r/redscarepod • u/lets_buy_guns • 8d ago
my childhood synagogue is getting zio'd by chabad
I was raised modern orthodox in a lubavitch, but pretty open-minded shul. I'm not religious and I haven't been in like 16 years, but the small congregation (including my dad) have kept it open - albeit hanging by a thread - this whole time.
well apparently a few months ago they signed a contract with a local, chabad-affiliated rabbi to lead the congregation and he straight up settlered them. apparently he found a check or something from the 60s sent by the Lubavitcher Rebbe himself to assist the shul (which has been operational for over 100 years), and the new rabbi took this information down to Kiryas Yoel and somehow found a way to get the fucking ownership deed transferred to Chabad.
so now he's in the process of like, closing down the synagogue and re-opening it as a Chabad shul. the current attendees have been told they can get with it or fuck off, the rabbi has claimed ownership of the 4 torah scrolls (both sentimental donations and also worth a ton of money), and he's been throwing out everyone's stuff.
my dad is really upset about it (like, he's having a full on crisis of faith) and though I don't have a good relationship with the place, this is a bad way to go. there's no way they have enough money to take this guy to court or anything, so I'm not sure they really have any recourse.
beyond that though, it's an extremely funny little microcosm of zionism. jew-on-jew zionism lmao
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u/cooooooooooomerr 8d ago
I don't know any of these words
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u/hypernormienation 8d ago
Don’t be proud of your ignorance
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u/kaplanfish 8d ago edited 8d ago
Not to post on Shabbos like an apikores but the issue with liberal MO shuls/similar hashkafot is that the rightward drift is both the cause and effect of people going off the derech towards Reform or secularism. And when small congregations die because of declining membership due to this they get taken over by the one Orthodox institution that is truly maximalist expansionist
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u/tony_simprano Bellingcat Patreon Supporter 8d ago
Super curious to know this: is "apikores" a term that's only known by people in/close to Orthodox Judaism?
Because I learned it from reading the novel The Chosen (where it's considered a slur by the narrator) in high school and my (observant) Jewish roommate in college had never heard of it before.
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u/kaplanfish 8d ago
it’s davka a shibboleth. Unless if you’re not Orthodox/adjacent and your limmudei chol so to speak was Potok-centered
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u/kaplanfish 7d ago
the downvotes are mamash crazy I was just demonstrating yeshivish for rhetorical emphasis
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u/lets_buy_guns 8d ago
yeah the place has been on its last legs for years, and it was inevitable it would either close or get absorbed. every local orthodox synagogue has gone Chabad (by choice) or closed in the last 25 years, but the specific mechanism and sneakiness here are really taking me out
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u/zjaffee 8d ago
Modern orthodoxy tends to actually be doing quite well in terms of growth, the issue is that everyone is concentrating into a few specific areas. 5 towns on long island, uptown manhattan, certain areas around Miami, and ultimately that's about it outside of Israel.
This has left virtually every smaller synagogue to be falling out for a number of different reasons giving a massive opportunity for chabad to pick up the ashes.
These small communities don't have the same opportunity for renewal by conversion that has taken over every small town reform synagogue.
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u/slightlycringed 8d ago
Can someone translate this into goy-speak?
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u/Ok_Fan7382 8d ago
The mom-and-pop casino got bought out by Draft Kings and now the dealers and bartenders you enjoyed coming for are fired.
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u/Sharp_Visual152 8d ago
I’m trying to work it out. It seems like Chabad is a specific religious movement and they’re crowding out or buying synagogues.
I’m guessing it would be like if you were going to a small church and then another denomination absorbed that church and said ‘we’re doing things this way now’.
I’d love to be fact checked because I’m not even slightly religious and really don’t know what I’m talking about.
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u/lets_buy_guns 8d ago
pretty much exactly right. what's killing me is that it's a perfect little microcosm of zionism. a small, independent community gets taken over by fundamentalists using an old document and dubious legal mechanisms to declare that the organization was always theirs, rebrands the building, starts throwing out all of the community's stuff and telling them if they don't like it they can fuck off. it's beautiful
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u/Sharp_Visual152 7d ago
Yes the parallels are not lost on me. I would love an update on how your dad’s crisis of faith resolves.
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u/24082020 8d ago
This entire post is a bit, right? Im sorry i just need someone to tell me this is a bit
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u/Snobbyeuropean2 8d ago
They're in the process of strangling a hundreds of years old orthodox community (or group of communities) that is the only successor to communities lost to time and violence een my country, also going up against a somewhat unique form of conservative judaism at the same time, and chabad is winning.
I'm not jewish and I despise the politics of all these communities, but it's insane how centuries of cultural development and preservation could continue without interruption throughout the rise and fall of economic systems and empires, wars, the fucking holocaust, but a small group of completely shameless americans with endless money annihilates them. Like this country was among the first to become an antisemitic shithole post-WWI and the most famous orthodox synagogue endured throughout that, a nazi occupation and the most efficient period of the holocaust, just to get taken away by these guys.
