257 Newly Minted Chabad Rabbis Celebrate Ordination
Image by Chabad
A group of 257 rabbinical school graduates gathered at the Chabad movement’s Rabbinical College of America outside of Morristown, New Jersey.
The rabbis, who received their rabbinic ordinations between 2012 and this year, took part in the celebratory ceremony on Sunday.
This year’s cohort is slightly smaller than its largest ever group of 280, which gathered in 2012.
Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, former chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel and current chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, spoke on a panel to the Chabad graduates.
Thanks to the outreach efforts of its last rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, during the latter half of the twentieth century, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement has grown into one of the largest in Hasidic Judaism. According to Chabad, there are now over 4,400 Chabad-affiliated rabbis stationed in 90 countries around the world. Known for their outreach activities to secular and un-affiliated Jews, the Chabad rabbis and their wives often work as emissaries in far-flung communities with marginal Jewish infrastructure.
This year’s group includes rabbis who speak Portuguese, Russian, French, German, Italian and Swedish.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
