Shmuel Butman
American Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi (1943–2024), director of the Lubavitch Youth Organization, spokesman during the 1991 Crown Heights riot and chairman of the International Campaign to Bring Moshiach
| Shmuel Butman
| |
|---|---|
| Born | 30 January 1943 Frunze (now Bishkek), Kyrgyz SSR, Soviet Union |
| Died | 22 July 2024 Manhattan, New York City |
| Nationality | American |
| Residence | Crown Heights, Brooklyn |
| Occupation | Rabbi; director of the Lubavitch Youth Organization; chairman of the International Campaign to Bring Moshiach |
| Known for | The "World's Largest Menorah" at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street; Chabad spokesman during the Crown Heights riot; the 1993 "coronation" of Menachem Mendel Schneerson as Messiah |
| Spouse(s) | Rochel Butman (née Geisinsky) |
| Children | Velvel Butman; Yossi Butman; four daughters |
Shmuel Butman (30 January 1943 – 22 July 2024), in full Shmuel Menachem Mendel Butman, was an American Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi who directed the Lubavitch Youth Organization (LYO), the movement's outreach body for the New York area. He was one of the movement's most public faces in New York. He lit the giant Hanukkah menorah on Fifth Avenue every year from 1977, spoke for the Hasidic community of Crown Heights during the Crown Heights riot of August 1991, and led the International Campaign to Bring Moshiach, a group that proclaimed Menachem Mendel Schneerson the Messiah.[1][2] Sue Fishkoff calls him "the self-declared head of the International Campaign to Bring Moshiach".[3] Henry Goldschmidt describes him as "a prominent but controversial Lubavitch community leader".[4]
Early life
According to Chabad.org, Butman was born in Frunze (now Bishkek) to Shneur Zalman and Yehudis Butman. His mother was the daughter of a great-grandson of the third Chabad rebbe, and his father had been exiled to Siberia for four years for his work in the Chabad "underground". In 1946 the family left the Soviet Union on Polish papers and settled in Paris. There Menachem Mendel Schneerson's mother, Chana, lived in their home, and Schneerson visited her daily. The family moved to Brooklyn in 1954. In 1962 Schneerson sent Butman to the Chabad yeshiva in Lod, Israel.[1]
Lubavitch Youth Organization
Butman married Rochel Geisinsky in 1966 and then joined the staff of the Lubavitch Youth Organization, known by its Hebrew initials as Tzach. Chabad.org says Schneerson founded it in 1955 and that it was then directed by Rabbi Dovid Raskin. Butman recalled that he was its second employee. Its early work centred on college students, with Shabbat weekends on campuses and in Crown Heights.[1] In 1996 Butman described the LYO as "the outreach arm of the Lubavitch movement", covering "working with college students, going to army bases, going out on the street to put on tefillin [on Jewish men], the menorah lightings".[5]
The Fifth Avenue menorah
Butman first put up a giant menorah at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, outside the Plaza Hotel, in 1977, and Mayor Abe Beame lit it. Chabad.org says every mayor of New York has attended the lighting since. The present 32-foot structure was designed by the Israeli artist Yaacov Agam, and Butman lit it every year from 1986.[1] His son Velvel Butman told The Jewish Press that the first menorah cost $5,000 and was paid for by Willie Goldberg, head of the diamond club on 47th Street.[6] In 2001 Butman told The New York Times that its height of 32 feet equalled the limit of 20 cubits set by Jewish law.[7]
Albany and City Hall
Chabad.org says Butman led the campaign in New York State for Education and Sharing Day. Instead of a single day, the governor declares a run of "days of education", one for each year since Schneerson's birth.[1] In 2018 The Jewish Press reported that the LYO had marked the Rebbe's birthday this way every year since 1995. Butman opened Assembly and Senate sessions with a prayer, "for which he is offered a stipend from each house", and then invited legislators to put a dollar in a charity box. The paper's columnist wrote that he was "the only person ever allowed to ask for donations from state lawmakers" while the chambers were sitting.[8] On 8 April 2019 he gave the opening prayer in the Assembly before it passed a resolution "honoring the Lubavitcher Rebbe with 117 days of education". The member for his district, Mr Mosley, then introduced him as director of the LYO and, "for many years", director of the weekly L'Chaim.[9]
Chabad.org credits him with a sukkah at the United Nations, where he said he first met Benjamin Netanyahu in 1984, and says he took Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to see the Rebbe in 1990.[1]
Crown Heights riot
The New York Times wrote that Butman, then executive director of the LYO, "became the spokesman for his tight-knit ultra-Orthodox community" after Yankel Rosenbaum was stabbed to death on the night of 19 August 1991.[2] On 21 August he attended the Crown Heights Emergency Committee meeting at which community leaders asked the city's deputy mayor and police commissioner "why the police were not making arrests".[10] JTA reported that Butman and Rabbi Shmuel Light recalled that "when a black driver killed a Jewish child in an accident last year, the Jews did not riot".[11]
Butman gave the main eulogy at Rosenbaum's funeral. The historian Edward Shapiro writes that for him "the riot was both an attack on Jews everywhere and a sure sign that the messianic era was near".[12] He told the anthropologist Jerome Mintz: "Unfortunately we saw a pogrom in 1991. We saw and we heard things: Heil Hitler! Kill the Jews! This is not Berlin 1930 but New York 1991."[13] Against the charge that the community had ignored the family of Gavin Cato, the seven-year-old killed by a car in the Rebbe's motorcade, he told Mintz: "We reached out. We sent representatives to the family. We sent them a letter and flowers."[14] He marched in the West Indian Day parade on Labor Day 1991 and told the crowd he had joined in the spirit of "brotherhood, camaraderie, friendship, and peace".[14]
That December the police refused him an escort to speed him by helicopter from the Fifth Avenue menorah to Brooklyn before the Sabbath. Mintz writes that this was done "to avoid any hint of favoritism", that Butman was outraged, and that he "was criticized in the Hasidic community for exaggerating its effect".[15]
