Growing up in the upwardly mobile Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., award-winning photographer Marc Asnin says he was always a “loud and proud Jew” with a big heart and a deep concern for the underdog and the bullied—the kinds of people who have defined his professional life as a documentary photographer.
Photographing the down-and-out who most people look away from; giving a voice to those who are rarely heard; and recording their lives for posterity in art galleries and books is at the heart of Asnin’s work, including his latest book, Final Words— published by the University Press of Kentucky in collaboration with QCC Art Gallery—which records the last words and mug shots of 578 men and women executed in Texas since 1982.
Asnin says he learned compassion for the poor and persecuted from his Jewish grandmother, who lived for decades in the then mixed-race Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. He cherishes growing up in a loving, forgiving Jewish home. But on reflection, he says, not all of his childhood role models were good ones. He admired from a distance his gun-toting, tattooed uncle, who became the subject of his first book, Uncle Charlie, which The Guardian called “an unflinching photographic account of a Brooklyn tough guy” that “charts his descent into addiction, alcoholism and ill-health.”
And while Asnin remembers his grandfather as an invalid, he also knew that he had once been a gangster.
Asnin attended a succession of Hebrew schools until his bar mitzvah, but did not find anything meaningful or motivating about the Judaism he had been exposed to.
Like many in his generation, Asnin didn’t begin to develop an understanding and appreciation for Judaism until he was an adult. It began with a fateful encounter with the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory.
First Encounter With the Rebbe
Asnin first saw the Rebbe in 1988. He had been on assignment photographing the Jews of Castro’s Cuba, and when the head of the community later flew to New York to get supplies for Havana’s lone Jewish school, Asnin met up with him to help. The Cuban Jew asked Asnin to take him to a particular address: 770 Eastern Parkway. It meant nothing to Asnin who, although a lifelong Brooklynite, had no connection with religious Jews and no particular desire to have one. “They were all the same to me,” says Asnin.
When they got there, the Rebbe was standing outside 770 distributing coins to children to give to charity. The saintly image of a white-bearded rabbi lovingly interacting with young children was something completely unexpected for Asnin and it made a deep impression on him.
A few years later, Asnin was in a Midtown Manhattan restaurant with fellow photographers and reporters. Kathy Ryan, photo editor of The New York Times Magazine, mentioned a major story in the works about the Rebbe and his influence on the world. Asnin piped up that he had seen the Rebbe and described the encounter. Ryan was familiar with Asnin’s work for Life, The New Yorker, French Geo, La Repubblica, Le Monde and Stern. He got the assignment.
‘The Oracle of Crown Heights’ appeared on the cover of the March 15, 1992 issue of the New York Times Magazine, containing a number of memorable images of the Rebbe and the Lubavitch community by Asnin. His photograph of the Rebbe was selected by The New York Times Magazine as one of the “25 Most Memorable Covers” of the previous 100 years.
“[Asnin] caught spirituality,” said Ryan about the photos.
“Most subjects become self-conscious and uncomfortable when you get too close,” says Asnin. “But not the Rebbe. Even while he was praying, the Rebbe had no problem with me standing a foot or two away, taking pictures of him. He was just on another level.”
Asnin says he was privileged to receive a dollar and a blessing from the Rebbe. “When you looked in his eyes … he was just very intense,” he recalled in a 2013 interview with Chabad.org. “There was a different energy flowing from him. It was not the average interaction. It was the most special assignment I’ve ever had.”
During the weeks-long assignment, Asnin became enamored not only with the Rebbe but with the Chabad Chassidim he met and their “genuine love and acceptance of others.”
“I was amazed at how relaxed and open everyone was. It was the first time in my life that I felt such unconditional love. Even if people didn’t agree with me about political, social or even religious issues, no one was putting me down or calling me a ‘self-hating Jew.’
“They were always looking at the glass half-full. They would listen and maybe gently disagree, and then just agree to disagree and move on. It was an incredible thing for me. It’s an incredible legacy that I later saw with Chabad all over the world—from Siberia to Cuba to Haiti.”
Asnin’s personal observance was jump-started on Sept. 11, 2001, when he was sent by Time magazine to Lower Manhattan to document the attack on the World Trade Center. He arrived at Ground Zero after the South Tower fell and hid under a fire truck with a fireman whose face he never saw as the North Tower collapsed.
When he arrived home safely, his first thought was to thank G‑d and find a way to show his faith and bond with fellow Jews. “I decided to cover my head wherever in the world I would go,” says Asnin, who often sports a crocheted black beanie. He also wears tzitzit, a small garment with biblically mandated fringes, under his shirt.
