House Being Built in Israel for the Lubavitcher Rebbe

He’ll soon have his own house in Israel, but the Lubavitcher rebbe will not be making aliyah — that is, not until the Messiah brings every Jew to Eretz Yisrael.

When real estate developers who are followers of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson recently decided to expand Kfar Chabad, a 1,000-family community located between Ben-Gurion Airport and Tel Aviv, they came to the rebbe for a blessing, and with a petition calling on him to reveal the fact that he is the Messiah.

They also asked the 89-year-old Hasidic leader if he would like them to build a house for him in Kfar Chabad. The rebbe said yes.

But the rebbe did not mean that he would get on a plane the next day for the Holy Land, explain his followers. Rather, he is expecting the imminent arrival of the Messiah to bring us all to Eretz Yisrael.

The initiator of the rebbe’s new house, Zosha Rivkin, reportedly tried to convince Schneerson twice in the past to have a house built for him in the Lubavitch enclave, only succeeding recently.

The rebbe was overheard telling the developers, during their visit to the movement’s headquarters in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, that “many people have houses in more than one country.”

His own ancestors are among them: The second Lubavitcher rebbe, Dov Ber Schneuri, known as the Mittler rebbe, purchased a building in Hebron in the early part of the 19th century.

But the only member of the Lubavitch dynasty ever to have visited Israel was the previous rebbe, Yosef Yitzhok Schneersohn, the current rebbe’s father-in-law, who was there for a few days in the summer of 1929, on his way from Russia to the United States.

(JTA correspondent Hugh Orgel in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.)