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JTA — Lamar Odom visited the New York gravesite of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the influential former leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, with his two children last week. “I heard he makes miracles happen,” the former NBA star said in an Instagram post. “It’s a miracle to be here at this place with my children, reflecting…
(JTA) — President Trump issued a proclamation in honor of Education and Sharing Day, marking the anniversary of the birth of the last Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Trump met Monday in the Oval Office with a delegation of rabbis from the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. The rabbis presented two gifts to the president: a silver…
(JTA) — A researcher says Mormons have posthumously baptized the late Lubavitcher rebbe, the grandparents of Carrie Fisher and Steven Spielberg, and hundreds of Holocaust victims, violating an agreement to halt the practice. Helen Radkey, a Salt Lake City-based independent researcher who has been looking into the Mormon practice of posthumous baptisms for two decades,…
There’s a painter’s ladder leaning against the outside wall of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s tomb in Queens. If you climb to the top rung, you can look down at the barefooted mourners throwing notes onto Schneerson’s grave as the men in security vests hustle them out to make room for the next group. On the…
(JTA) — What does a fervent religious movement do after the death of its singular leader? That was the existential question the Chabad-Lubavitch movement faced 20 years ago this week when its charismatic rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died with no heir. Amid the grief and turbulence following his 1994 death, many believed Chabad would be…
(JTA) — Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, was inarguably the most well-known rabbi since Moses Maimonides. Hundreds of prominent rabbinic figures have lived in the intervening 800 years since Maimonides died. But how many can be named before an audience of Jews from the United States, Israel, France or the former Soviet…
WIkipedia (JTA) — It has been two decades since the death of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the rebbe whose influence was felt far beyond the Chabad-Lubavitch hasidic sect he led. Within hours after the long-ailing Schneerson, more commonly known as “the rebbe,” died at age 92, JTA reporters visited Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood where…
It takes less than 10 minutes, a passport and the help of a friendly librarian to hold in your hands one of thousands of religious texts at the heart of an international legal battle between Russia and America. That’s what I found when I traveled in January to Moscow, where I came face to face…
