Rabbi Dov Yona Korn grew up in Morris Plains, NJ in a “very Reform” Jewish family and is today the shliach in NYU and several other schools in the Bowery district of NYC. In this episode, we discuss his discovering Chabad in the months after the Rebbe’s passing and the difference this timing made in his own understanding of the Rebbe and Lubavitch. We also discuss how the Rebbe’s ideas are filtered through layers of communal understanding, and how this communal understanding is...

Mendel Treitel grew up on shlichus in Montreal and is today a modern art painter living in Sydney. In this episode, Mendel shares his journey through yeshiva and how a number of special teachers helped him reconcile his artistic disposition with the norms of the Yeshiva. We discuss the challenges in being both a chossid and an artist, the question of individuality and how the art a chossid paints today should be different and unique from the art a chossid painted generations ago. Mendel's...

Rabbi Yosef Katzman grew up and lives in Crown Heights, where for many years he hosted the "Cable to Jewish Life" television show. In this episode, Rabbi Katzman reflects on different pivot points through the years and how these relate to the community's changing attitude towards asking questions. He also reflects on Rosh Hashana "back in the day" and where this leaves us going into this new year. ____ Homesick for Lubavitch began a year ago as a small passion project and has grown into...

Rabbi Naftali Silberberg grew up on shlichus in Detroit and today lives in Crown Heights where he is the co-director of curriculum for JLI and host of the Let's Talk Tanya podcast. In this episode, we trace Naftali's years in yeshiva that took him to Oholei Torah in the late 80s and then to Kfar Chabad, where he discovers a life long love - almost despite the yeshiva - for the study of Tanya. We discuss what makes the narrative of Tanya so unusual and how a thoughtful study of the Torah...

Rabbi Michoel Seligson is a teacher and author who lives in Crown Heights. He is also the son of Dr. Avrohom Abba Seligson, a"h, who was known as the Rebbe's doctor. In this episode, Rabbi Seligson shares his father's amazing story of becoming a doctor as a frum Jew in pre-war Europe, his escape to Shanghai and the role he played in saving the Jewish refugees over the course of the war, and his eventual arrival to Brooklyn where he developed a close, private and miraculous bond with the...

Rabbi Levi Avtzon grew up in Crown Heights and lives today in Johannesburg, South Africa where he is a rabbi at the Linksfield Synagogue. In this episode we continue the conversation in recent episodes about the tension between the soft and demanding voices in our community. We discuss the changing narratives in the Lubavitch community and how past demand for conformity has now given way to a therapeutic mindset, and we debate whether or not this change is in fact a true change at...

Mrs. Tzivia Jacobson grew up in in the 1930s in a Lubavitch family in Kutaisi, Georgia under Soviet rule. Nobody in her family had ever seen a picture of the Rebbe at that point, let alone met him, but every night her mother would put her to bed with a blessing that one day they would see the Rebbe. Her family would eventually escape the USSR and make their way to Brooklyn where Mrs. Jacobson would be one of a handful to see the beginnings of the Lubavitch story in Crown Heights and up to...

Reb Yossel Mochkin grew up in Crown Heights in the 1960s and 1970s, living in the cloistered world of his immigrant parents and their friends but surrounded by a fast changing and exciting world around him. Never finding it easy to fit in to the milieu around him, Yossel had to ask on his own questions about the direction his life was to take. These questions were never fully resolved, but a yechidus with the Rebbe gave Yossel a blueprint his is still continuing to implement. In this...

Rabbi Berry Farkash is a Shliach in Issaquah, Washington and director of Chabad of the Central Cascades. Several years ago, a local crisis led Berry into the world of psychotherapy where he became a certified clinical psychotherapist and practices Hypnotherapy and other Transpersonal modalities. Today all of his clients are fellow Lubavitchers, many of them shluchim. In this conversation, we discuss his own journey toward finding the Rebbe’s softer voice and the need for forgiveness and...

Mrs Toby Hecht is the director of Shabtai, a global Jewish leadership society at Yale University in New Haven. Toby grew up on shlichus in Seattle and was finishing up her senior year in Beth Rivka High School in Crown Heights when she and her friends were swept up in the collective grief of Gimmel Tammuz. In this conversation, Toby reflects on the feelings of that time, the emergent awareness of needing to move forward and the responsibility we have today to take decisive ownership of the...

Rabbi Dr. Shmary Brownstein is a shliach in Davis, California where he also wrote his doctoral dissertation on the famous series of maamorim, Bosi Lgani. In this episode, we discuss Shmary's growing up in Crown Heights in the early 90s and his decision to leave for Brunoy. We discuss how the conception of past changed over those years and how some of the ideas of Bosi Lgani might inform how we ought to approach staying connected to the past without becoming lost in it.

