1974: Mitzvah "Tanks"

Every weekday morning a cavalcade of vans fans out across New York City seeking parking places on the busiest street corners and thoroughfares. Earnest young men with flowing beards emerge, wearing yarmulkes, plain white shirts and dark trousers, and as they take positions around the vans, loudspeakers on board start to play Hasidic folk music. "Good morning. Are you Jewish?" the youths ask passers-by. If the answer is yes and a prospect is willing, he is then escorted into the back of the truck… They teach their guests to use to tefillin -- two small leather boxes containing Biblical passages and bound by thongs to the head and arm to symbolize the ties of reverence… "These trucks," says Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, a Lubavitcher official, "are our tanks against assimilation."

Newsweek July 15, 1974