Inaugural annual award spotlights teens who are making a difference in their communities What do an eighteen-year-old Canadian political activist, an altruistic seventeen-year-old Parisian, and a vivacious, first-generation American teen have in common? They were all crowned winners of CTeen’s inaugural Eight Under Eighteen award. In 2020, CTeen, the Chabad Teen Network and the world’s […]

Leonard Holtz found an archive of letters in a shoebox. Then he and his wife gave it to the Chabad Library In July of 1941, a worried Rabbi Shimon Leib Greenberg of Chicago sent a letter to a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied France who had just arrived in New York. The Warsaw-born Greenberg had lived […]

Among a handful of liberal arts schools with certified kosher dining halls Diversity has long been a part of Oberlin College in Ohio’s DNA. Black students were admitted in 1835, two years after the institution’s founding. Women were accepted from day one, and allowed to enroll in the bachelor’s program beginning in 1837. Despite accusations […]

Ninety-four years ago today, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn (1880-1950), sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, and the leader of Russian Jewry at the time, was freed from Soviet-imposed exile. The date was 12 Tammuz, corresponding to today’s date, which is celebrated widely by Chabad and Jewish communities as an important watershed in the history of Jewish life in […]

In Episode 4 of Lamplighters: Stories From Chabad Emissaries On The Jewish Frontier, Rabbi Sholom Greenberg, a Chabad Shliach from China, tells the story of how he and the Jewish community in and around Shanghai helped a Jew who had lived – and died – alone in a nearby city. The Chinese government wanted to […]

Parents urged to guide their children on the time of brief reflection A Florida law that requires a one- to two-minute Moment of Silence at the start of each day in public schools was signed into law on Monday by Gov. Ron DeSantis. The law, which was passed by the Florida Legislature in April, prohibits […]

A collaborative effort to design the Robbins Family Youth Center in Thornhill, Ontario Teens at Chabad’s Jewish Youth Network in Thornhill, Ontario, have been sharing their hearts, minds and dreams for more than three years in helping to design the Robbins Jewish Youth Center, the first major Jewish community center in the world built exclusively […]

An early and enthusiastic proponent of criminal justice reform through the Aleph Institute Back in the early 1980s, Judge Jack B. (Yehoshua Binyamin) Weinstein had no reason to take a meeting with a 36-year-old rabbi named Sholom Lipskar. Weinstein was the chief judge of the Eastern District of New York, while the young rabbi was […]

How Chabad of Southern Ontario has Grown over the Last Four Decades It was with a poignant sense of deja vu, on a chilly afternoon this spring, that Rabbi Zalman and Esty Grossbaum welcomed guests to a small groundbreaking ceremony for their new Chabad House in Vaughan, Ontario. Exactly thirty nine years earlier, the Grossbaums […]

Summer is only just beginning in the Northern Hemisphere; but back in January, when Argentina was soaking up the sun, twenty-five young women used their vacation to get away from the bustle of Buenos Aires and immerse themselves in a Jewish experience. At a hotel tucked away in the beautiful mountains of Cordoba, Argentina’s countryside, […]