Chabad house

Khalaf A remains in pre-trial detention.

In Thailand, an anti-Israel protest involving over 500 participants chanting slogans and displaying signs led to the cancellation of a planned Rosh Hashanah meal at Phuket's Chabad House.

Thai media reported that protest organizers later issued messages described as anti-Semitic, justifying their actions as an effort to protect Thai traditions from foreign disturbances.

Meanwhile, a new book by Professor Leela Corwin-Berman, who is American, challenges the assumption that Jewish citizenship in the United States was always granted routinely and without controversy.

We've had people try going to a community Seder that are sometimes held.

I went to one here held by the Chabad House in Buffalo.

Just, hey, I'm here to support.

Just want you guys to know that you have a friend And we're here to partake.

All right, so now already I'm intimidated.

But [laughs] but anyway, so, um, you know, I went to the son and I said, "I need a rabbi in Arizona at the Chabad House.

Could you give me a name?" Sure enough, pulls out his phone, makes a phone call to Shloime Levittov, Rabbi Shloime Levittov.

And the Levittovs basically I believe have three Chabad homes, houses in Arizona, and the, all the family members.

Yes

...

I, I, I, I sat with, um, the rabbi on S- pretty much every Thursday at noon, uh, at the Chabad House, studying with him for an hour.

And inevitably, um, you know, you develop a friendship if it works.

You give? That's great.

And also, I gave to Chabad House

during their telephone.

That's good.

You gave to Chabad House.

I did, too.

You think I get to park in a crippled space? How much did you give? Oh, I don't know.

I gave three.

I don't know how.

And then, as I got more and more into making videos, and a lot of my videos were documentaries for Chabad Houses and other causes, other Lubavitchers, we actually have here someone who's become a very dear friend over the years, Zalman Lubavitch, whose family was the subject of one of my earlier projects.

And Zalman probably won't like me saying this in public, but you could have come on the podcast earlier, we would have sorted it out.

But when I met Zalman, one of many, I'm not gonna blame it entirely on him, but it became very apparent to me that the way I thought who he was, my concept of him before I met him was very, very different to how I understood him after I spent time with him.

Here we go.

We're going to have John Voight in Chabad House, possibly talking to Jewish students, and he's going to tell them that they have to study Buddhism, or this or that, all the different philosophies that he studied.

And I'm already sitting horrified by what the answer is going to be.

So John Boyd looks at this kid and he says, can I ask you a question before I answer you? He says, sure.

So if we do a lot, how much more so it's even more.

He asked the Rebbe what should be the name of the, uh, institution, and the Rebbe says they should call it Lubavitch House, and if for some urgent, uh, uh, reason that's not fitting, it should be Chabad House.

So this is the very beginning of the Chabad Houses in which the Rebbe is suggesting.

I, I think in just the letters that we have learnt, I don't know yet if there was yet that, uh, terminology of Chabad House.

I think this may be-- I have to find out, but, uh, this may be.

But here you see the Rebbe says Lubavitch House or Chabad House.

I do believe that in England they call it Lubavitch House, like the Rebbe's first option.

And the Rebbe prays for them.

It's a different, it's a different kind of setup.

You have a bunch of Lubavitchers working together on different, um, metzoyim before the Chabad houses.

This was before the everybody had their own Chabad house.

Before, yeah, the Chabad, the first Chabad house was Shloime Kunin.

Right.

Don't forget, Montreal is one city.

We have o- over forty Chabad houses.

I know.

See, look, you can go, uh...

When I first became religious, you could drive across America and spend every night in a different Chabad house.

About, uh, twenty-five years ago, you could have bicycled.

I think at this point you could probably almost walk across North America and spend every night in a Chabad house.

There are gonna be some places like, you know, when you hit, when you hit like Montana or Idaho where there's only like one or two Chabad houses in the whole state, it's gonna be a little bit of a far walk in between, but you get the idea.

The fact that there are even Jewish enclaves in places like Montana and Idaho are things which were never even-- nobody even thought about fifty years ago, that there should be a possibility of a, of a Jewish institution, no less a Hasidic institution.

So we did all that.

Utah of all places, okay? There's a hundred families plus about forty singles.