Who’s Your Messiah?
That’s the question raised in a Jerusalem Post article about an immigrant from the former Soviet Union who came to Israel under its Law of Return and was interested in converting to Judaism. While the rabbis were impressed with his religious observance, the problem came when they started asking him questions prompted by his affiliation with the Chabad Hasidic sect, which tends toward the belief that its late rebbe is the messiah.
The Post reports:
Prof. Binyamin Ish-Shalom, head of the Joint Institute for Jewish Studies, where the young man prepared for his conversion, said that the rabbinic court, impressed with the high level of adherence exhibited by the young man, was on the verge of converting him.
“Suddenly, one of the rabbinic judges asked him if he believed that the rebbe [Schneerson] was the messiah,” recounted Ish-Shalom.
“He answered, ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been taught,’ or something like that. And that was it; at least one of the judges refused to convert him.”
Ish-Shalom rejected the notion that believing the deceased Schneerson was the messiah constituted a form of forbidden worship.
However, a source in the State Conversion Authority said that at least two leading religious Zionist rabbis ruled that messianic Chabad was beyond the pale of normative Jewish belief.
“They [messianic Chabad Hassidim] attribute to him supernatural powers years after he passed away. That is not Judaism. It’s something else.”
Read the full article.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
