The line forms early on Sunday morning, snaking along the Eastern Parkway side of a tri-gabled red-brick building at house number 770. Men in black hats and long coats, women pushing strollers, visitors who flew in from Buenos Aires and Melbourne and Tel Aviv, all of them waiting to walk past the small office where for nearly fifty years Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson handed out crisp dollar bills to give to charity. He died in 1994. The building has never been busier.
Around the corner on Kingston Avenue, two yeshiva boys ask passing men if they are Jewish, and if so, would they like to put on tefillin. A Mitzvah Tank idles nearby. This is Crown Heights, headquarters of one of the most expansive religious networks any single city block has ever produced.
Crown Heights, The Place
Crown Heights sits in the geographic center of Brooklyn, south of Bedford-Stuyvesant, north of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, bounded loosely by Atlantic Avenue, Empire Boulevard, Washington Avenue and Ralph Avenue. The spine of the neighbourhood is Eastern Parkway, the tree-lined boulevard Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux laid out in the 1860s as part of the same green system as Prospect Park. The 2, 3, 4 and 5 trains run beneath it.
Brownstones, limestone rowhouses, and pre-war apartment buildings with elevators and lobbies still define the housing stock. Kingston Avenue is the Lubavitch commercial street: kosher butchers, judaica shops, sefarim stores, bakeries that smell of yeast on Friday mornings. Walk one block north of Eastern Parkway and the soundtrack shifts toward soca and dancehall and the smell of curry goat from West Indian takeaways. Two neighbourhoods share one address.
How Crown Heights Became Chabad
Before the Chabad
Jews had been moving into Crown Heights since the early 1900s, drawn by the brand-new Eastern Parkway and IRT subway extension. By 1940 the neighbourhood was roughly forty percent Jewish, most of it secular or modern-Orthodox, with elegant apartment buildings full of doormen and tailored coats. There was a small Hasidic presence, but Crown Heights was not yet a Hasidic neighbourhood.
It was also one of the more comfortable Jewish neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, more bourgeois than the tenement Lower East Side or the working-class Williamsburg of the same era. The Chabad movement, when it finally arrived, came not from the streets of New York but from the catastrophe of Europe.
The Chabad Arrive
In March 1940, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch dynasty, escaped Nazi-occupied Warsaw through Riga and Stockholm on travel papers arranged by American Jewish officials and a sympathetic German diplomat. He landed in New York that spring. He was sixty years old, in a wheelchair, and head of a Hasidic movement the Holocaust was destroying.
A small committee of Chabad supporters needed a building that could be home, synagogue, office and school. It needed an elevator. They found 770 Eastern Parkway, a Collegiate Gothic Revival house built in 1920 by architect Edwin Kline, originally a medical office. The Rebbe moved in that September. The address has been the world centre of Chabad ever since.
The sixth Rebbe founded the Beth Rivkah girls’ school in 1941, beginning with about thirty students in a rented storefront. The Lubavitcher Yeshiva for boys followed. Other Hasidic courts came to Crown Heights in the wake of the war: the Bostoner, the Novominsker, the Sadigura rebbes all opened houses nearby, joined by Polish and Hungarian Holocaust survivors. The neighbourhood was becoming one of the densest concentrations of European-style Hasidic life left in the world.
Crown Heights at the Rebbe’s Peak
The sixth Rebbe died in January 1950. After a year of mourning, his son-in-law Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson accepted the leadership on 10 Shevat 1951. He had been born in Mykolaiv on the Black Sea in 1902, studied engineering in Berlin and Paris, escaped Vichy France in 1941, and arrived in New York that summer. He would lead Chabad for forty-three years and never again leave the Crown Heights and Queens area.
Under the seventh Rebbe, Chabad became something new. Where most Hasidic groups turned inward after the Holocaust, the Rebbe sent his followers outward. Young couples were dispatched as shluchim, emissaries, to towns and cities with little or no Jewish infrastructure, told to build something where there had been nothing. Anchorage, Bangkok, Kinshasa, Reykjavik. By 1990 the network was snowballing. Today there are more than 6,500 Chabad emissary families operating roughly 3,500 institutions in 110-plus countries.
From Crown Heights radiated the Mitzvah Tanks, the campus chaplaincies, the Chanukah menorahs erected in public squares from Moscow to Manila. In 1974 the Rebbe launched the Mitzvah Tank campaign, sending RVs onto the streets of New York to invite Jewish passersby to put on tefillin. Fifty years later they still roll out from Eastern Parkway each Friday before sundown.
