‘I asked the rabbi: Why will Passover be so different this year?!?’ The people of Mariupol understood they were living on a powder keg. On the Ukraine side of the makeshift border with the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, Mariupol has been a flashpoint since 2014. That’s why, when Russia invaded Ukraine six weeks ago, Mariupolites […]

The Lauder Chabad School in Vienna is going to extreme lengths to accommodate 700 Ukrainian refugee families—free of charge. The Lauder Chabad School in Vienna was already at capacity when the first refugees from Ukraine came pouring into town three weeks ago. But seeing the families as they arrived, Vienna’s chief Chabad rabbi and Chairman […]

The Haggadah is one of those oceanic Torah texts. It invites continual return and reengagement, as we come back each year at the seder, to explore its fathomless depths.  A Pesach-pastiche of biblical passages, rabbinic exegesis, practical laws, and songs, the Haggadah’s roots, in a sense, go back to the Exodus. Its main texts and […]

First envisioned by the late Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, the already-iconic building is eight years in the making. A jubilant crowd cheered as dozens of rabbis donned hardhats and gripped shovels to break ground in Chicago on a new replica of the Chabad Headquarters building in Brooklyn. Intended to house a synagogue and Lubavitch Chabad of […]

It was unseasonably cold on the first night of Passover back in 1979. Snow had fallen the day before and melted into slush puddles that made walking unpleasant. The evening prayers had ended, and everyone was hurrying home to finally begin the Seder.  Not the Rebbe. Before returning to his home to make the Seder […]

A century of struggle to make and consume ‘the symbol of Passover’ The war in Ukraine has brought attention to the fact that one of the world’s largest shmurah matzah suppliers is based out of the eastern city of Dnipro. While many matzah shipments had already been made prior to the Feb. 24th invasion, the […]

Countless lives transformed by the Rebbe’s advice on positive living Sometimes, a book will speak to a reader and lead them on a path they never envisioned. It is unusual, though, for a book to do so for large groups of people. Yet that’s exactly what happened in the three years since Positivity Bias by […]

Tatyana Chabarova of Kharkov gets ready to celebrate Passover with Chabad in Israel Before the fighting in Ukraine, Tatyana Chabarova often heard her rabbi, Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz, the Chabad-Lubavitch emissary of Kharkov, say, “Think good, and it will be good,” quoting the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory. That was likely a hard thing […]

What would they tell us today? What Would They Tell Us Today? Some of us would have loved to be a fly on the wall at the Seder described in the Haggadah: It happened that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarphon were reclining [at a Seder] in Bnei […]

Each year, four days before Passover, brings another major date on the Chabad-Lubavitch calendar: The 11th day of the month of Nissan, the birthday of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. This year, the 11th of Nissan carries a special sense of occasion with it, as it marks 120 years since his birth, in the seaside town Nikolayev, […]