Faces of Chabad: Rabbi Eli Naiditch, Shliach to Tel Aviv
“Right before my Brit, the man holding me stopped everything. He said, wait—bring me a picture of the Rebbe. He put it inside his hat, and they went on. My father told me that story my whole life. I always felt like it gave me the drive I needed to be on Shlichus.
That was Dallas. My parents weren’t officially Shluchim, but they got a blessing from the Rebbe almost every place they moved. Most of my childhood was in Sharon, Massachusetts; at thirteen we moved to Miami. We had guests every single Shabbat. My mother ran a preschool, my parents were both in the Jewish burial society. I always thought I’d go into business or law.
I always felt that to become close to the Rebbe, you have to go as far away as possible to reach Jews. At sixteen I went to the Republic of Georgia for the holidays, then Hong Kong.
My wife and I married seventeen years ago and came to Israel for our first year. And we stayed. Five years in Tzfat, and then we came to Tel Aviv. Some of my friends live in the middle of nowhere—places with a few hundred Jews, and they tell me, Eli, I think your work in Tel Aviv might be harder than ours. You can be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Jews and it’s even more daunting. Some nights I get about three hours of sleep. But I know that I’m the Rebbe’s soldier. He’s got me on his shoulders.
Simchat Torah is always our biggest day of the year—over a thousand people come. Shortly after October 7th, 2023, I was called up as a reserve soldier. I gave my family a hug and a kiss and wished them safety. Driving north, I kept thinking, this is meshugah. We got to the meeting point and they’d taken over a school—the Chabad school in the area. There was a huge picture of the Rebbe as I walked in. I thought, okay. This is where I need to be. Friday night we made Kiddush for the soldiers. One of them came over after and said: every Simchat Torah I take my kids to shul—that Kiddush gave me restored hope. Sunday they called me in and told me I was the new officer of the unit. I said, what? They said, don’t worry, it’s small stuff for you. You run a Chabad House.”
