510 A History of Judaism
that ‘if someone comes to my grave, gives a coin to charity, and says
these ten psalms, I will pull him out from the depths of Gehinnom
[hell].’^ Claims among Habad hasidim (often called ‘Lubavitch’ after the
village in Smolensk Oblast, now in Russia, which for over a century
until 1940 housed their headquarters) of the messianic status of their
seventh (and last) rebbe have been rather less circumspect. Menahem
Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994, after forty- four years as leader
of the movement, was one of the most influential leaders within Juda-
ism in the twentieth century, not just because of the role he played for
his hasidic followers, who revered him and attended in great crowds his
weekly assemblies, but because of his assertion of a responsibility for all
Jews, including the most secular. Astute use of modern methods of mass
communication, allied to the willingness of followers enthused by immi-
nent eschatological expectation to settle in places of scant Jewish
population in order to plant the seeds of religious observance wherever
they could, has raised public awareness of Lubavitch far above that of
other hasidic communities. Emissaries from the Rebbe have devoted
themselves to the encouragement of Torah observance in France, Eng-
land, Argentina, Russia and the rest of the former USSR, and Australia,
and many other countries, apart from the main centres of Lubavitch
settlement in Israel and in the United States – in particular in Crown
Heights in New York State, where the Rebbe had his residence. The aim
of such emissaries – many of them young couples, with the man ordained
as a rabbi in his early twenties (sometimes with only a smattering of the
knowledge to be found among other haredi rabbis) – is to combat sec-
ularism within the Jewish population by engagement with even the least
observant in even the most obscure locations. No Jew is considered as
too far outside the fold to be enticed by a rabbi in a travelling ‘mitzvah
tank’ equipped to show Jewish men how to put on tefillin or light can-
dles for Hanukkah, or to be reached by the rabbi’s wife in the ‘Habad
House’, who will tactfully explain to young women about the lighting
of candles on Sabbath and the importance of monthly ritual immersion
to ensure that procreation takes place in a state of purity.^17
In many ways such outreach is as distinctively American, in the foot-
steps of evangelical Christians, as the bellicosity of Meir Kahane. The
Rebbe himself declined even to visit the land of Israel, even though a
house identical to his dwelling in 770 Eastern Parkway in New York
was constructed for him in Cfar Habad in Israel. Habad Lubavitch is as
concerned with Jewish identity in the multicultural context characteris-
tic of Jewish life in the United States as with the life of Jews in Israel. Its