Can A Jewish Community Fly In Dumbo?

Early one Friday evening about a year ago, while in the middle of our family Shabbat dinner, there was a knock at the front door.

I opened it to find one familiar face — an observant guy from the neighborhood who has taught my son piano – and a new one.

The new guy was Rabbi Ari Kirschenbaum, a young Lubavitcher who had recently decamped to our corner of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. They were holding Shabbat evening services in an apartment over the local greasy spoon across the street and needed a 10th man to make the minyan. Could my husband come?

It’s the Lubavitch way — reaching out to make person-to-person contact, encouraging each one to observe one more mitzvah, and in the process send their rebbe’s mission out into the world like so many sparks from a fire.

Their goal is nothing less than messianic redemption.

“One more mitzvah, as Maimonides tells us, one person even if he’s not so scholarly and not so righteous, doing a simple act of goodness and kindness, can tip the scale to salvation,” said Rabbi Aaron Raskin, who established Chabad of Brooklyn Heights almost 18 years ago, and is currently seeding North Brooklyn with junior shluchim in Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Williamsburg and, in partnership with his colleague in Park Slope, in Carroll Gardens.

The world is used to reading about Lubavitch emissaries, or shluchim, in long-settled parts of Manhattan and on Long Island, and far-flung places like the former Soviet Union and Dharamsala, India.

Now they’re increasingly popping up in what were until recently considered marginal neighborhoods where high-rise condo buildings are taking over. Because when there’s a big influx of New York’s professional class there are sure to be Jews. And where there are Jews, a Lubavitcher is sure to follow.

“There’s going to be a massive influx of people here,” said Rabbi Avrom Tov Chakoff, Dumbo’s new Lubavitch emissary, sitting with a visitor in an over-priced coffee shop under a warren of artists studios and galleries, across from an enormous building of new apartments. Next-door was an overly precious market, with expensive bottles of fancy sodas and pieces of exotic fish laid out as if they were art pieces.

Chakoff lives with his wife and infant daughter in a nearby apartment, donated by local developer Joshua Gutman. They began their work as soon as they were married, going straight from their wedding reception to their Dumbo apartment.

“We’re always keeping our eyes open for new neighborhoods,” said Rabbi Kasriel Kastel, program director at the Lubavitch Youth Organization in Crown Heights. He oversees the New York area emissaries.

“Used to be that no one wanted to go to New York,” he said. “They wanted to go to someplace exotic, but a lot of people are starting to find New York exotic. You go to North Williamsburg and you could be who knows where. It’s mostly yuppies coming in, but there are a lot of Israelis too. On the first night of Pesach in North Williamsburg they had 40 or 50 people.”

New shluchim have also recently put down roots on Roosevelt Island, in Long Island City and even Harlem.

In Prospect Heights, Kirschenbaum holds classes and Shabbat services in neighborhood homes. He is about to complete an eruv, which he hopes will attract more observant Jews to the neighborhood.

He is also helping rebuild the constituency of a decrepit Orthodox synagogue on the Crown Heights-Prospect Heights border. And he and his wife, parents of two young children, are involved with starting a Modern Orthodox day school there. They plan to open in September with a class for 3- to 6-year-olds.

One day last week Kirschenbaum was going to drop off personalized yarmulkes with the owners of Southpaw, a popular club in neighboring Park Slope. He was also hoping to get them to put on tefillin. Last Purim they donated the space for a party dubbed “Grateful Yid,” which, Kirschenbaum says attracted almost 300 people.

Earlier in the week in Dumbo, Rabbi Chakoff, 25, held a class offering a Kabbalistic gloss on the weekly Torah portion, hosted by a pair of artists in their studio. Two friends of theirs were there to also learn from the earnest young rabbi, who is several decades their junior.

Dressed in the black and white garb characteristic of Lubavitch men, as he taught Chakoff unknowingly echoed the tones in a canvas hanging on the wall above his head, a black-and-white painting of a nude woman reclining.

Learning with Chakoff “has opened up questions and interests for me,” said Marty Greenbaum, the painter who shares the space with his wife, Eileen Mislove, a painter and textile designer.

