Brazilian Justice Invites Rabbi to Highest Court

Brazil’s newest Chabad-Lubavitch center barely launched before events would take its director to the highest court in the land.

Thankfully, says Rabbi Leib Rojtenberg, it wasn’t a lawsuit that brought him to the chambers of Justice Luiz Fux, president of the Federal Supreme Court. It was a small scroll of parchment known in Hebrew as a mezuzah.

Fux, the first Jew to occupy the position, invited Rojtenberg, director of Chabad of Brasilia, to affix the item to the doorpost of his office. The small ceremony comes among several projects the rabbi and his family are coordinating, including plans to renovate the city’s old ritual bath.