Rabbi Peretz and Chanie Chein both grew up in Crown Heights and are the shluchim today at Brandeis University near Boston, Massachusetts. They have also recently founded M54, a program founded on the relational connection between learners as they embark on shared yet individual explorations, resulting in profound outcomes. In this conversation, Peretz and I discuss his growing up in Crown Heights in the late 80s and early 90s and his pivotal decision to leave Crown Heights to study in a...

Rabbi Moshe Greenwald grew up on shlichus in Long Beach, CA and is on shlichus today in Downtown Los Angeles. In this episode, we discuss his childhood memories of coming to 770 for Pesach, his coming of age during the turbulence of 1992 and the questions he's had to wrestle with since. The conversations leads us to questions about the possibility of a Chossid's living with uncertainty.

Rabbi Pinny Andrusier lives in Cooper City, Florida where he is a shliach for more than thirty years. Growing up, Pinny found his place less in the structure of yeshiva and more in the adventure of shlichus, which is where he hoped to find his place after marriage. But when the time came, he struggled to find a place in shlichus and almost gave up on his dream, until a note from the Rebbe a few days before 27 Adar changed everything. In this episode, we discuss the challenge of fitting in,...

Rabbi Shmuly Avtzon is a Mashpia in the Yeshiva of 770 and director of Sichos In English, an organization founded by his late father and my uncle, Rabbi Yonah Avtzon a"h. In this episode, we compare and contrast our childhood experience and recollection of 27 Adar and 3 Tammuz, him growing up in the thick of the Rebbe's neighborhood of Crown Heights and me growing up across the world on shlichus in Hong Kong. We discuss the shockwaves these events had on our childhood, and whether or not...

Marc Asnin is a documentary photographer who lives in New York City.  Over the years, Marc has photographed all kinds of subjects, from the most marginizaled people on death row to his own Uncle Charlie. In 1992, Marc was commissioned by the New York Times to photograph the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Crown Heights community as part of a feature essay, The Oracle of Crown Heights. Just a few weeks before the stroke, Marc’s pictures are from the last and most iconic pictures of that year. In...

Before becoming a full time life coach, Fitz Rabin was a master sofer for over a decade. Over the years, Fitz struggled to identify with some of the practices seen as basic to being a Lubavitcher, namely the study of Chitas. Today, he celebrates 1000 days of learning chitas before shkiya. We discuss the feelings of alienation from mass practice, the search for individual connection and the general tension between being true to yourself within a broader community.

Mrs. Vivi Deren grew up in Nashville, Tenessee as one of the first children of shluchim in the Unites States. Today she lives in Connecticut where she has been on shlichus with her husband for nearly fifty years. In this episode, she speaks about her parents growing up as chassidim in the United States of the 1920s and 1930s, and about her grandparents who raised them. We speak about how the community of Lubavitch in the United States has changed since, and how the Lubavitch ethic of...

Rabbi Yossi Morozov grew up in Brooklyn and was on shlichus with his family for twelve years in Ulyanovsk, a city one thousand kilometers east of Moscow. After being forced to leave Russia, Yossi moved with his family to the Pomona area in New York and became a life insurance agent. In this conversation we discuss his choices to go on shlichus and then into business and the challenges these choices posed to his own Lubavitch identity.

Rabbi Simon Jacobson is known today as a bestselling author and founder of the Meaningful Life Center. But for many years he was one of the transcribers and editors of the Rebbe’s Farbrengen. In this conversation we discuss some of the paradoxes he observed over the years, both regarding the Rebbe’s use of technology in sharing the Farbrengen around the world but also in how the Rebbe empowered his chassidim to think for themselves.

Rabbi Ruvi New grew up in Melbourne, Australia and is a shliach today in Boca Raton, Florida. In this conversation, we discuss the changing dynamics of Lubavitch identity in the decade between his and his oldest's brother, Moshe New, cross Pacific journeys to 770. We also discuss how over those years there seemed to be a tipping point of an "arum," or atmosphere, that brought more and more of Lubavitch into a powerful core, and where that leaves us today. ______ Homesick for Lubavitch is a...

Eli Nash is a businessman and philanthropist who grew up in Crown Heights and lives today in South Florida. Starting with his efforts to raise awareness about sexual abuse and then porn addiction, Eli has become very active in different causes surrounding mental health in the community. In this episode, we discuss his own journey away from (and back to?) Lubavitch, the individuals who pointed him back to his roots, and the challenging work of finding the good from the bad.

R' Chaim Itche Drizin was one of the first shluchim to set out in the late 60s, directing Chabad of Northern California from his Chabad House in Berkeley. Today he works as a therapist who in the course of his work speaks with many young men and women in the Lubavitch community. In our conversation, we speak about his growing up as the youngest son of the famed chossid, R' Avrohom Maayor, the gap between him and his father's generation, a how this "gap of translation" persists to this very...