Emissaries, Brooklyn, and a Succession That Was Not Made

The movement as it exists today was rebuilt after the destruction of Eastern European Jewry. The sixth rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, had been arrested in the Soviet Union in 1927 for organising underground Jewish education, was released and expelled, and reached New York in 1940. The Brooklyn headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway dates from that arrival, and the street number has become a name people use on its own.

Under the seventh rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who led the movement from 1951 until his death in 1994, Chabad built the institution it is now best known for. The shluchim are emissary couples sent to a city, usually young and usually for life, with a mandate to serve any Jew who arrives rather than to gather a congregation of Chabad Hasidim. That outward turn is the sharpest structural difference between Chabad and most other Hasidic groups, which direct their energy inward to their own community, and it explains why Chabad houses appear in places with no Hasidic population at all, on university campuses and in cities across the world.

No successor was appointed after 1994 and none has been. Some within the movement hold that the seventh rebbe is the messiah, a position others inside it reject and which has been argued over in the wider Orthodox world for three decades. The atlas records that the question is contested rather than settling it. What is not in question is that the emissary network continued to expand through the argument, which says something about how the movement is actually held together.