After her stormy teenage years, Rifka Chilungu gave up on atheism, got hooked on Judaism, and missed her college graduation to attend a Brooklyn seminary By the time twenty-year-old Emily Couch walked across the plaza to the ancient stones of the Western Wall, she was exasperated. Despite having no Jewish family and only a few […]

Philanthropist Robert Kraft cuts ribbon on center where first cohort of eight rabbis will be trained On May 19, the Jewish holiday of Lag BaOmer, the ribbon-cutting for a new rabbinical school was held in Brighton, Mass., with philanthropist Robert Kraft flanked by local rabbis, dignitaries and elected officials. The school comes in response to […]

Dozens of young Jewish professionals from across the United States bonded on a Chabad getaway to Antigua, Guatemala last weekend Daniel Benyaminov is a chef of Israeli extraction who lives in Toronto, Canada. Last week, he was in Guatemala, looking into a live volcano. “I didn’t see that coming,” he laughs. But then, he also […]

The Rebbe encourages the singing of the popular Lag BaOmer song about Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the Rashbi.

Festivities take to the streets from Odessa, Ukraine, to Chisinau, Moldova Lag BaOmer is the holiday of Jewish unity, and its symbolism is being widely felt by the thousands of Ukrainian Jewish refugees celebrating the day in the warm embrace of their adopted Jewish communities. In Ukraine, where the Jewish population has felt an outpouring […]

Chabad emissaries from across Europe and Africa gathered on the Portuguese pier where the Lubavitcher Rebbe escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941 In June 1941, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the future Lubavitcher Rebbe, and his wife Chaya Mushka boarded a ship from Lisbon’s Rocha da Conde de Óbidos pier that carried them from Nazi-occupied Europe to […]

Program honoring the Rebbe gets support from most of the nation’s governors Following a rousing turnout last month that attracted more than 3,000 people in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the birth of the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—Chabad-Lubavitch of Argentina has won the support of more than half […]

41st study cycle of Mishneh Torah and Sefer Hamitzvot coincides with Lag BaOmer On May 19, Jews around the world will conclude a year’s worth of daily study of Maimonides’ magnum opus, Mishneh Torah, also known as Yad HaChazakah or simply, Rambam—the Hebrew acronym for Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon. This year, the conclusion of the […]

In Episode 24 of Lamplighters: Stories From Chabad Emissaries On The Jewish Frontier, reporter/producer Gary Waleik presents the story of Rabbi Yehuda and Rebbetzin Miriam Ferris who, for the last 40 years, have shared the beauty of the Torah with the Jews of freewheeling Berkeley, California. The Ferrises are a good fit there because, like […]

Most commandments in the Torah are so cryptic that a straightforward perusal will leave the reader without the knowledge necessary to understand or fulfill them. So the details are elucidated in the Oral Law, which was given at Sinai and transmitted by the sages of the Talmud and their subsequent exponents. Here we chose to […]