On Sunday, over 6,500 rabbis and Jewish leaders gathered in Edison, N.J., for a gala concluding the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries (Kinus Hashluchim), billed as the largest rabbinic conference in the world. 

Since the 1950s, through a vast network of emissaries around the globe, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement has facilitated Jewish life in places with little to no Jewish infrastructure. This year, as global Jewry faces rising antisemitism and the impacts of Israel’s wars against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as the grinding conflict between Russia and Ukraine — both of which maintain strong Chabad communities — Chabad’s emissaries, stationed in 5,200 centers across over 100 countries, have been thrust onto the front lines.

The event took place less than a week after the funeral of Rabbi Zvi Kogan, the 28-year-old Israeli-Moldovan Chabad emissary who was killed last week after being abducted in Dubai. Rabbi Levi Duchman, the top Chabad rabbi in the United Arab Emirates, addressed the conference, alongside Rabbi Kalman Meir Ber, Israel’s newly elected Ashkenazi chief rabbi. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also sent recorded remarks. The gala featured the announcement of several new Chabad appointees, notably, Rabbi Kuty Kalmenson, the first permanent rabbinic presence in generations in Andorra, the tiny country between France and Spain. 

“For many of the rabbis, this conference was a family coming together after a very tough year, after many tragedies, and one that was very fresh and raw,” Rabbi Motti Seligson, director of media at Chabad, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “But it was also a moment of collective resolve,” he said. 

Duchman and several other speakers echoed this sentiment, calling for the expansion of Chabad programming and outreach as the community faces mounting threats. “Our response will have to be to grow even more,” Duchman said during a video tribute to Kogan on Sunday. 

As in many Jewish communal spaces this year, the war in Israel was a prominent theme throughout. According to Seligson, there are 1,400 Chabad emissary families in Israel, many of whom have been deeply affected by the war. “What’s going on there is on everyone’s minds,” said Seligson. 

Prior to the gala, the Chabad-Lubavitch “Kinus” brought together over 3,000 emissaries over five days for workshops, seminars, general sessions and farbrengens around the movement’s world headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York. 

The topics spanned supporting emerging Jewish communities, the Jewish response to rising antisemitism, the future and present of European Jewry, Jewish student life on campus, the unique challenges of Israeli expat communities worldwide and navigating complex halachic situations.

On Sunday, several emissaries also participated in pre-event panels, focusing on the war in Ukraine, campus antisemitism, the attack on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam and the Israel-Hamas war. 

Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz, an emissary in Kharkiv, Ukraine, was interviewed in one pre-event panel. When Moskovitz was initially stationed in Kharkiv in 1990, shortly after the Iron Curtain was lifted, the city was 40 minutes away from the border with Russia. As the war has dragged on, Russian military control has drawn closer. Now, Moskovitz said, the de facto border is only a four-minute drive away.

“There are those who walk between the drops of rain. We in Ukraine are walking between the bombs,” said Moskovitz.

The city is under daily bombardment, Moskovitz said, which caused damage to a Chabad-run school in 2022. Even as they work to rebuild, said Moskovitz, there has been new Jewish life in the city since the war began. “All of the sudden we became the center of help to all the people who stayed behind,” he said.