At the fifth-anniversary rally in 1996 Butman compared Rosenbaum's killing to Cain's murder of Abel and invoked "the voice of Jacob" and "the hands of Esau". Goldschmidt argues that this "equated Yankel Rosenbaum's killers with the entire Gentile world".[4] On the tenth anniversary he wrote "The Crown Heights Pogrom: Ten Years Later" for The Jewish Press.[16]
The campaign for the Messiah
In January 1993, after Schneerson's stroke, JTA quoted Butman as chairman of the International Campaign to Bring Moshiach: "This will be the coronation of the rebbe as Melech haMashiach (King Messiah)." Yehuda Krinsky's office replied that "Butman does not speak for the Lubavitch movement".[17] Fishkoff writes that Butman "attempted to hijack a celebration of the Rebbe's forty-third year in power" and arranged a satellite link, while the Chabad leadership "pointedly remained upstairs". Afterwards Krinsky told reporters: "Tonight was like every other night."[3] Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman write that Krinsky called the event "dishonest, dangerous, confusing, sacrilegious".[18]
After Schneerson's death in June 1994 Butman kept up the campaign. In 1995 his group published his Countdown to Moshiach: Can the Rebbe Still Be Moshiach?[19] In January 1996 the campaign put up a billboard by the George Washington Bridge proclaiming Schneerson the Messiah. In February it held a convention at the New York Hilton, where Butman promised reporters "the greatest event in the history of mankind".[20] He told JTA that "Lubavitch and difference are a contradiction in terms", and that Schneerson's death was "a temporary stage" before he would rise from his grave in Queens.[21] When the Rabbinical Council of America condemned that belief in June 1996, he said a vote against it "is like voting against the rebbe".[22]
Dispute over his post
In February 1996 the LYO board sent Butman a letter dismissing him. JTA reported that the letter gave two reasons: he had failed for two years to submit reports of income and expenses, and he had used the organisation's fax and phone lines for the messianic campaign. Krinsky, as a director of Machne Israel, confirmed the dismissal. Butman denied it: "I am not fired." He said the matter had been settled at a board meeting on 12 February and that he had promised to keep the two roles separate.[5] Fishkoff writes that he "refused to step down" and "had developed his own private funding sources and his own board of directors".[3] No court case or regulatory finding about the LYO's accounts has been found.
Death and succession
Butman died on 22 July 2024. Chabad.org's obituary does not mention the riot or the messianic campaign. It quotes Governor Kathy Hochul calling him "a central figure in New York's Jewish community", and his usual sign-off at the menorah, which asked that its lights "usher in the eternal lights of Moshiach".[1] By 2025 his son Yossi Butman was described as director of the LYO. He organised the communal sukkah outside City Hall and, with his brother Velvel, officiated at the Fifth Avenue menorah.[23][24]
See also
- Lubavitch Youth Organization
- Chabad messianism
- Crown Heights riot
- Yehuda Krinsky
- Mitzvah campaigns
- Education and Sharing Day
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Menachem Posner, Rabbi Shmuel Butman, 81, Raised the Jewish Profile in New York and Beyond Chabad.org, 25 July 2024, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Sam Roberts, Rabbi Shmuel Butman, 81, a Brooklyn Voice of Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Is Dead The New York Times, 14 August 2024, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Sue Fishkoff, The Rebbe's Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch, New York: Schocken, 2003, pp. 266–267.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Henry Goldschmidt, Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006, pp. 55–56.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Was 'moshiach' Promoter Fired? Debate Rages over Lubavitch Post Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 14 February 1996, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Marc Gronich, The Making of the World's Largest Menorah The Jewish Press, 17 December 2025, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ The New York Times, F.Y.I. The New York Times, 16 December 2001, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Marc Gronich, Albany Beat – March 30, 2018 The Jewish Press, 28 March 2018 (dated column of 30 March 2018), accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ New York State Assembly, Transcript of proceedings, 8 April 2019 New York State Assembly, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Richard H. Girgenti, A Report to the Governor on the Disturbances in Crown Heights, vol. 1, Albany: New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, 1993, pp. 90–91.
- ↑ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Fatal Brooklyn Traffic Accident Sparks Widespread Racial Violence Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 22 August 1991, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Edward S. Shapiro, "Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot", American Jewish History, vol. 90, no. 2, June 2002, p. 100.
- ↑ Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 336–337.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 Mintz, Hasidic People, 1992, pp. 338–339.
- ↑ Mintz, Hasidic People, 1992, p. 343.
- ↑ Shapiro, "Interpretations of the Crown Heights Riot", 2002, p. 104 and n. 11.
- ↑ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 'Mashiach Madness' Reaches Frenzy As Lubavitch 'Anoint' the Rebbe Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 28 January 1993, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Samuel C. Heilman and Menachem M. Friedman, The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, pp. 243–244.
- ↑ Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, bibliography.
- ↑ Fishkoff, The Rebbe's Army, 2003, p. 270.
- ↑ Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Campaign Expands to Airwaves to Declare Late Rebbe "moshiach" Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 7 February 1996, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ J. Correspondent, 1,000 Orthodox rabbis reject claim rebbe was Messiah J. The Jewish News of Northern California, 21 June 1996, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Shabsie Saphirstein, Faith And Unity Under The Sukkah At City Hall Queens Jewish Link, 22 October 2025, accessed 10 November 2026.
- ↑ Anash.org, World's Largest Menorah Shined Brighter Than Ever Anash.org, 24 December 2025, accessed 10 November 2026.