8/8/2025

How to Mimic Chabad's Growth

It was a spring morning in 2021, on one of my first visits to Martha’s Vineyard, when I met for coffee with someone from our community. Sitting outside of Nat's Nook in Vineyard Haven, I shared with him that Hadassah and I were thinking about opening a Chabad house on the Island.

He looked at me with a shocked expression and, with a caring voice, urged me to reconsider. There are so few Orthodox Jews here, he said, that a Chabad presence would have no appeal. For our sake, he suggested we’d fare better exploring the opportunity in a more Orthodox community.

This week, a new JFNA poll told a very different story. It found that since October 7, Jewish engagement in the United States has surged, and Chabad has seen the greatest surge of all. Whether Jews consider themselves part of a Chabad community or just attend events, Chabad’s activity is up more than any other Jewish group.

Remarkably, most of these Jews are not Orthodox. Many identify as Reform, and many have no formal affiliation at all.

We’ve seen it firsthand. Since opening in 2022, our Chabad community has flourished and grown exponentially, attracting some 2,000 unique individuals to our many events over just three years—95% of whom are not Orthodox.

So what is it? Why is Chabad so successful here on Martha’s Vineyard, across the United States, and in over 110 countries?

There’s no hiding the fact that we are Orthodox, that we do many things differently, and that Jewish law (Halacha) and traditions shape and guide everything we do. So why would a Reform Jew, a Conservative Jew, or even one of the many agnostics and atheists in our community want any part of a tradition that some might argue doesn’t reflect their values or standards?

The JFNA pollsters suggested two answers.

First, they noted that there are Chabad houses everywhere, even in tiny communities. This convenience draws people who might otherwise go elsewhere, but in small towns like Norman, Oklahoma, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, there is no “elsewhere.”

But that’s a shallow take.

Jews aren’t flocking to Chabad because Chabad is everywhere.

Chabad is everywhere because Jews are flocking to Chabad.

The second explanation in the article is more accurate.

People love the warm and welcoming atmosphere of Chabad. Ahavat Yisrael, love of our fellow Jew, is a core Jewish principle and central to Chabad’s philosophy. Every Jew belongs, regardless of religious or political background.

But warmth only removes the barriers. A welcoming atmosphere might explain why people feel comfortable at Chabad, but it doesn’t fully explain what attracts them, or what pulls them to stay engaged.

If you’re all-inclusive but lack a message, people still won’t come. Being warm and welcoming doesn't quite explain it, and that’s what the article missed.

The true “secret” of Chabad comes down to two things:

First: Joy.

A community member wrote to me yesterday, forwarding the article and adding that “too often Jewish life is all about the Oy. But Chabad brings the joy into Judaism.”

Too often, Jewish conversations are focused on the troubling rise of antisemitism and how to combat this hatred. But our children hear that, and it’s not appealing. If being Jewish is all about experiencing antisemitism or fighting antisemitism, no parent would want that for their child, and no child would want that for their future.

Who needs the headache of being hated?

Chabad, therefore, tries to focus instead on the positives of the Jewish experience. We share the warmth and joy of Judaism with everyone who attends our events, infusing everything with a deep love for tradition, Shabbat, Israel, Torah, and for one another. We offer a way for Judaism to become a fun and meaningful part of our lives.

If other communities want to mimic Chabad’s growth, they should spend less time talking about how much we are hated and more time talking about how good, meaningful, and beautiful it is to be Jewish.

And it’s not naïve. However bad things may be today, Jews have lived through far worse, and we’ve overcome. We will continue to thrive if we only choose to. And we can only choose to if we focus on the positive aspects of Jewish life.

If we fixate only on how much we’re hated, one day there may be no more Jews left to hate.

A Martha’s Vineyard resident once told me they weren’t sure Chabad was for them because “it’s too much of an optimistic version of Judaism.”

But it seems that most people are drawn to optimism and energy, to love and to joy.

Positivity, the JFNA poll tells us, is unstoppably contagious.

Second: Neshama — Soul.

There’s a bit of folklore that when Jews emigrated en masse to the United States between 1880 and 1920, the men would hurl their tefillin into the Atlantic as they approached the Statue of Liberty.

Many, if not most, Jews arriving in the U.S. during those years felt that the way their families had practiced Judaism in the “old country” had no place in America.

Here, they believed, they’d have to assimilate. They felt pressure to become as gentile-like as possible.

My own great-great-grandparents experienced the same thing. They emigrated in the early 1900s, leaving behind their Orthodox backgrounds. My family remained Orthodox only because their son—my great-grandfather—stayed behind in yeshiva and didn’t emigrate with them. Instead, he made aliyah in the 1920s.

But when Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the sixth Chabad Rebbe, escaped the Nazis in 1940 and arrived at the port in New York, he made a four-word statement:

“America is nisht andersh.”America is no different.

Chabad’s mission, he proclaimed, would be to retain the deep, unbroken connection Jews have had to Judaism since Sinai, and to make that connection accessible and palatable to modern, secular, even unaffiliated American Jews—without watering it down.

When he passed in 1950, his son-in-law, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, took this bold vision and turned it into reality. He sent his students out on shlichus, to serve as Chabad representatives and bring the soul of Torah and mitzvot to the farthest corners of the world and the most forgotten communities.

“America is nisht andersh” is the motto by which Chabad still thrives today. It’s the unshakable belief that Torah does not change and that Judaism is everlasting. Yes, we must be creative in how we present it, but the core essence of the neshama, the soul of Judaism, is pure and unchanging.

And people want a taste of that purity.

Chabad’s appeal, I believe, is that it offers every Jew—no matter their background—a warm, loving, and deeply spiritual Jewish experience that speaks directly to their neshama. And this pull toward authenticity is so deep that people are often willing to look past what they might otherwise dismiss as outdated or even archaic, for the sake of a nostalgic tradition embedded in their soul.

In this week’s parsha, in his last will and testament, Moses tells the Jews the Shema:

“You shall love Hashem your G-d with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might... And you shall teach these words to your children.”

If we want to succeed in teaching these words to our children, we must first love Judaism with all our heart and with all our soul.

But if we fail to love it with all our heart because we’ve removed the joy, or if we fail to love it with all our soul because we’ve removed the tradition, it will be difficult to expect our children to want to carry it on.

Our children, Moses teaches in the Shema, want a Judaism that is soulful. And our children, Moses teaches in the Shema, want a Judaism they can love.

Chabad, the JFNA poll suggests, offers both.

And that’s why Chabad continues to surge.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Tzvi Alperowitz