No Barriers Before G-d: A Look at Chabad’s Dues-Free Communities

With Yom Kippur soon upon us, Jews around the world are thinking about synagogues, whether they attend one daily or haven’t gone since last Yom Kippur. Chabad.org’s High Holidays Directory is seeing a record number of visitors eager to find a welcoming service in any one of the 110 countries and territories, or 50 states, home to a Chabad-Lubavitch center. Emissaries are reporting larger numbers than ever before, with RSVPs and walk-ins up at least 15% from pre-Covid times. While other congregations are beginning to step away from the “pay-to-pray” model, the Chabad centers they’re emulating have never charged mandatory dues or membership fees.

The results speak for themselves: According to data collected by demographers Ed Heyman and Joel Kotkin, between 2001 and 2020, Chabad went from 346 to 1,036 synagogues in the United States, and that’s without counting the hundreds of Chabad on Campus, young professional, teen and youth centers that host prayer services throughout the year, as well as hundreds of pop-up services led by Chabad’s rabbinical students in small towns and prisons. In fact, according to Pew’s 2021 study of the Jewish community, a staggering 38 percent of American Jews engage with Chabad. This growth came about even as U.S. synagogues operating on the denominational model suffered a 29 percent decline.

“Judaism used to be a given, synagogues had a captive audience,” Keith Krivitzky, a Jewish nonprofit consultant and former CEO of the Jewish Federation of Monmouth County, N.J., tells Chabad.org. In that environment, he explains, the traditional membership-based model worked. Today, however, “affiliation isn’t a given, people can choose anything as consumers.” Especially for infrequent attendees, “why pay for the service you go to twice a year?”

But the dramatic rise in Chabad attendance across the country—and worldwide—isn’t a result of a disruptive business model or attracting less well-to-do community members,say demographers and communal leaders. Rather, it is an expression of the deep spiritual values that underscore Chabad’s work. As Krivitzky puts it: “There’s a fundamental difference between ‘It’s free if you can’t afford it’ and Chabad’s ‘You are welcome just because you are Jewish—no strings attached’ attitude.”

“The membership model is wrong—and dead,” explains Danny Fujita, a regular at Chabad of Key Biscayne, Fla., who is also past president of a South Florida congregation where he still serves on the board. He puts it starkly: “Very often, an institution forgets their broader mandate and focuses only on membership. If a Jewish person isn’t welcome on the High Holidays, that’s wrong. Chabad got it right.”

A seaside Havdalah service at Chabad on the Coast in Tel Aviv, which has grown tremendously in just a few years, attracting Jews of all ages and backgrounds. Using a dues-free model, they have outgrown their current center and are renovating a 1930s synagogue in the heart of the city, rarely used in recent decades, that had been founded by Austrian Jews who had fled to Israel.

Reaching Out to Every Jew Without Preconditions

Beginning in 1950, when the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—began sending out young men and women as Chabad emissaries far and wide, he didn’t typically hand them an assignment to establish a synagogue or open a day school. The mission was all-encompassing: “From the very beginning, we were taught that our job is to reach out to every Jew without preconditions,” reflects Rabbi Dovid Eliezrie, co-director of the North County Chabad Center in Yorba Linda, Calif., since 1974. “Our responsibility is to every Jew—the totality of the community—whether they’re regular attendees or have never walked through our doors. The mission is to connect Jews with G‑d and with their tradition.”

While the structure of the typical Chabad congregation is an organic outgrowth of the movement’s broader philosophy (and not a “business model” designed by the Rebbe), the Rebbe made clear his view of barriers between Jews and Judaism. For example, in a meeting with Israel's two chief rabbis, Rabbis Mordechai Eliyahu and Avraham Shapira, prior to Passover of 1986, the Rebbe proposed that rabbis worldwide host public seders open to all Jews, with the emphasis that “they’re not demanding anything,” the Rebbe said. It should be made clear, the Rebbe stressed, that “no financial contribution” was expected and that “ … they don’t need to stay until the end of the seder; they can come and go whenever they wish.”

For the Rebbe, a Jew eating matzah and having four cups of wine on Passover was the most important thing—whether they came in for five minutes or stayed all night, whether they were regular synagogue attendees or had never seen the inside of one before.

Much more than a fiduciary responsibility to a membership base, Chabad is there for every Jewish person, echoes Fujita. Chabad isn’t “here to serve members but to serve Torah, to inspire people to live more Jewish, regardless of who pays or how much.”

The bottom line, says Krivitzky, is that “[the Chabad representative’s job] is to serve the whole community, that’s why they visit prisons—the people nobody else wants to visit—that’s why you see them in hospitals. You don’t need to be a member for them to help you.”

Fujita cautions that this isn’t a criticism of the people running other congregations: “Synagogue boards dedicate time and money to their cause, but it’s inefficient.”

“The membership model is wrong—and dead,” explains Danny Fujita, a regular at Chabad of Key Biscayne, Fla., above, who is also past president of a South Florida congregation where he still serves on the board.

He and Krivitzky feel that the time has come for Chabad’s model to be more widely embraced as the most sustainable way forward for all congregations. Krivitzky has consulted for Jewish organizations around the country, pitching an adoption of a more individual-driven rather than membership-driven model.

But Chabad has a major structural difference, Fujita observes: “It’s personality driven, not organizationally driven,” he says. “The difference is the job. Most rabbis studied to be a rabbi and have a job as a rabbi. For Chabad, it isn’t a job; it's a life’s mission.”

Krivitzky gives High Holidays preparations as an example: “They call every single contact and personally invite them to join the services. It’s not about the fact that it’s free, but it’s the personal touch that attracts people.”

But how do these rabbis and their wives build a community from bottom up, with no dues, and still cover the budget?

“Rather than ‘pay-to-pray,’ at Chabad if you come to pray, and like what you see, you can pay,” says Eliezrie, who is also the author of the 2015 The Secret of Chabad. “We are fully supported by our local communities; it’s fueled by local philanthropy.” The end result is a truly grassroots Jewish community center and synagogue, springing up often in places where no one had believed it to be possible.

“When a person walks into our synagogue on Yom Kippur, it’s often because they’ve felt a sense of High Holidays inspiration but feel otherwise disconnected,” explains Eliezrie. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment—do you say ‘Sorry, where’s your ticket?’ Our goal is to make people feel as welcome as possible when they’re taking their first steps into Judaism. We know that when they see—when they feel—the value of it in their own lives, when they’ve uncovered the Jewish spark within their own souls, they’ll care to support it more broadly.”

There’s a persistent myth, says Krivitzky, that Chabad emissaries or centers receive a stipend from headquarters. “What people don’t realize is that it’s sink or swim,” he adds, “there’s a drive to be successful in a way that just isn’t the case with other organizations.”

Ultimately, he notes, “There’s a much greater risk tolerance; they have bitachon, ‘faith,’ in G‑d that He will provide. They’re on a mission.”