New York Trip
New Jersey Jewish News 5/31/05
Chabad tour of Brooklyn offers spirituality, nostalgia by Marilyn Silverstein NJJN Middlesex Correspondent Standing beside the monument memorializing Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Bill Levy of Monroe reread the letter of prayer he had just written. Then he folded the paper, tore it once, twice, and scattered the pieces atop the thousands of other pieces of prayer that formed a kind of solemn confetti on the rebbe’s grave. “I can’t say I was overwhelmed. I don’t know if I’d even say it was moving,” Levy said a few moments later as he sat beneath a tent at the Ohel (Tent) Chabad Lubavitch near the gravesite at Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens, NY. “But I think it was interesting and enlightening. I think it’s certainly worthwhile. “I just wanted to open my mind and enlighten myself about what’s out there,” he said. “I’m close to 80 years old, and I’m still searching. This was a way of exploring part of my Judaism. I’m still trying to find what it’s all about.” Levy’s blend of openness, skepticism, and thirst for knowledge and spirituality struck a chord that echoed again and again as close to 55 Jews — most of them seniors from the retirement communities of Monroe Township — participated in the May 19 pilgrimage into the heart of the New York world of Chabad Lubavitch. The trip brought together the two worlds Chabad emissaries are hoping to bridge — the heavily hasidic Brooklyn neighborhoods that form their roots, and the suburban, non-Orthodox neighborhoods where they are branching out on a mission of outreach. “We’re calling it ‘A Spiritual Day in Brooklyn,’” said Rabbi Eliezer Zaklikovsky, religious leader of the Chabad Jewish Center of Monroe Township, a division of Chabad Lubavitch of Greater Mercer County, as the crowded bus made its lumbering way to New York. “The main thing is to have people have the experience of praying at the gravesite of a tzadik . They write a letter to the rebbe, give charity, meditate, read the note,