“I’m not lighting candles but I feel more Jewish,” Greenbaum said. “It permeates my being and comes out in my work.” He occasionally incorporates Hebrew letters into his graffiti-like paintings. “It moves me in ways that surprise me,” he said.

Chakoff came to their door one Friday afternoon last year bearing a challah baked by his wife. He has since put up a mezuzah on that door, Chakoff proudly offers.

When he first came to the neighborhood he went door-to-door asking if people were Jewish. “A couple of doors slammed in my face but not as many as I expected,” said Chakoff.

He’s been building his community ever since. While there are times he gets into a funk — “it’s hard when 40 people say they’re coming for a meal and you prepare all that food and only 2 show up,” he admits — he also feels cheered by the people he’s reaching.

That day he was busy teaching from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., making two trips to Manhattan to work with students, among several classes he held in various Dumbo locations.

While Chakoff and his wife are just a couple of miles from the mother ship in Crown Heights — 770 Eastern Parkway, the Lubavitch movement’s headquarters — it can still feel far away.

“I’m not in some place where if you need Chalav Yisrael [strictly kosher] milk you need to milk the cow yourself, but honestly we’re so busy that it doesn’t really make a difference that we’re so close,” he said.

Financial Struggles

While philanthropist George Rohr underwrites the work of shluchim on college campuses, those elsewhere have to come up with their own funding.

They may start out in modest housing donated by a supportive local real estate owner, but they have to come up with donations to support the matzos they like to distribute at Passover and for the money to pay their own Con Ed and grocery bills.

“We have an understanding with some of the new shluchim that they should keep their day jobs and slowly phase things in,” said Kastel of the Lubavitch Youth Organization.

Rabbi Shaya Gansbourg has been doing just that in Harlem. Unlike most shluchim, he is 50 and has already married off one of his children. He and his wife and other two kids still live in Crown Heights, but for the last year and a half he has been commuting to 125th Street and its environs.

His first career was in the print industry. On business trips to the Far East he’d stay with his Lubavitch shaliach friends. His brothers, too, are shluchim.

And for years in the summer he and his wife, a high school teacher, have been taking 10th grade Lubavitch girls on trips from Mexico to Vancouver as part of a girls’ camp.

“I’ve been giving these girls a message of shlichus,” that working as an emissary is the pinnacle of doing the rebbe’s work, “and it bothers me, so I ask ‘where am I in life? Is this what I should be doing?’”

When he realized that Harlem is gentrifying, he thought there might be Jews there to reach.

He started last fall at the City College of New York campus, where several hundred Jews study, he says. With the Hillel chapter he held a Rosh Hashanah lunch and shofar workshop.

On Sukkot he built a hut in the middle of campus, brought in a band and had at one point about 100 students in the sukkah.

Next year he hopes to host kosher lunch-and-learn programs. He also wants to expand to other parts of Harlem. “I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people here asking to participate,” said Gansbourg.

In the meantime he’s looking for an apartment there and trying to figure out how to raise the $70,000-$100,000 a year he needs in order to run a full-service Harlem Chabad center.

It takes at least $50,000 to $60,000 a year to support the most modest Chabad outreach operation in a new New York location, said Kastel, whose support includes moral, but not financial, support.

Though there is widespread thirst for what shluchim have to offer, Kastel said, financial potential dictates where they open.

One example is the Russian community in the Bensonhurst area. There is currently one shaliach for 40,000-50,000 Jews, he said. But “it’s a poor community, so you have to ask how you are going to support a second or third shaliach. If there was a benefactor who wanted to help it would work, but when the Russians get a little richer they move to Jersey, so there are only the poor ones left.”

Yet demand to be a shaliach has never been higher, he said.

“I’ve got 100 guys upstairs in the Kollel (Torah learning center for married men) banging my door down to go out on shlichus,” Kastel said. “And interest in New York is booming.”

Even where you might least expect it.

Prospect Heights’ Kirschenbaum says that he wants to establish “Chabad of Bed-Stuy,” the historically black Brooklyn neighborhood.

Just before Passover he got phone calls from Jews who were new residents there wondering where they could get matzah.

“How funny would it be to hear Chabad-Lubavitch of Bed-Stuy? In terms of marketing it’s genius,” said Kirschenbaum. “It’s only a matter of time.” ?