I was trying to get comfortable in my plane seat, which is not an easy task for a woman eight months into her first pregnancy. I took stock of the events that led up to this cross-country trip, which would take my husband Choni and me to our new shlichus location in California. We were eagerly anticipating our new venture. Nervous? Well, yes, a bit - especially since we hadn’t given the moving company a delivery address for our belongings. No, it wasn’t that we weren’t prepared - simply put, we didn’t have an address yet. But we had three weeks t
Being a Shaliach runs in my blood! My father moved to Australia in 1979 to start Kollel Menachem. A few years later, he began helping the Tasmanian Jews with Yamim Noraim and eventually founded a makeshift Chabad there. So it was only natural to me that when I got married and started my own family, I would move to Tasmania and become the first full-time Rabbi living on the 200-mile long “island.” Today, my family and I have lived in Tasmania for about 11 years. We moved in 2011. While the island is (comparatively speaking) small, reaching
We’ve always known the importance of this shlichus. This move would take us and our three children somewhere with no school, no Mikvah, and 100 miles away from the nearest kosher store. The list of unknowns was immense, but we were prepared to take on the challenge. When we began reaching out to the students, our first idea was to invite them all for a Friday night meal. The timing wasn’t ideal. It was the dead of summer, and the campus would be populated by a mere fraction of its students; only those taking summer courses. In spite of th
As a shliach to the exclusive community of Golden Beach, Rabbi Chay Amar has more than enough wisdom to share. His shlichus was hardly smooth sailing, but his simcha and strong principles made him come out ahead. In this issue, Rabbi Amar shares financial advice, how to stay firm under pressure, and what wealthy people really want from you. When my wife and I first came to Miami, the Jewish presence there was very different from today. Just to give you an idea, there was only one Kosher pizza store and one kosher Chinese restaurant in the entire are
Years ago, my wife and I were set to go on shlichus to Sumy, Ukraine, a small city near the Russian border. When we arrived, my family stayed by the shluchim in Kharkov while I went to Sumy to search for an apartment. One night, I walked to my hotel room feeling very down. I had been there for two weeks already, but I had not yet found a suitable place for us to live. Was this all one big mistake?The town square was mostly deserted. Over and over again, I replayed the events of the past two weeks in my mind. Packing up our apartment in California and shi
Chances are that when you think Louisville, baseball bats or bourbon are the first things that come to mind. But for locals like me who were born and bred in the city bearing the name of France’s King Louis XVI, Louisville Kentucky means home.Surprisingly enough, Louisville’s Jewish community had three kosher slaughterhouses in 1900, but all of them closed down over the next few decades. Despite those realities, there were four congregations here, including an Orthodox shul, which was here when the Rebbe sent my parents on shlichus in 1985, as
Most shluchim you meet may have grown up in Chabad homes, but I did not. My father was a special yid, a man who referred to himself as “a Jew without labels,” and I attended Litvishe yeshivas throughout my formative years. My older brothers became Lubavitcher Chasidim, and attending the Rebbe’s farbrengens ultimately led me down a similar path - the energy in the room, the holiness in the air and the light that seemed to surround the Rebbe just drew me in. The concept of shlichus intrigued me, particularly campus shlichus which I i
Living in California, Chicago or New York I don’t think I ever imagined that one day my family and I would be busy traveling the country’s 19th largest state, bringing Torah to North Dakota’s 1,000 Jewish residents. But life is full of surprises and I have definitely encountered more than my fair share since I arrived in Fargo in 2010.The seeds for my life here were actually sown two years earlier. When Chabad shluchim Rabbi Gavriel and Rivky Holzberg were murdered in a horrific terror attack, I was studying accounting at the time, and