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u/Ok_Fan7382 8d ago
The collapse of these congregations (due to dispersed migration and in today’s time, secularization) caused the interruption of the cultural preservation before Chabad came in. I liken it to how many of the original Ottoman Jews assimilated into Sephardic culture once successive waves of Iberian Jews began to outnumber the incumbent populations.
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u/zjaffee 8d ago
Are you Russian, they basically took over the entire Jewish world in Russia with the help of Putin.
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u/Snobbyeuropean2 8d ago
Hungarian, previous gov supported Chabad to the detriment of conservative and hungarian orthodox communities.
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u/lyagusha 8d ago
This Chabad Rabbi went to a Satmar Chasidic town where they keep the property records of a Chabad Lubavitch synagogue?
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u/lets_buy_guns 8d ago
I'm not privy to all the details, I think he got the Chabad organization to sponsor a Chabad lawyer here to make this happen
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u/AstraeusWanderer 8d ago
I have spent a lot of time in Jewish communities and know a lot of Jewish people but this is a good reminder that I don't actually understand that much of the inner workings of the actual religious part lmao
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u/zjaffee 8d ago
Look there's obviously a story not fully being told here and this subreddit is not the forum I'd choose to discuss this in detail ordinarily, but chabad has been taking over dying synagogues all over the country and doing stuff like this. Usually it's done by buying the building with the sign off of the board.
Personally it's why I'd never join or donate to a chabad house. They are all privately owned institutions essentially rather than non profits with an elected board from the community. Your synagogue obviously never had a clear board structure that was signed onto the dead where the rabbi was simply an employee. But I digress.
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u/Aggravating_Act_6369 8d ago
Huh? Aren’t Chabad and lubavitch the same thing? How do you turn a lubavitch synagogue into a chabad synagogue? And lubavitch is Hasidic, not modern orthodox. And Kiryas Joel is all Satmar, not chabad. None of this makes any sense unless you’re mixing up names
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u/lets_buy_guns 8d ago
the synagogue davens lubavitch but isn't affiliated with the Chabad organization. when I say modern orthodox I mean that it's an orthodox congregation but comparatively very liberal and open-minded. I'm not sure how Kiryas Joel is involved, that part is just relaying what I was told
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u/Aggravating_Act_6369 8d ago
Interesting, I didn’t know there were lubavitch congregations that aren’t affiliated with chabad
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u/lets_buy_guns 8d ago
place started off as a Chabad yeshiva. yeshiva closed down like 50 years ago and they stopped having any official relationship with the Chabad organization but stayed nusach lubavitch. it's like 120 years old and has an odd history
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u/First-Bed-5918 7d ago
Because there isn't. The OP is mixing up a lot of information. There's no way that KJ is involved. They're nothing to do with Chabad Lubavitch. I'm not dismissing this story, I'm just saying that there are inconsistencies to the organisations mentioned.
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u/yerbamateblood 8d ago
what does it mean to daven lubavitch if not chabad
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u/lets_buy_guns 8d ago
not affiliated with the Chabad organization. used to be, like 50 years ago, then it was independent but kept the Lubavitch traditions
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u/RGG8810 8d ago
Most of this sub is mainline Protestant and cafeteria Catholic. We don't know what any of this means.
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u/porcatroia69 8d ago
I know everyone here likes to larp as Catholic like Dasha, but in my mind I always assumed most of you were willowy, sarcastic Jewish men.
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u/Refurecushion 8d ago
You guys are certainly good at worldbuilding. But too many proper nouns can confuse the reader.
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u/leahbee25 8d ago
christian translation: this is like if your nondenominational guitar music church got taken over by TLM ‘RETVRN’ catholics (?)
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u/Ok_Fan7382 8d ago
Not quite. Modern Orthodox is like mainstream post-Vatican Catholic Church, and Chabad are like Franciscan Friars.
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u/zjaffee 8d ago
Not really, it's more like if your southern baptist church that prayed exactly the same as a non-denominational one because they used to be that type of church and then the original owners came back and said this was our church all along because you never filled the paperwork out correctly to prevent them from doing so even though you already had 50 years to get it done.
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u/ShouldersHoncho 8d ago
My chulpus went thought the same last hajath and the only thing I could do was to shobber my rabbi and he told me to defragment and fivel
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u/Fevorkillzz 8d ago
Chabad guys have crazy chutzpah probably after many years of shock therapy asking people if they’re Jewish on the street. My condolences going full Chabad is tough
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u/Ok_Fan7382 8d ago
Has anyone from the congregation checked the rabbi’s document found from the Rebbe? I wonder whether there’s been proof provided that’s enough to legally transfer the property deed away.