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 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
