NEW YORK — Torn strips of paper piled 3 feet high lay over the grave, as Jewish people of various creeds circle the tomb, quietly uttering prayers. Fluorescent light spills from an entryway into the dark of the cemetery outside.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, always brings more Jewish people than usual to the burial place of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a towering figure in the 20th century. His influence shaped the course of history and left an indelible mark on the global stage. But to his followers, he’s simply known as “Rebbe.”
“Thousands and thousands of people go here throughout the year. I mean, one of the absolute busiest times is right now, which means on these days … the days leading to Rosh Hashanah are the busiest times, hands down,” said Chabad Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a young rabbi in central Brooklyn.
But the Ohel Chabad-Lubavitch in Queens isn’t an ornate resting site, at least not for a man of such stature in the Jewish faith. It consists of a bricked one-story building swathed by a crowded graveyard. The graveyard houses the Rebbe’s tomb and hundreds of headstones etched in Hebrew.
Just inside the door of the building’s foyer, a flat-screen TV plays a 24-hour loop of the Rebbe, scratchy video of his most beloved advice and talks. At any time of the day or night, Jewish people will be seated and watching, eyes trained on the man they have come to celebrate and petition.
Beyond the entry, down a small set of stairs, is a large hall full of writing desks. There, people alternate between scribbling on paper and thinking with their chins in their hands. A few chat with friends, more quietly than usual. Others look as though they’ve been crying. Some seem determined, their jaws clenched as they jot down their thoughts.
The men have donned yarmulkes and tassels, sweatshirts and jeans. Women wear head shawls and long skirts, but others sport pants and loose hair. Children swing their legs at their seats while their parents teach them how to construct their letters.
The large room allows for mixed company, but two long writing spaces designate separate spaces for men and women. They’re far more silent.
“What happens at the site is everybody sits — very serious, somber. And everybody sits and they write their letters,” Rabbi Levin said. “You will sit and write, and what happens is we write a letter to the Rebbe, to Rabbi Schneerson, and to his soul, to beseech on high for us a sweet year.
“We spell it out,” he added. “What exactly does it mean? It means: May these things see success. Second thing everybody’s writing is this: What’s your resolution? What part will I play?”
Between 1951 and 1994, when he died, Rabbi Schneerson didn’t just lead Chabad. His leadership rendered it one of the most influential Jewish movements on the planet.
Under his watch, Chabad became a global powerhouse, setting up a vast network of institutions that cater to Jewish people’s spiritual, social, and humanitarian needs — whether they’re deeply observant or barely connected to their faith. From outreach programs to education and cultural initiatives, Chabad’s reach grew exponentially.
“The clarity of the ideas of this individual, which, even though he passed away 30 years ago, I think the ideas are becoming even more relevant, and therefore coming back to where we meet here today,” said Rabbi Yosef Vogel, a Chabad rabbi whose father was a founder of Chabad in the United Kingdom.
To many of the people who come to Chabad, New Year’s resolutions look like pledges to charity. The building’s wooden black donation boxes give Jewish people the opportunity to donate then and there — but others are declaring their intent to donate in their letters.
And many of them say this new year pledge brings miracles to their lives. In fact, so many of them tout those sorts of miracle stories that it’s deemed a “phenomenon.”
Rosh Hashanah, the first of the Jewish High Holy Days, begins at sundown Wednesday and calls for acts of reflection and penitence.
Mark Ross runs a tech company from Cedarhurst with his three brothers. It’s a startup that struggled to tread water in its first years. As is the case with many startups, profit was by no means a certainty, but Mr. Ross’s rabbi didn’t seem to think it mattered.
Jews are exhorted by their leaders to give 10% of their profits to God. For Mr. Ross, that wasn’t so simple.
“Last year was the first year we came here with the rabbi to kind of make a commitment to giving charity. We’ve never really done that in our business before,” Mr. Ross said. “So the rabbi told us it’s a very big thing that, in advance of the year, we come here and we commit to what we’re going to give that year, no matter if we’re making money or not making money. Of course, we were losing a lot of money every single month, but we decided to make that commitment in the beginning of the year.”
’Tested by God’
The first month came and went, Mr. Ross said. The business lost money, as predicted. The next month, it lost money again.
“We were giving anyways, even though we were losing … God was kind of testing us, so we had to fight through that test. And then next month came, four months we were losing, we gave anyways — charity to this organization and that organization, and a lot of money, thousands and thousands, even though it was painful to do,” Mr. Ross said. “But we knew we were probably being tested by God.”
It was a fight to keep going, he said, to work against what felt like stacked odds. Then the tides shifted, in ways he couldn’t have foreseen.