Every Sunday from 1986 onward the Rebbe stood in a narrow hallway near his office and handed out single dollar bills, one to each visitor, telling them to give the money to charity. The line moved for hours. People flew in from five continents. The dollars, often kept in laminated sleeves, are still treasured family heirlooms in homes from Sao Paulo to St Petersburg.
The Change
On 3 Tammuz 5754, June 12, 1994, the Rebbe died. He left no children and named no successor. Chabad faced a question every Hasidic dynasty eventually faces: who comes next. For Chabad the answer was, in effect, no one. The institutional leadership was distributed across the movement’s existing bodies. The Rebbe’s chair on the synagogue platform at 770 has stood empty for over three decades.
A theological rift emerged. A faction called Meshichistim believed the Rebbe was the Messiah and that he would soon be revealed; the more centrist majority of Chabad emphasised continuing his work without making messianic claims. The argument has waxed and waned for thirty years, occasionally visible on the painted facade of 770 and on yellow flags carried at parades. The movement has nonetheless continued to grow.
The most painful moment in modern Crown Heights history came on August 19, 1991. A car in a motorcade returning the Rebbe from a cemetery visit veered through the intersection of President Street and Utica Avenue and struck two Black children on the sidewalk, killing seven-year-old Gavin Cato and injuring his cousin Angela.
Within hours, a young Australian Hasidic graduate student named Yankel Rosenbaum was attacked and stabbed by a crowd in retaliation. He died of his wounds. Three days of rioting followed. The driver was not indicted; one of Rosenbaum’s attackers, Lemrick Nelson, was acquitted of murder in 1992 and later convicted in 1997 of violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights.
The riot was a rupture, the worst in modern New York race relations, and the relationships in the neighbourhood are still shaped by its memory. The decades since have seen sustained community-building work between Hasidic and Afro-Caribbean leaders. The neighbourhood is not what it was in August 1991.
The Landmarks of Hasidic Crown Heights
770 Eastern Parkway. The original. A 1920 Collegiate Gothic Revival house, three gables of red brick, two storeys of stained-glass windows, and a basement-level main synagogue now extended through the adjoining building at 784-788 Eastern Parkway. It is the most photographed Jewish building in the world. Full-size and near-replicas of its facade now stand in Kfar Chabad and Ramat Shlomo in Israel, in Buenos Aires, in Sao Paulo, in Milan, in Melbourne. The original is here.
The Ohel, Old Montefiore Cemetery, Cambria Heights, Queens. Not in Crown Heights, but inseparable from it. The granite enclosure houses the graves of the sixth and seventh Rebbes. According to the cemetery’s caretakers, more than 100,000 people visit each year on Gimmel Tammuz, the Rebbe’s yahrzeit, leaving handwritten pan notes pressed into the cracks of the stone.
Beth Rivkah, 470 Lefferts Avenue. The girls’ school founded by the sixth Rebbe in 1941 with thirty pupils in a storefront. Today its Crown Heights campus runs from preschool through a teacher-training seminary and enrols thousands. The expansion came partly through Soviet and Iranian Jewish refugee families who arrived in waves from the late 1950s onward.
Oholei Torah, 667 Eastern Parkway. The flagship Chabad boys’ yeshiva, founded in 1956 in a Brownsville synagogue at the seventh Rebbe’s direction by Rabbi Michoel Teitelbaum and Reb Dovid Deitsch. It now occupies a campus on Eastern Parkway and teaches a curriculum almost entirely of Torah and Hasidic philosophy, with little or no secular content.
The Tefillin Booth, Eastern Parkway and Kingston Avenue. A folding table and an awning at the busiest Hasidic intersection in Crown Heights. Volunteers staff it daily. Any Jewish man walking by is invited to wrap tefillin for two minutes. It is the smallest landmark in the neighbourhood and the most evangelical.
Kingston Avenue itself, from Eastern Parkway to Empire Boulevard. The commercial spine of Hasidic Crown Heights. Kosher bakeries, judaica stores, the offices of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, the seforim shops where new releases of the Rebbe’s transcribed talks still sell out. On Friday afternoons the street empties in the half-hour before Shabbat candle-lighting. By sundown it is silent.
The Crown Heights Mikvah, 1506 Union Street. The community ritual bath, used by women monthly and by many men daily before morning prayer. Not visible from the street and not advertised, but central to the daily rhythm of observant life in the neighbourhood.
Where the Crown Heights Hasidim Came From
Most Crown Heights Hasidic families trace their lineage to a relatively narrow band of pre-war Eastern Europe: the Belarusian shtetls of the old Pale of Settlement, the Ukrainian towns of Volhynia and Podolia, the western Russian provinces, and the eastern reaches of inter-war Poland. The movement itself takes its name from the small town of Lyubavichi, in what is now western Russia near the Belarus border, where the Chabad rebbes lived from 1813 to 1915.
The founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liady (1745-1812), was born in Liozna, in present-day Belarus, and developed the Chabad approach in the towns of Liozna and Liadi. His son and successor moved the movement to Lyubavichi, giving the dynasty its place-name. Crown Heights families talk about Vitebsk, Minsk, Nikolaev, Yekaterinoslav (modern Dnipro), and Lubavitch itself the way Boston Irish families talk about Cork and Kerry.
Two later waves reinforced the original arrivals: Iranian Jewish families who fled the 1979 revolution, and the very large post-1989 wave of former Soviet Jews from Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus, many of whom were drawn into Chabad through its emissaries in the old country and then crossed to Brooklyn. The neighbourhood Yiddish you hear on Kingston Avenue today is increasingly accented by Russian, Hebrew and French.
Crown Heights Today
Roughly 30,000 Hasidic Jews now live in Crown Heights, the great majority of them Chabad-Lubavitch. The population skews young and is still growing through one of the highest birth rates in New York City. New families squeeze into the brownstones south of Eastern Parkway; couples newly married at 770 take temporary apartments on Union Street and Crown Street before being sent abroad as emissaries.
The neighbourhood as a whole is roughly half Afro-Caribbean and African-American, about a quarter white (mostly Hasidic, with a growing share of young professionals priced out of brownstone Brooklyn elsewhere), about fifteen percent Hispanic, and the remainder mixed. The parallel community is not incidental to Crown Heights; it is the other half of the neighbourhood’s story. The West Indian American Day Parade still moves down Eastern Parkway every Labour Day, the largest carnival in North America. That story belongs to its own article.
The Hasidic community continues to mark its own calendar in public on the same boulevard: the 19 Kislev farbrengen each winter, commemorating the release from prison of the Alter Rebbe in 1798; Lag B’Omer parades with thousands of children in May; sukkot built along Eastern Parkway in October; and above all the Gimmel Tammuz gatherings in late June, when Crown Heights becomes the staging ground for the annual pilgrimage to Queens.
The empty chair is still on the platform at 770. The line still forms on the sidewalk. The Rebbe’s voice, captured on thousands of hours of audio and video, plays on speakers in the back of the synagogue during the long quiet stretches between services. Crown Heights has the unusual quality of a neighbourhood that is, all at once, a centre, a memorial, and a base camp for an ongoing mission. The map starts here and runs to 110 countries.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Hasidic Jews settle in Crown Heights?
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement settled in Crown Heights in 1940 because the sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, needed a residence after escaping Nazi-occupied Europe. A committee of his American supporters bought the building at 770 Eastern Parkway, which had an elevator the wheelchair-bound Rebbe required, and it has been the world headquarters of Chabad ever since.
Are Hasidic Jews still in Crown Heights today?
Yes. Roughly 30,000 Hasidic Jews live in Crown Heights, almost all of them Chabad-Lubavitch, and the population is still growing through one of the highest birth rates in New York City. The Hasidic community is concentrated south of Eastern Parkway between New York Avenue and Troy Avenue, with Kingston Avenue as its commercial spine.
What are the most famous Hasidic landmarks in Crown Heights?
The most famous landmark is 770 Eastern Parkway, the world headquarters of Chabad and the building replicated in Hasidic communities from Israel to Argentina. Other key sites include the Oholei Torah yeshiva on Eastern Parkway, the Beth Rivkah girls’ school on Lefferts Avenue, the tefillin booth at Eastern Parkway and Kingston, and the Ohel in Queens where the seventh Rebbe is buried.
Where did the Crown Heights Hasidim come from?
Most Crown Heights Hasidic families trace their roots to Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia, particularly the towns of Liozna, Liadi and Lyubavichi where the Chabad movement was founded in the late 1700s. Later waves brought Iranian Jewish families after the 1979 revolution and a very large group of former Soviet Jews from Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus after 1989.
When did Hasidic Jews first arrive in Crown Heights?
The Chabad-Lubavitch presence in Crown Heights began in March 1940, when the sixth Rebbe arrived in New York after escaping Nazi-occupied Poland, and was established in September 1940 when he moved into 770 Eastern Parkway. Other Hasidic courts followed during and after the Second World War, joined by Polish and Hungarian Holocaust survivors.
If your family’s story passed through Crown Heights, or through the shtetls of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia that fed it, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Lubavitch and Liadi to Eastern Parkway, to wherever you have ended up.