Behind the Headlines: 1,000 Shilichim Come Together to Tell of Worldwide Mission

As the thoughtful gaze of the Lubavitcher rebbe looked down from a giant poster over the dais at the front of the room, a thousand men dressed in black hats, black suits, white shirts and beards sang and danced, listened to exhortations to continue their work with joy and dedication and talked about the challenges of being Lubavitcher shlichim, or emissaries.

The shlichim can be found in almost every corner of the world: Casablanca, Morocco; Hong Kong; Asuncion, Paraguay; Salzburg, Austria; Bombay, India; and in the United States from New Hampshire to Alaska, Alabama to Nevada.

All told, they number 3,000 people, including wives, in 40 states and 33 countries.

The timing of their annual convention in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, site of the worldwide Lubavitch headquarters, was significant, according to Rabbi Shmuel Butman, director of the Lubavitch Youth Organization.

“The rebbe says every shaliach is like a menorah,” Butman said, “and today is the first day of Kislev, the month of Chanukah and the menorah.”

Putting the ritual eight-flamed lamp in the window to announce to all who pass by that it is a Jewish home is part of the Chanukah tradition.

Chabad shlichim serve the same function, as they establish a presence and ignite the flame of a traditional Jewish community where previously there was none.

Rabbi Yehoshua Harlig is just now setting out for Las Vegas, where, he says jokingly, his motto will be, “When the chips are down, come to Chabad.”

NO LONGER CITY OF SIN

All kidding aside, he insists that the gambling and show-girl paradise is no longer the “city of sin” it once was, now that the legendary days of Jewish pit bosses are just about over.

There are about 25,000 Jews in Las Vegas, out of a population of about 800,000. Many are former Californians who already know about Chabad, and who went to Las Vegas to buy cheap real estate. They went to Las Vegas to escape many things, including Judaism.

Harlig, who at age 28 has already spent time in India, Scandinavia and Hong Kong learning the shaliach’s craft, has decided that his first project in Las Vegas will be writing a Torah.

A sofer, or scribe, from Los Angeles has been commissioned to complete all but the last few lines, which will be filled in next summer in Las Vegas.

Local Jews will sponsor each of the last letters of the Torah, which will be filled out in the community.

“Creating a Torah is the last mitzvah, the 613th in the Torah,” Harlig said, and the project is sure “to unite all the Jews of Las Vegas.”

Honolulu, home to about 10,000 Jews including Rabbi Yitzhok Krasniansky and his family, also attracts Jews “who want to get away from structured Jewish life,” he says.

The tan he sported at the November meeting stood out in the room full of pale faces, and attested to the fact that Jewish life in Honolulu is different than it is in most other places.

His home is half a block from the beach, and because there is no mikvah in Hawaii, his wife uses the Pacific for the ritual bath.

Then there’s Rabbi Yehudah Raskin, who despite having been in Casablanca for the last 31 years, has never had a drink at Rick’s Cafe.

Morocco, a country rich with Jewish history, had 300,000 Jews when Raskin first arrived. But now only 10,000 remain in Morocco, about 7,000 of them in Casablanca, and some in Fez, the birthplace of Maimonides.

The rest have mostly gone to Israel, he said.

Despite the small size of the community, Raskin finds that the relationship between the Jewish community and the Arab Moroccan community is a good one, aided by the fact that “King Hassan is a good king. He helps us,” the rabbi said. “People there have a lot of respect for rabbis.”

‘LIKE A SOLDIER’

It is not easy being in a place so far removed from most of the Jewish world, but when Raskin left, he did not dwell on the challenges he would have to contend with. “I was like a soldier who went to the army,” he remembers.

Rabbi Eliezer Shemtov has lived in Montevideo, Uruguay, for the last five years. There, the community consists of 20,000 people of mostly German, Hungarian, Polish and Turkish ancestry.

The president of Uruguay, Luis Alberto Lacalle, is a devout Catholic, but has told Shemtov that his great-grandparents were Marranos.

And, according to Shemtov, Lacalle has sought out the counsel of the Lubavicher rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. Last year, before the Uruguayan elections, when Lacalle was a senator and a presidential candidate, he called Shemtov and told him he wanted to meet with the rebbe.

Shemtov arranged the meeting. When Lacalle got to New York, he was waiting in his Manhattan hotel for a car to pick him up and take him to Crown Heights. But because of heavy traffic, the car was extremely late. So Lacalle caught a cab, which, once over the bridge into Brooklyn, got caught in the traffic.

Lacalle got out of the car, and with an aide, according to Shemtov, jogged through Brooklyn so that he would not miss meeting with the rebbe.

TWO DOLLARS FOR CHARITY

When he got there, the rebbe gave Lacalle two dollar bills to give to charity.

When Lacalle returned to Uruguay, he was trailing in the polls, but by the time the votes were all counted, he had won by 7 percent of the vote, “a very important, mystical number in Judaism,” Shemtov pointed out, alluding to the rebbe’s influence in such supernatural matters.

At the end of the dinner, when the master of ceremonies called out the communities where the shlichim are stationed, each name on the list was greeted with thunderous applause.

“New Jersey!” he cried, and three tables full of men with black hats, long beards and grinning faces stood up. “Australia!” he yelled, and the room reverberated with applause.

But when he announced “Russia” and “Eretz Yisrael,” all 1,000 men broke out cheering, and the room filled with the sound of the Russian song, “There is Nothing Besides God, and We Are Not Afraid of Anyone.”

REMINDER: The JTA Daily News Bulletin will not be published Friday, Nov. 23.