The Rebbe

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), known simply as the Rebbe (REH-beh), led the Chabad-Lubavitch movement from Brooklyn for over forty years — and changed how the Jewish world thinks about every single Jew.

He took leadership in 1950, five years after the Holocaust tore a generation from its roots. Plenty of voices counted those Jews as lost to Jewish life. The Rebbe staked everything on the opposite: no Jew is ever lost. Every Jewish soul carries a spark that nothing can extinguish — it only waits to be revealed.

He led like no one before him. He answered hundreds of thousands of letters personally — from prime ministers and professors, teenagers and skeptics — each reply honoring the question, turning its premise toward the positive, and ending with one practical next step. He met people one-on-one late into the night for decades. And when that became physically impossible, he invented something new: every Sunday, into his late eighties, he stood for hours so thousands of people a week could be seen, one at a time — each handed a dollar to give to charity, so each would leave a giver. Asked how he wasn’t exhausted: “When you’re counting diamonds, you don’t get tired.”

He refused labels — all of them. Religious, secular, observant, lapsed: he wouldn’t sort Jews into any of those boxes, because in his eyes there was one category. A Jew. A letter in the Torah scroll.

Between 1967 and 1976 he launched ten mitzvah campaigns — don’t wait for Jews to find Judaism; bring one deed to them, with love — and sent his emissaries to nearly every corner of the earth to make the offer. The Do section of this site is those ten campaigns, made to you.

His favorite picture of the work was the lamplighter — the man who walked the old towns at dusk with a flame on a pole. The lamps are already there. The oil is already there. Someone just has to bring the fire close enough.

One more thing, and it’s the reason this website exists with a clear conscience. In 1960, when critics questioned teaching Torah over the radio, the Rebbe answered that every invention exists for a divine purpose — radio and satellite were created so that goodness could reach everywhere at once. His movement broadcast by satellite in the 1980s and was among the first religious communities on the early internet. By his own teaching, the web exists so that a page like this one can find a Jew like you.