He noted how much he enjoys putting on tefillin in Chabad Houses and mitzvah tanks around the world because “it makes me feel connected with the rabbis and bochurs [‘yeshivah students’].” There are mezuzahs on the doorposts in his home, and when a friend of his daughter recently visited for the first time, she said “Wow, your family is so religious!” No, replied his daughter, “we are loud and proud Jews.”
Chabad Prison Chaplains and the Rebbe’s Influence
Among the many rabbis that Asnin has gotten to know over the years, some who have impressed him the most are rabbis affiliated with Chabad’s Aleph Institute who serve as prison chaplains, giving support and comfort to men and women who had experienced rejection throughout their lives.
It was at the urging of the Rebbe that Rabbi Sholom B. Lipskar, executive director of the Shul of Bal Harbour, Fla., founded the Aleph Institute in 1981. The Rebbe was a strong and early pioneer of criminal justice reform, seeing a fundamental flaw in incarceration disconnected from re-education and rehabilitation.
“I have been to prisons with Chabad rabbis in Florida, Texas and in a women’s prison in New York,” says Asnin. Although quick to point out that he in no way condones criminal behavior, Asnin began to see the prisoners he met through the eyes of the Chabad chaplains: as neshamas (‘souls’) in need. Asnin became determined for others to also see them that way.
Asnin says he first saw that pure love for incarcerated Jews in Florida, when he visited a prison on Rosh Hashanah with Aleph’s Rabbi Menachem Katz. “He gave them a sense of hope and the feeling that there’s someone who genuinely wants to listen to them,” said Asnin. “Prison life is hard and complicated, filled with loneliness and danger, and it just blew me away to see such great love and respect between the rabbi and the prisoners.”
![Chabad Rabbi David Goldstein is the head rabbi for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, but Asnin says “he’s genuinely there more as a friend." - Photo by Marc Asnin](https://w2.chabad.org/media/images/1263/pgMt12634243.jpg?_i=_n504BC99DD0473598AAE3BCDC5D75568D "Chabad Rabbi David Goldstein is the head rabbi for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, but Asnin says “he’s genuinely there more as a friend." - Photo by Marc Asnin")
Asnin recently visited a Houston prison with Rabbi Dovid Goldstein of Chabad of West Houston. Goldstein is the head rabbi for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, but Asnin says “he’s genuinely there more as a friend than as a rabbi. I haven’t seen that anywhere but with Chabad, the uniqueness of being both a rabbi and a friend.”
“These rabbis adapt to where they are and the people they are with. When they go into prisons, they understand the dance,” which Asnin attributes to the Rebbe’s teachings and example. “They are comfortable even in the confines of prisons and able to create an amazing energy. You should see Rabbi Goldstein working with prisoners on death row. The Rebbe brought this to a whole new level.”
Asnin says an important motive in compiling Final Words was his desire to counter what he calls “the total dehumanization” of people—the disregarding and discarding of men and women that he witnessed in prisons around the world. It is a theme emphasized by the Rebbe in his talks and writings on criminal justice reform.
“If a person is being held in prison, the goal should not be punishment but rather to give him the chance to reflect on the undesirable actions for which he was incarcerated,” the Rebbe said in Yiddish in a 1976 talk. “He should be given the opportunity to learn, improve himself and prepare for his release when he will commence an honest, peaceful, new life, having used his days in prison toward this end.”
The Rebbe continued: “In order for this to be a reality, a prisoner must be allowed to maintain a sense that he is created in the image of G‑d; he is a human being who can be a reflection of G‑dliness in this world. But when a prisoner is denied this sense and feels subjugated and controlled; never allowed to raise up his head, then the prison system not only fails at its purpose, it creates in him a greater criminal than there was before. One of the goals of the prison system is to help Jewish inmates and non-Jewish inmates ... to raise up their spirits and to encourage them, providing the sense, to the degree possible, that they are just as human as those that are free; just as human as the prison guards. In this way they can be empowered to improve themselves ... .”
Asnin’s goal is that people see the people he photographs, whether in prison or on the streets, in a new way. From his Uncle Charlie to down-and-out gamblers at New York’s Aqueduct racetrack to men and women on death row, they are people, Asnin says, who deserve to be seen and heard.
“I hope the stories and images I have created will help people realize that the marginalized in our society are human beings created in the image of G‑d.”
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