“I don’t know, maybe the fifth month or something, something just turned, and it was like, like a miracle. All of a sudden, we start to see the turnaround, month after month, month after month, success. And we kept giving and giving and giving throughout that success as well. And now we’re back here a year later. And we’re pledging,” he said.
Now, Mr. Ross and his brothers are doubling what they’d pledged before.
“But we’re pledging in advance of the year, meaning it doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do. That year, we’re pledging to God that we are going to help people and give and give,” he said, grinning.
For Menachem Husarsky, the word “miracle” isn’t quite practical enough. His business, too, found unprecedented heights of success after he pledged to charity, but he sees it as a matter of fact — a larger example of something that happens every day.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a miracle in the classical sense, right? Because I actually don’t believe miracles work that way. I think it’s more,” he said. “You need to notice it, these miracles that happen to you very often. It’s your perspective, right? Like, something good could happen to you, like, Oh, I was lucky, right? But then you, when you start to notice the world around you, you can start to see these so-called coincidental patterns.”
Mr. Husarsky said his moment of clarity came along in 2019, when the rabbis began asking their congregations to contribute money to charity for Rosh Hashanah.
“I said, ’I don’t know. I’m not doing so well financially.’ And so [the rabbi] told me about this verse in the Book of Malachi. So there’s a phrase in there, where The Prophet says that you should test God. You know, the sages say that normally you can’t test God. You can’t say, oh, I’ll do this, and you have to provide me back, XYZ. But the one thing you can test God with is charity.”
And that’s what Mr. Husarsky did. Though he resides in New York City, where he raises bees and chickens with his family, his work is commercial real estate in Phoenix.
Four years ago, he and his business partner decided to do a little God-testing.
“It’s now been four years where every single year I pledge more than I could, more than I could give. So typically, we like to say you should tithe and give a 10th,” he said.
But for those who are ambitious, giving a fifth to charity is also an option, Mr. Husarsky said.
“Well, one thing I’ve discovered is that I would project and say, ’OK, the business is going to make X dollars, so let me give 20% of X,’ I’d find out that we ended up doing better that year — and it actually turned into a 10th. And so that’s been consistent for like, the last, the last four years,” he said.
Now charity is a fixed expense.
“Actually, if I open up my [accounting books], you’ll actually see there’s a line item: donations, charity. It’s just always there. It’s just another expenditure on the business,” Mr. Husarsky said. “I’m taking a salary, God’s taking a salary.”
These wins are now an expected part of the Rosh Hashanah tradition at Chabad. And for many of those who have traveled to the site to pray to the Rebbe, they’re simply proof of his exalted — and sometimes disputed — status as “Messiah.”
Rabbi Vogel moved to New York a few years ago, but was a dedicated visitor to the gravesite even when he lived across the pond.
“Thousands, tens of thousands of people come to this place from all walks of life, Jews, non-Jews. The [Israeli] prime minister’s wife was here a few days ago. The president of Argentina was here a week ago. The prime minister of Albania was here. Now you would ask yourself: Why these people? They’re not commanded. They’re not Jewish. The point is that his message is to anyone who opens their minds and hearts to something,” Mr. Vogel said.
Certainly, the Rebbe sounds messianic from that description. But according to Chabad’s Rabbi Levin in Brooklyn, the concept of “moshiach” — or messiah — is not the same to Jews as it is to the outside world.
“We were first in Egypt as Jews in Egypt, enslaved in Egypt, before we received a Torah, before Mount Sinai, before we became a nation. We were an enslaved population. Moses shows up. Moses is referred to in the Jewish tradition as the first Moshiach. Why? Because he was Moshiach — it literally means anointed. He was the first anointed person,” Rabbi Levin said. “So he’s the Redeemer of the Jewish people. God redeems us, but it’s done through a leader figure who, at that time, was Moses.”
The Rebbe was also simply “anointed” to lead the Jewish people, Rabbi Levin said. The Jewish understanding, then, is not that of the Christian view — one of an ultimate Messiah.
“God says, now the Moses figure becomes that individual who leads the Jews into redemption. OK? So, so this concept about the Rebbe being Mashiach, it’s overall a consensus that the Rebbe is just obviously the most befitting to play this role,” he said.
Even so, for those who came to ask their beloved Rebbe for assistance in the new year, their faith in his power to help is unaffected by his official label.
“During a visit to the Ohel, the essence of one’s soul connects with the essence of the Rebbe,” reads the Torat Menachem.
It’s that same connection that drives tens of thousands of Jewish people into the cramped tomb every year.
After the ink has dried and they’ve read him their letters of petition, they rip their words into strips and step from the tomb into the night — into a new year and a fresh start — leaving behind their promises with the Rebbe.
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