Last week in New Jersey, at the gala banquet capping off Chabad’s 41st annual International Conference, 6,500 rabbis made a shiva call to Jerusalem.

“All of us will jointly extend our condolences,” Rabbi Levi Duchman, the chief rabbi in the United Arab Emirates, said to an audience seated around hundreds and hundreds of round tables, everyone Zoomed into Israel.

Levi Duchman, chief Chabad rabbi of the United Arab Emirates

Behind Duchman was the image of planet Earth, showing the breadth of Chabad outposts all over the world. Chabad, an organisation known to Jews all over the world is famous for having emissaries, or shluchim, everywhere, including remote locales places with minuscule Jewish populations. In attendance were rabbis from more than 100 countries and all 50 American states.

Rabbis of the Caribbean mixed with rabbis from all over Europe and South America, as they’ve done for decades.

But this year’s conference was different. 

The UAE have released the names and photos of the three suspects arrested in connection with the murder of Rabbi Zvi Kogan

Just a week before, Chabad had lost one of their own: Rabbi Zvi Kogan, an emissary to the United Arab Emirates, had been abducted and murdered by Uzbek citizens, allegedly in the pay of Iran.

Back in New Jersey, the crowd stood from their seats.

"May Hashem comfort you among all mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” Duchman recited from behind his podium, as Kogan’s family watched along in Jerusalem from his parent’s house.

The tragedy in UAE is just one of many during a difficult year filled with skyrocketing antisemitism, war in Israel, and war in Ukraine. It’s also one of many tragedies Chabad has dealt with since the 1950s, when the Chabad spiritual leader, also known as the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, began the custom of sending shluchim across the world to support Jews wherever they may wander.

Sixteen years ago, around the time of that year’s conference, the directors of the Mumbai Chabad House were murdered—the deceased Mumbai rabbi’s niece happened to be Kogan’s wife.

How the JC covered the Mumbai massacre at the Chabad house

This year’s conference, held throughout Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighbourhood where the Chabad movement is headquartered, was the largest rabbinic gathering in the world. The theme was lech lecha, which means “go forth”—God’s commandment to Abraham to spread the message of one God to others.

The annual group photo of all the Chabad Shluchim (Shmulie Grossbaum/Chabad.org)

You can’t allow tragedy to transform “into group misery or group fear or even rage,” Rabbi Yosef Chaim Kantor, an emissary in Bangkok, who has attended the conference for 31 years, told the JC.

“Our job is to make sure that the memory of the rabbi [Zvi Kogan] and the energy of his life gets transformed into and multiplied in a way that should counter the evil and the darkness,” he said. “We have a collective searing pain, a hole that cannot be filled, but the pain needs to be taken to a place of action, movement, growth.”

It’s the same message the Rebbe had given his followers in 1956 after a terror attack at a Jerusalem Chabad school left five children and their teacher dead: turn towards Torah and mitzvot, he said, and grow.

Coming together at the convention was powerful, because “We're all in the same boat,” Kantor said. Whether on college campuses or in countries thousands of miles away, “We're all identified as Jewish. We're all high profile. Our job is to bring people together. Our job is to be out there dressed the way we're dressed, exuding the confidence that we exude, confidence only in Hashem.”

The five-day conference, also known as the kinus, meaning gathering of people, was filled with workshops held throughout Crown Heights about European Jewry, rising antisemitism, fundraising, Jewish life on campus, social media, end-of-life counseling, and mental health, but the sessions were merely “a technicality,” Rabbi Bentzi Sudak of Chabad-Lubavitch of Hampstead Garden Suburb in London, who has attended the conference for 20 years, told the JC. “It’s the energy that you feel that cannot really be put into words.”

What truly matters is the shmoozing, Kantor said. “Getting together and encouraging each other, taking ideas from each other, networking, brain brainstorming. It's the water cooler conversations in the tents outside the Rebbe’s resting place.”

Rabbis at the Ohel in Queens (Shmulie Grossbaum/Chabad.org)

The Rebbe passed away in 1994, and the conference included a visit to his Queens grave. In the coffee area outside, Kantor bumped into a fellow rabbi who informed him of a philanthropist who wanted to support his work. It was a connection he would have not made if he hadn’t attended.

Every year since 1984, the rabbis attending gather outside the Chabad headquarters for a group photo, filled with thousands of black-hatted rabbis who all attempt to look at the camera at the same time. It’s a very Jewish version of Where’s Wally. A joyous moment, yet, even then, the rabbis acknowledged their losses, saying prayers for Israel, the hostages, and for Kogan

Much of the conference may have seemed similar to past events, Rabbi Motti Seligson, director of media at Chabad, told the JC : “The overall principles are the same, overall values, and the work that needs to be done is the same… We are talking about Jewish life from cradle to grave, every minute of the day and every minute of the night."

Having a shiva call at a gala is “quite poignant and quite difficult,” Sudak said. “You're looking at your colleague’s father on the screen. That really shakes you. Your reaction to that is, ‘We must not let the Jewish people be defined by that.’”

Instead, he said, you need to create meaning for Jewish culture and Jewish identity that is joyful and not defined by antisemitism.

The gala was also attended by influencers and politicians including US congressmen Mike Lawler and Ritchie Torres.

There were hours of speeches by Chabad emissaries who spoke different languages, including by a rabbi who used sign language to share how he uses what some see as a handicap to connect with others. In a video, one Maryland urologist shared how Chabad helped him learn to spread mitzvot himself, showing the ripple effect of their work. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent recorded remarks. The event ended with everyone up and bouncing, grabbing each other’s shoulders and dancing with joy.

(Shmulie Grossbaum/Chabad.org)

On his journey back to Thailand, Kantor plans to stop in Israel to visit a first cousin whose son was killed in Gaza. With over 20 hours of travel, he will have plenty of time to decompress.

The conference, the mourning, the banquet, the dancing was “a collective hug that we have for each other,” Kantor said. “The collective hug that we are empowered to transmit to the people of Israel, to the Jews, and to humanity.”