Chabad House

Local centre run by a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary couple, combining synagogue, study centre, family home and venue for Jewish programmes

Chabad House
Type	Local centre of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, run by an emissary (shliach) couple
Founded	March 1969 (first campus Chabad House, University of California, Los Angeles)
Founder(s)	Shlomo Cunin (UCLA); the model was promoted by Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Headquarters	Chabad headquarters, 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York
Location	Worldwide
Area served	More than 100 countries and territories (movement figure, 2025)
Services	Prayer services; Sabbath and festival meals; Torah classes; Hebrew schools, pre-schools and camps; campus programmes; hospitality for travellers
Key people	Local emissary couples
Website	chabad.org
Remarks	Criminal convictions, civil judgments and land-use cases involving individual Chabad Houses are listed separately below.

A Chabad House is a local centre run by an emissary couple (shluchim) of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. It usually combines a synagogue, a place of study, a venue for Jewish programmes and the emissaries' family home. The movement describes the Chabad House as "the nerve center of all the educational and outreach activities of the Chabad-Lubavitch shliach", serving the whole local Jewish community. The first campus Chabad House opened at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in March 1969.

Menachem Mendel Schneerson repeatedly called for new Chabad Houses "wherever Jews live". In 2025 the movement reported more than 3,500 Chabad-Lubavitch institutions, staffed by some 6,000 emissary couples in more than 100 countries and territories. Each house raises most of its own funds locally.

Individual Chabad Houses have been the scene of terrorist attacks, notably in Mumbai in 2008, Poway in 2019 and Bondi in 2025. Some have also been involved in criminal and civil cases. These cases are set out separately below, by type of outcome.

History

Origins

In the 1950s and 1960s the emissary Shmuel Dovid Raichik travelled across the American West and Midwest, laying the groundwork for the first Chabad Houses there. The first campus Chabad House opened in March 1969 at UCLA. It was opened by Shlomo Cunin, whom Menachem Mendel Schneerson had sent to Los Angeles in 1965. Sue Fishkoff describes late-night "rap sessions" there with students of the hippie era. Cunin went on to build almost a hundred Chabad Houses in California.

Editor's note: the sources consulted describe UCLA (1969) as the first campus Chabad House. They do not settle when the term "Chabad House" was first used, or which off-campus centre was the first to use it.

Campus expansion

Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman write that emissaries built more than 250 Chabad Houses on or near university campuses. There the emissary couple acted as "parents or older siblings" and offered students Sabbath meals and a Jewish home "without a commitment in advance to total Jewish observance". On Hanukkah 1986 Schneerson said that every Chabad House should be a Jewish home, and every Jewish home "a place worthy to be a Chabad House". For the campus network see Chabad on Campus International Inc.

Relations with campus Hillel organisations were sometimes strained. Rabbi Menachem Schmidt, who opened the first Chabad House at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, told Sue Fishkoff that "the Hillel director threw me out of the building a couple times".

International spread

Heilman and Friedman write that "Jewish trekkers in Katmandu, business people in Shanghai, students at Harvard, and vacationers in the Virgin Islands" find in Chabad Houses "a ready-made and welcoming family of Lubavitchers". Centres along the routes taken by young Israeli travellers are covered at Hummus Trail.

From 1984 a number of Chabad Houses were built as copies of the movement's headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. The first was the rebuilt UCLA house, put up after the original burned down in a fire that killed three students.

Activities

The movement presents the Chabad House as a community centre "serving the needs of the entire Jewish community, from the youngsters to the elderly". Sue Fishkoff describes activities such as holiday workshops in which children bake matzah, make shofars or press olive oil. Local schools are invited for a small fee, and the local press is invited too. Heilman and Friedman note that campus houses often offered a lechayim, a toast over drinks.

Funding

Emissaries usually receive travel costs and, "if they're lucky", a year's salary. After that they are expected to support themselves by charging for some services, such as day schools and summer camps, by finding donors and by taking related jobs. Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn supplies materials and settles disputes. Sue Fishkoff calls the movement "highly centralized, yet profoundly decentralized". In California, Shlomo Cunin borrowed heavily in the 1980s. Fishkoff reports that by 2003 he controlled assets worth more than $35 million.

Relations with local Jewish communities

Sue Fishkoff records hostility from parts of the established Jewish community as Chabad grew. She also describes Shlichus: Meeting the Outreach Challenge (1991), an emissaries' handbook whose chapters on opening a new centre aim at "placating the local Jewish establishment and garnering good press".

Attacks on Chabad Houses

• Mumbai, 2008. During the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, gunmen stormed the city's Chabad House (Nariman House) and killed six Jews there. They included the directors, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his pregnant wife Rivkah. Their two-year-old son Moshe was rescued by his nanny. The centre reopened in August 2014.
• Poway, 2019. On 27 April 2019 John T. Earnest opened fire at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California. He killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye and injured three others. He pleaded guilty to a 113-count federal indictment and was sentenced on 28 December 2021 to life plus 30 years. Conviction.
• Bondi, 2025. On 14 December 2025 two gunmen attacked Chabad of Bondi's Chanukah event on Bondi Beach, Sydney. Fifteen people were killed, among them the assistant rabbi, Eli Schlanger. See Chabad Lubavitch of Australia.

Editor's note: the BBC reported on 17 December 2025 that one of the gunmen, Naveed Akram, had been charged with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder. These are charges, not convictions.

Court cases and official findings

The cases below are grouped by type of outcome. A criminal conviction, a civil judgment and an allegation are different things, and they are kept apart here. For abuse cases see Chabad abuse cases; for other financial cases see Chabad and fraud.

Criminal convictions

• Chabad of Poway (2022). Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, the former director of Chabad of Poway, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and commit wire fraud. On 4 January 2022 he was sentenced to 14 months in custody and ordered to pay $2,834,608 in restitution. According to his plea agreement, he received at least $6.2 million in sham donations to the Chabad and affiliated charities and secretly refunded up to 90 per cent of them, so that donors could claim false tax deductions. He also defrauded corporate matching-gift programmes and emergency-grant schemes. Prosecutors recommended a lighter sentence because of his co-operation and because he had been wounded in the 2019 shooting.

Civil judgments

• Chabad of California (2014). In a False Claims Act case brought in 2010 by the whistleblowers Aria and Donna Kozak, and later joined by the federal government, US District Judge Morrison England ruled by summary judgment on 9 December 2014. He found that Chabad of California had spent a $272,495 Homeland Security grant meant for security cameras on payroll, repairs and utilities. He ordered it to pay $844,985 in treble damages and penalties. Chabad's lawyer said the organisation was disappointed and considering its options. Civil liability, not a criminal conviction.

Land-use litigation

• Litchfield, Connecticut (2014). Chabad Lubavitch of Litchfield County applied to expand a historic house at 85 West Street. The defendants put the addition at 17,000 square feet, which the Chabad disputed. The Borough's Historic District Commission refused permission in December 2007. On 19 September 2014 the Second Circuit held that the refusal was an "individualized assessment", which brought it within the substantial-burden provision of the federal religious land-use law, RLUIPA. It sent the substantial-burden and non-discrimination claims back to the district court and affirmed the rejection of the other claims. Civil case, brought by the Chabad House.

See also

• 770 Eastern Parkway
• Chabad on Campus International Inc.
• Chabad/Lubavitch non profits in the US
• Hummus Trail
• Chabad House of Hendon
• Chabad of Golders Green
• Chabad abuse cases
• Chabad and fraud

External links

• Chabad.org (movement website)