Reporter’s Notebook: Workshops by Day, Dancing by Night

Day 2:

After spending most of the previous day either making their way to New York or catching up with family and friends, thousands of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries attended workshops Thursday on a slew of topics ranging from teenage programming to applying technological advances to Jewish outreach.

Reaching into their jacket pockets or scrolling through their Blackberries to consult the schedule between sessions at the 25th annual International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries, attendees found little down time, save for meals in the grand ballroom of the Oholei Torah yeshiva in Brooklyn. There, conservations could be heard not only in English, but in Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian as well.

Booths set up in the school’s lobby allowed visiting rabbis to check their e-mail, and offered interested emissaries a quick lesson in setting up a Web site. A table displaying hundreds of DVDs produced by Jewish Educational Media, meanwhile, attracted a continuous crowd as emissaries stocked up on titles to show their community members and families back home.

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One of the most popular workshops at this year’s conference appeared to be “Unleashing the Power of Social Networking,” where emissaries packed a room to orient themselves to the various programs available online, such as Facebook and Twitter, to promote their Chabad Houses’ activities. (Since the beginning of the conference, attendees have posted hundreds of updates to their social networking accounts.)

The evening general session emphasized the special significance of the current Hebrew year, 5770, with Rabbi Mendel Feller of S. Paul, Minn., leading a multimedia presentation on the history of the Brooklyn building housing Lubavitch World Headquarters, located at 770 Eastern Parkway.

Later that night, the emissaries joined the local Lubavitch community and contingents from other New York neighborhoods in celebrating the completion of a Torah scroll in memory of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, the slain directors of Mumbai, India’s Chabad House, and the four other Jews who were murdered alongside them in last year’s attacks.

Beginning with a ceremony at the yeshiva, the celebration continued down the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare before concluding with several hours of dancing at Lubavitch World Headquarters.

“This is a most befitting tribute,” said Rivka Holtzberg’s father, Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg of Afula, Israel. “These [emissaries] were the life and family of Gabi and Rivky, who are surely celebrating” with them.