Chabad ‘Synagogue-on-Wheels’ Heads to Siberia

Mobile Shul: A version of Chabad’s mitzvah tank.

By JTA July 31, 2013

Chabad activists have taken three synagogues on wheels on a journey into Siberia and central Russia.

The activists, among them sons of emissaries to Russia for the Chabad movement, are driving three camper vehicles into the Russian outback along three different routes that will take them through dozens of cities over the next three weeks, according to the official website of the Chabad movement.

The so-called “mitzvah tanks” typically park for a day or two in cities with Jewish communities, according to the rabbi of the Siberian city of Tomsk, Levi Kaminetsky.

He said a synagogue on wheels that left from Moscow on July 18 arrived last week in Tomsk, which has a synagogue and a Jewish community of a few hundred people. In Tomsk, the three crew members of the synagogue on wheels made house calls to the homes of Jews who cannot leave home for medical reasons.

“It makes people feel that someone is thinking of them, that someone has driven all the way out here to meet them, and that’s something beautiful and powerful,” Kaminetsky told JTA.

It is the second trek for the mitzvah tanks into the Russian interior; the first took place last year.

One of the campers also arrived in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, where Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Zalman Zaklas will be opening a new synagogue and Jewish community center in a month.

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’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO