The rabbis came from Israel and Ukraine, from Azerbaijan and France, from Thailand and farther still, as thousands of Jews filed into a graveyard in Queens under a sea of black hats.
The roughly 6,500 orthodox rabbis, in New York City for an annual conference, arrived in a city convulsed by protests over the war between Israel and Hamas.
In the graveyard, the burial place of the spiritual leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a nearly 250-year-old Hasidic group, the rabbis sought solace, the answer to prayers for peace — and a sense of hope to bring back to their congregations.
“We are losing everything we have,” Rabbi Avraham Wolff, the chief Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi of Odesa, Ukraine, said in Hebrew. He was born in Israel, which has been at war with Hamas since the group carried out a terrorist attack on the country on Oct. 7. And just before he left for New York, Russian rockets fell on Odesa. “I have 3,000 Jews who are looking to me and at everything their rabbi is doing,” he said. “For them I have to be strong.”
He added, “If I have to cry, I do it under my blankets.”
The gathering was the latest International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries, which began in 1987 and convenes the group’s leaders from synagogues around the globe. On Friday, the rabbis’ first stop was the grave of Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, whose burial place in the Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens has become a pilgrimage site.
All morning, they placed handwritten prayers atop the grave, in keeping with the belief that their departed leader could ferry the wishes directly to God. Among the flurries of scraps were missing person posters featuring Israelis who were among the more than 220 people taken hostage by Hamas in the October attack.
The conference, which goes through Monday, typically features a dinner on Sunday evening, the highlight of which is a lively celebration filled with dancing. This year, the event was moved to be a luncheon so that 1,400 more rabbis within Israel could join. Many of them chose not to leave their communities and attended remotely this year because of the war, organizers said.
Some, like Rabbi Menashe Althaus, from Kiryat Tiv’on, about 10 miles southeast of Haifa in northern Israel, felt it was more important than ever to attend. “I came here to pray that the situation should be so much better, for true peace,” and because he felt America was his country’s most unwavering ally, he said in Hebrew.
The rabbis shared ways they had coped and helped their communities cope. In Thailand, Rabbi Yosef Kantor’s synagogue hosted a prayer circle last month, he said. It was attended by over 700 people, who prayed for the return of the hostages — dozens of Thai farm workers are among those still held captive by Hamas.
In New York, Rabbi Uriel Vigler of the Chabad Israel Center in Manhattan said he had armed his children with pepper spray and begun to teach them Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. Moshe Schapiro, a rabbi in New Jersey, gave his children minuscule versions of Jewish prayer books to carry for protection. At the cemetery, he handed out more.
Rabbi Menahem Mendel Zana came from Paris, where last month stars of David were spray-painted on buildings amid a wave of antisemitic sentiment across Europe.
“We know the situation, but we come here to reinforce our community, and return without fear,” Rabbi Zana said in French, as hundreds of his peers milled around him, bowing over prayer books or writing down their own prayers. “We return with more power.”