Largest "Sukkah Mobiles" Ever Built Take Up Manhattan Positions

Two 48 feet by 8 feet trailers converted to mobile sukkahs took up positions in Midtown Manhattan this week in an effort to get Jews to make a blessing in the structures as part of Sukkot celebrations. The vehicles are the largest such "Sukkah Mobiles" ever employed by Chabad-Lubavitch, which for years has taken advantage of a provision in Jewish Law that allows sukkahs to be transportable and dispatched hundreds of roving huts in cities across the world.

The rabbis who staff and drive the sukkahs maintain a supply of lulav and etrog sets for Jews to fulfill the biblical commandment to make a blessing on the Four Species of date palm branch, willow branches, twigs of myrtle and a citron fruit.

Sponsored by the Mitzvah Tank office, a division of the Lubavitch Youth Organization, the two big-rig-sized sukkahs at the corner of Broadway and 37th Street in New York also offer the opportunity for Manhattan residents and workers to eat and sit inside the structures, actions commanded in the Torah during the week-long festival of Sukkot.

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According to Rabbi Mordechai Hirsch, last year more than 80,000 Jews in the tri-state area alone fulfilled the mitzvah of eating in a sukkah through the "Mobile Sukkah" project. This year, special emphasis is being placed on meeting people at major train stations as they head off on their morning commutes.

"We are not waiting for them to come to the synagogue," said Hirsch. "We are going to them."

As in past years, Chabad-Lubavitch of Midtown, co-directed by Rabbi Yehoshua and Brocha Metzger, also erected a stationary sukkah in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library.