770 AROUND THE WORLD
1/30/2026
It was 2017 and I had an eight-hour stopover in Chile on my flight back to New York after spending the year as a yeshiva intern in the great Buenos Aires.
Wanting some fresh air and thinking I’ll get a glimpse of the beautiful country, I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the local Chabad house some 25 minutes away in Santiago.
When we arrived, we pulled into a building that looked strikingly familiar. The Chabad house in Santiago was an exact replica of the iconic Chabad headquarters building in New York, on 770 Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.
Santiago’s Chabad house is one of some thirty such replicas around the world. In Santiago, Milan, Mitzpeh Ramon, Melbourne, Tacoma, and dozens of other cities around the world, Jewish communities chose to model their Chabad houses after the iconic NY building.
The original building in Brooklyn is so iconic that when a car rammed into its doors earlier this week in what was suspected to be an antisemitic incident, news reports referred to the building as it is best known, simply by its street number, “770.”
The red gothic building in Brooklyn was purchased by Chabad in 1940 as its new home, after the movement was forced first to escape the rise of communism in Russia and then the rise of Nazism in Europe.
In the years since, it has become one of the most well-known buildings in the Jewish world, in large part due to the custom of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who would personally welcome thousands of visitors to meet him every Sunday, giving each one a blessing and a dollar to pass the blessing to someone else.
But 770 is cherished by so many not because of its aesthetic beauty, but because it symbolizes the mission of Chabad, to bring a love of G-d, Jews, and Judaism to communities all around the world.
In a Jewish world shattered after the Holocaust and assimilating in America, 770 represented a refreshing new path, one that was taught by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, to replace the oys of Judaism with the joys of Judaism, and to bring warmth and neshama, and the love of Torah, to Jews wherever they were.
This week, with the final October 7 hostage returned to Israel with the rescue of Ran Gvili’s body, the darkest chapter in recent Jewish history has come to a close.
As we open a new page, let us hope, and let us choose, that the next chapter of our Jewish lives will be shaped not by darkness and sorrow, but by a love of being Jewish and Ahavat Yisrael, and by the realization that despite the weeds in the way, the world is G-d’s garden, and we are fortunate enough to be chosen to water it.
Hadassah joins me in wishing you a Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Tzvi Alperowitz