Chabad-Lubavitch leaders are working overtime to transform the Mumbai attacks into an unparalleled opportunity for spreading the movement’s message.
Chabad has received unprecedented media exposure since terrorists struck its center in Mumbai, killing two of its emissaries to the Indian city — Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah — along with four other Jews.
To capitalize on the wave of attention, the movement has conducted an orchestrated marketing and public relations campaign. Chabad officials in New York and emissaries around the world are conducting media interviews, and constituents who have been touched by the movement are reaching out in droves to local and international publications to extol its praises.
The Chabad media operation, which is run from the office of the movement’s official Web site, Chabad.org, kicked into high gear when news started to filter in Nov. 26 that the Mumbai Chabad house was among the institutions besieged by gunmen in terrorist raids that ultimately saw the deaths of 172 people, including nine terrorists.
By the time the deaths in the Chabad house had been confirmed, the movement’s media liaisons had spent several consecutive days in their New York offices, working on little or no sleep, as hundreds of calls poured in from the international media seeking interviews about the Holtzberg family and Chabad in general.
Within a week of the attacks, Chabad had raised about $1 million through mailboxes it had opened on Chabad.org — one for helping to raise Moshe, the Holtzbergs’ 2-year-old son who escaped the attack on the Chabad house, and one to help rebuild the Chabad house in Mumbai, which was damaged badly by explosions and gunfire during the terrorists’ siege and attempted rescue by Indian Special Forces.
Such publicity and fundraising efforts in the wake of tragedy may strike some as crass, if not inappropriate and offensive. But the approach can just as well be understood as a natural reaction for a movement that prides itself on its success in helping to rebuild Jewish life around the globe after the Holocaust.
In recent days, Chabad officials have spoken openly about their strategic response to the attacks.
“It is an opportunity to connect more and more Jews to the mission … and part of that is channeling the empathy people are now feeling,” said Rabbi Yosef Kantor, the director of the Chabad of Thailand and the emissary who helped established the movement’s presence in Mumbai prior to the Holtzbergs’ arrival.
“I see this as being a big package or opportunity to be able to inspire and direct Jews on how they can channel their outpouring of support and sympathy, their emotion, rage, outrage and frustration,” he added.
Even within the context of mass executions, the story of the Holtzbergs is compelling. A young couple from New York in their early 20s set off for an exotic land to fulfill a religious mission to provide a home away from home to traveling Jews and Israelis. After establishing themselves and building a community, they were struck down in a horrific terrorist attack — apparently targeted specifically because of their Jewish mission — leaving behind their toddler son, who was heroically rescued by his Indian nanny the day before his second birthday.
It is difficult to quantify exactly how much press Chabad has received as the result of the Mumbai massacre, but in the aftermath of the attacks, many major newspapers have published features on Chabad’s local and global efforts. CNN.com posted at least 10 video segments featuring Chabad and the Holtzbergs, including a four-minute segment dedicated exclusively to describing the movement’s activities.
In addition to the news coverage, major newspapers around the world, including the Wall Street Journal, published opinion pieces lauding Chabad from writers who have been personally affected or touched by the movement.
Dozens of print journalists, as well as camera crews fromm major news networks, covered a Chabad-organized news conference on Nov. 28 at the movement’s Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y., shortly after the Chabad house deaths had been confirmed. Footage from the conference, which featured emotional announcements from top Chabad leaders, was broadcast throughout the world.
The news conference became the platform as well for the chairman of Chabad’s education and social services arm, Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, who oversees the movement’s emissaries, to announce that Chabad was starting a fund to pay for Moshe’s upbringing.
While fundraising in the immediate aftermath was geared toward helping the Holtzberg’s son and rebuilding in Mumbai, the stepped-up publicity may also prove to be a boon for Chabad houses. Chabad emissaries usually receive minimal seed money to start their outposts, but each house is responsible for raising its own budget each year. Though Chabad does not keep a formal database on how much each outpost raises, officials estimate that the emissaries combined take in more than $1 billion per year.
Fundraising in the aftermath of Mumbai is more than a necessary evil, Chabad officials say — it is part and parcel of their mission to bring Jews closer to their Judaism.
However, Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a spokesman for Chabad, stressed that Chabad emissaries are engaged in honest, genuine work and are not simply seeking to cash in on a situation.
“The issue here is not about involving people in Chabad. It is about doing another mitzvah, about ensuring that we each keep adding light in our homes and communities, not about affiliation,” he said.
“I think that in addition to all of the learning and conditioning we’ve had over the years, and all the remembering and learning that we each do of how the rebbe, of righteous memory, dealt with tragedy, one can say that on a very deep, raw, visceral level, many shluchim are driven to simply ensure that Gabi and Rivkah’s deaths will not have been in vain.”