proposing to sell a property worth an estimated £1.75 million to clear its debts.

All our yesterdays: Lubavitch life

Katie Taylor — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:53:57 +0000

All these images were taken from our 169 year archive. To access the JC archive subscribe here

More All our yesterdays here

On this day: the JC in history here

Shofars and power tools

Jonathan Kalmus — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:30:35 +0100

Over 180 people got ready for Rosh Hashanah by making their own shofar through a Whitefield Chabad workshop on Sunday.

Parents were encouraged to bring their own power tools but children also got the chance to construct a shofar from a raw horn.

They were told why it is sounded and about Rosh Hashanah and its customs.

Whitefield Chabad director Rabbi Shmuli Jaffe said the idea was to have "adults working alongside their kids and helping each other. It was very interactive."

The event was organised in conjunction with the London branch of Lubavitch educational organisation Tvios Hashem.

Shtetl show for Leeds children

Jessica Elgot — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:16:33 +0100

Leeds is opening a Jewish educational centre where children can take a walk through time into a 19th century eastern European shtetl.

The Jewish Heritage Centre for Children, due to open in October, is the brainchild of Leeds Lubavitch education director Shoshana Angyalfi and her project co-ordinator Ruth Bell, who gave the JC a sneak preview of the museum.

Mrs Angyalfi said: "Each house in the shetl shows a different aspect of Jewish life. We have the scribe's house where we learn about the Torah. There is a succah, and a candle store where we learn about the different uses for candles - for Shabbat, for Chanucah, for yahrzeits (memorials).

"In the family home a sewing machine is set up and a Shabbat table - to show that during the week we work and on Shabbat we rest."

The houses in the shtetl have been deliberately built crooked, the narrow streets in between them are cobbled, and the ceiling has been painted to look like sky by local painter Judith Levin. She is the project's resident artist and also created the detailed stained-glass windows of the shtetl synagogue.

In each house, a video, shot by award-winning local filmmaker Simon Marcus and featuring costumed child actors, explains the meaning of the items in the house.

Some of the furniture was donated by members of the community, and the authentic metal lanterns which light the homes were donated after Mrs Angyalfi spotted them at a Chabad convention in New York.

Mrs Bell has come up with many innovative ways to teach visitors about halachah (Jewish law). In the shtetl stable, children can stamp animal hooves into sand to see if the hooves are cloven and establish whether or not the animal is kosher.

As visitors emerge from the shtetl, they enter a modern kosher play-kitchen and a mini-supermarket. Mrs Bell said: "We want to show that we still follow the traditions and laws of the shetl, but we do it in a modern way."

The £274,000 project was made possible thanks to a grant from the
Heritage Lottery Fund.

It will open as an extension to the existing Chabad Centre on Shadwell Lane, Moortown, and will include a café and soft play area. Cookery workshops, lectures, and arts and crafts will also be run in the centre.

Although the centre will not be open every day to the general public, Mrs Angyalfi said there was a huge demand for school visits and interest from adult groups, including the Women's Institute and the Gypsy and Traveller Association.

Mrs Angyalfi added: "The Jewish community in Leeds has been very supportive of the project - the Leeds Representative Council has held a meeting here already. We really want it to be something they are proud of."