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<\/a><\/p>\nMourners grieve over the coffins of Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, the Chabad House emissaries who were killed in the terror attack in Mumbai, during their funeral service Dec. 2, 2008 in Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv. (David Silverman\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
I was a young rabbinical student at the central Chabad Yeshiva in New York. The news reached us like a thunderbolt. Kfar Chabad, then a small, fledgling village a few miles southeast of Tel Aviv, was made up mostly of Jews who had escaped Soviet persecution, the gulag, and World War II Europe. The vocational school in Kfar Chabad served young immigrants, many of them refugees from North Africa. <\/p>\n
Having lost homes, livelihoods and loved ones in the war, they had barely begun to rebuild. Now they were demoralized and afraid. Would anywhere in the world be safe for them? <\/p>\n
The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, provided an answer. He sent a telegram to the grieving village, three Hebrew words: b\u2019hemshech habinyan tenuchamu, \u201cthrough continued building you will be consoled.\u201d<\/p>\n
The answer lay not in fighting antisemitism: It lay in building a meaningful Jewish life.<\/p>\n
He encouraged them to expand, to build a larger school and a stronger educational program, and to draw more people to the village by developing additional social and educational services. <\/p>\n
He also sent a delegation of rabbinical students to Israel. <\/p>\n
I was one of them. Transatlantic flights were a rare thing at the time, and nonstop flights from New York to Israel didn\u2019t exist. We were told to pack books \u2013 Jewish books, Torah literature, Chasidic literature to distribute on a journey that took us first to postwar Jewish communities in Europe. <\/p>\n
Our assignment was to speak wherever we could. And that\u2019s what we did. Wherever we had the opportunity, we engaged with Jews \u2013 many still haunted by the aftermath of the war \u2013 encouraging them to embrace their faith. <\/p>\n
In Israel, our schedule was equally demanding. We traveled throughout the country, speaking, teaching and coordinating farbrengens, gatherings devoted to Torah study, song and spiritual reflection. Our base was Kfar Chabad, where the residents were still reeling from the massacre.<\/p>\n
In retrospect, it is striking what the Rebbe\u2019s agenda left out. Today, when Jews are attacked the conversation quickly turns to antisemitism: how to confront it, how to persuade others to condemn it. But the Rebbe had given us no such assignment. <\/p>\n
He understood that living in opposition to those who hate us is not a way forward. He did not make persecution the organizing center of Jewish life, nor did he direct communal resources toward institutions dedicated to tracking and fighting bigotry. <\/p>\n
Indeed, following the recent stabbing of a member of the local Chabad community in New York, charged as a federal hate crime, the victim returned to his rounds helping Jewish New Yorkers wrap tefillin the very next day.<\/p>\n
The Rebbe wanted us to empower Jews with education, to anchor the meaning of their Jewish heritage in living knowledge, and to cultivate a vibrant Jewish experience. He wanted Jews to stand tall not despite who they were, but because of who they were. <\/p>\n
This wasn\u2019t an argument against confronting bigotry. It was a recognition that even the most successful campaign against antisemitism cannot, by itself, produce a meaningful Jewish life experience. A community may be well defended and still lack the knowledge, the values and the traditions that give its existence meaning. <\/p>\n
The people of Kfar Chabad grieved the loss of those six lives. And for a while, it dominated their fears. But the Rebbe would not let the violence determine the community\u2019s future.<\/p>\n
The residents remained. Kfar Chabad still retains the feeling of a village, with red-topped roofs and low-slung whitewashed homes. But today it counts more than 2,000 families and a robust infrastructure with schools and synagogues. Hardly a day passes without Jewish celebrations \u2013 weddings and births, bar and bat mitzvahs \u2013 that spill joy into its streets. The village schools and campuses serve some 10,000 local and commuter students. <\/p>\n
This week, thousands of Chabad emissaries, rabbis who lead Jewish communities worldwide, will convene at Chabad-Lubavitch Headquarters in New York for their annual conference. They will come from places around the globe, from Mumbai to Bondi Beach, where in the face of terror attacks they have established deep roots and built communities that nurture life that others sought to tear down. <\/p>\n
Seventy years ago, I traveled to Kfar Chabad as a young student, with a message of encouragement to grow and build. I could not have imagined then how critical that message would become, decades later, to the survival of Jewish life.<\/p>\n
Today, many speak with admiration for the resilience with which Jews rise up after every setback. The Jewish people have indeed endured extraordinary suffering and repeatedly found the strength to begin again. <\/p>\n
But that is only part of the story. Resilience is not an end in itself. Survival is not the sum of our aspirations. <\/p>\n
What drives us forward is not simply the determination to withstand what others have done to us. It is the conviction that Jewish life has something of enduring value to offer \u2013 to our children, to future generations, and to the world. <\/p>\n
Seventy years later, that distinction matters more than ever.<\/p>\n
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA, its parent company, 70 Faces Media, or the CCJN.<\/em><\/p>\n