ePub Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown in History

Description

“Excuse me; are you Jewish?” With these words; the relentlessly cheerful; ideologically driven emissaries of Chabad-Lubavitch approach perfect strangers on street corners throughout the world in their ongoing efforts to persuade their fellow Jews to live religiously observant lives. In The Rebbe’s Army; award-winning journalist Sue Fishkoff gives us the first behind-the-scenes look at this small Brooklyn-based group of Hasidim and the extraordinary lengths to which they take their mission of outreach. They seem to be everywhere—in big cities; small towns; and suburbs throughout the United States; and in sixty-one countries around the world. They light giant Chanukah menorahs in public squares; run “Chabad houses” on college campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge; give weekly bible classes in the Capitol basement in Washington; D.C.; run a nonsectarian drug treatment center in Los Angeles; sponsor the world’s biggest Passover Seder in Nepal; establish synagogues; Hebrew schools; and day-care centers in places that are often indifferent and occasionally hostile to their outreach efforts. They have built a billion-dollar international empire; with their own news service; publishing house; and hundreds of Websites.Who are these people? How successful are they in making Jews more observant? What influence does their late Rebbe; Menachem Mendel Schneerson (who some thought was the Messiah); continue to have on his followers? Fishkoff spent a year interviewing Lubavitch emissaries from Anchorage to Miami and has written an engaging and fair-minded account of a Hasidic group whose motives and methodology continue to be the subject of speculation and controversy.From the Hardcover edition.