Prof. Don Seeman Utilizes TIJS Grant to Research the Rise of America’s Newest Jewish Holy Site
It did not make headlines in the secular media, but former President Donald Trump recently became the first American presidential candidate to visit the grave, or ohel, of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe in the old Montefiore Jewish Cemetery in Queens, NY. Whatever this may say about American politics, it says a great deal about the continually expanding influence and recognition of the Chabad Hasidic movement, despite the loss of their Rebbe, R. Menachem Mendl Schneerson, thirty years ago in 1994. With the help of the Tam Institute, I have been researching the rise of this newest American Jewish holy site for the past ten years.
Montefiore is an old cemetery filled with many graves from the early and middle twentieth century. Many but not all of the stones are written in Hebrew with well-known Jewish symbols like the hands of the priestly benediction. Some areas were reserved for members of particular landsmanshaftn, a kind of club for New York Jewish immigrants who all hailed from the same town or shtetl in Eastern Europe and found it congenial to purchase ornately gated corners of the cemetery for their eternal rest. But one area in the corner of the cemetery was reserved by the Chabad Hasidic community. Here, men’s and women’s graves are separated, but every gravestone is oriented so that it stands facing the central ohel (literally, tent), a small open-air structure containing the graves of R. Yitzhak Yosef Schneersohn, who moved the court of Chabad to New York from Warsaw in 1940, and his son-in-law, R. Menachem Mendl Schneerson, who reigned at 770 Crown Heights from the time he assumed the mantle of leadership in 1951 until the third of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, in 1994. The two Rebbes are buried side by side and their graves are thickly covered in small prayers or requests for blessings brought by the faithful, and then torn and scattered on the grave once delivered. There is a place for the lighting of many candles and Crocs are provided since it is expected that one will remove one’s shoes at a visit to the Rebbe’s ohel.
R. Menachem Mendel vastly expanded the global reach of Chabad during his fifty years at its helm. Even before that, he was in charge of its American publishing house Kehot and its youth wing. Today there are Chabad Houses on more than 200 college campuses in the United States alone. Chabad synagogues probably outnumber all other traditional synagogues combined, and the movement maintains active programs for prison chaplaincy, children with special needs, and many other initiatives. In fact, the Rebbe’s reach was so great and the love for him so great, that for the first time in seven generations, there has been no successor appointed. His former residence at 770 Eastern Parkway and his final resting place in the Montefiore Cemetery have both become sites for pilgrimage of Hasidim and other fellow travelers from around the world.
Little by little, the cemetery itself has been built up to accommodate and foster this interest. A new entrance to the cemetery was opened with a path directly to the Rebbe’s ohel. Over the past ten years a visitor center was opened with a study hall and synagogue, a hall for writing notes before visiting the grave, a small bookstore, and refreshments for travelers. Local homes surrounding the cemetery have gradually been purchased as guest houses for the hundreds and thousands that come here now for many Jewish holidays. As is often the case in Chabad, none of this growth was centrally organized to begin with. It was a project of a very small group of loyal Hasidim who took the initiative. I tried to sit down to interview one of these Hasidim on a recent trip to the Ohel but I was only there for a day and I was told that he was in seclusion, writing a letter to the Rebbe. You can now also send a letter to the Rebbe by email. Looking back in a hundred years, this may stand out as the development of the most significant North American pilgrimage site of the twentieth century.
Published 11/12/24