Speech Reflects Chabad Split

A prominent Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi delivered a speech this week in Brooklyn lambasting his movement’s leadership for not aggressively fighting Israel’s plan to dismantle settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank.

“When I read that the Lubavitch took a position that we’re not to get involved, it went against everything I know,” said Rabbi Avraham Hecht, 83, at an anti-disengagement event held Sunday night at the Jewish Children’s Museum, located across the street from Chabad’s worldwide headquarters in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights area. “How stupid can these people be? This is deportation, not disengagement. Even the Nazis didn’t do it this way.”

Hecht, who is no stranger to controversy, spoke on the 11th anniversary of the death of the movement’s late rebbe or grand rabbi, Menachem M. Schneerson.

In June 1995, Hecht came under fire after he called for the death of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose peace accords with the Palestinians entailed a surrender of land in the West Bank. After Rabin was shot and killed by a Jewish religious extremist in November of that year, Hecht was forced to resign his rabbinical post at Congregation Shaare Zion in Brooklyn, although he had previously retracted his statements.

Hecht’s recent speech was part of a program hosted by the Pikuach Nefesh organization, a Lubavitch group that opposes the disengagement plan. About 60 Chabad rabbis, many of whom had traveled to New York to visit the rebbe’s grave last weekend, attended.

Hecht did not endorse violence in response to Israeli policy, although the rabbi suggested it was likely that some settlers would respond with violence. “But,” he said, “do we want that — that one Jew should kill another Jew?”

The rabbi’s pointed criticism of Chabad’s institutional leaders highlighted current tensions within the movement. While opposition to Israel’s disengagement plan is widespread within Chabad, the central leadership — which directs the rabbis who perform outreach around the world — has avoided organizing an official campaign against it. Hecht belongs to a smaller group of rabbis who favor bold action, many of whom believe that the late Schneerson was the messiah.

The movement’s messianic wing came under some harsh criticism in a July 6 opinion essay by Larry Derfner in The Jerusalem Post.
Chabad has “a messianic wing associated with radicalism and violence, and then there’s the mainstream wing that disassociates itself from that sort of thing,” Derfner wrote. He cited reports that the Israeli youths who recently stoned a Palestinian teenager were associated with the messianic wing of Chabad as evidence of the “ultra-nationalist lethality coming out of” the movement, and he called on mainstream Chabad leaders to take action against the more radical wing.

Chabad leaders were reluctant to criticize those pressing for more action, but defended their decision not to launch an organized campaign against disengagement.

“The activism for Israel is best left in the hands of those who are more experienced in doing so,” said one leading Chabad rabbi who preferred not to be named. He added, “Chabad as an organization has to devote its resources to the hundreds of thousands, the millions of Jews who are assimilating, who are assimilated.”

The rabbi said that anyone who commits acts of violence is, by definition, not a true member of Chabad.

Last Sunday, as thousands of Chabadniks and other admirers of the late rebbe flooded his gravesite in Cambria Heights, Queens, the mood was mystical rather than political. A line of visitors snaked along the walkways of the cemetery, while visitors, from infants to the elderly, waited over an hour to enter the enclosure where the rebbe lies interred next to his father-in-law, Rabbi Yosef Y. Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe. Women and men entered the enclosure separately, in groups of 50 or more, and rushed to say prayers and drop personal notes by the grave. By late afternoon, it had become a pond of white paper.

Ephraim Wolffe, 31, rabbi of Sydney, Australia’s Central Synagogue, said he believed that the late rebbe would want him to focus his energy on the Jews living in Sydney in 2005, rather than on far-off events in Israel that he could not change.

“Although the rebbe loved each inch of the land, he recognized that you won’t always win each battle, that you may lose the war by trying to win each battle,” said Wolffe, whose parents and grandparents also worked as outreach emissaries for the movement.

The “fundamentalists do so much damage,” Wolffe said. “Everybody thinks they represent Chabad,” and “it’s painful, there’s no question.”