As the annual International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Women Emissaries, or Kinus Hashluchot, kicks off this week in New York, observers will notice the youthful energy of the participants. In fact, 404 of the 5,735 female Chabad leaders are Gen Z—the “digital native” generation born after 1997. These women, in their early 20s, lead and build communities, direct Jewish day camps and schools, mentor college students and run teen programming, all while juggling the responsibilities of mothering growing families and being the backbone of their community.
Kate Benediktsson was at the lowest point of her life when she encountered one of these young leaders. At the age of 40, she had just lost her husband and “went into a tailspin,” Benediktsson tells Chabad.org. Seeing the state she was in, a friend connected her with the new Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries in town: Mirel Mintz and her husband, Rabbi Levi Mintz, co-directors of Chabad of Tiburon, an affluent Northern California town with a median age of almost 50. Mirel, 21, and her husband went straight to Benediktsson’s home in the next-door town of Belvedere.
“Mirel walked up to me and gave me a hug that I can only describe as forcing the lifeforce of G‑d into me,” Benediktsson says of the moment they met. “It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. We sat down together, and I dove into it. I saw they were young, but I had a deeper conversation with them than I had with any rabbi or rebbetzin before.”
Benediktsson was baring her heart to a woman half her age—just older than her own 18-year-old son—but she says “their age wasn’t present in that space. What was present was help, humanity and spiritual guidance.” Then, 22 days after her husband’s passing, she lost her daughter as well. “Mirel came to my house every day for two months,” she says. “She was a steady positive.” Now, she adds, the rabbi studies with her son, teaching him about his Jewish faith.
How do such young women become leaders and role models in their communities, confidants and comforters to people old enough to be their parents or grandparents? While the median age of U.S. based rabbis is 56, according to a Faith Communities Today survey, Chabad rabbinic couples skew much younger, with close to 600 Gen Z men and women joining the ranks in the last three years.
The Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—keenly understood the energy and potential of American youth to be leaders and builders. “American youth is like unsown land waiting to be worked,” the Rebbe told an interviewer in 1950. “The youth can be compared to a blank piece of paper.”
The Rebbe, continued the interviewer, Asher Penn, “explained that the 20th-century American Jewish soul is ripe and open to Judaism in an unprecedented way. He showed that America filled all the requirements for becoming a Jewish spiritual haven, and thought it possible for American born Jews to be the next spiritual leaders and scholars for world Jewry.”
“They walk through the world with a gravity different from people my son’s age,” Benediktsson says of the young Chabad emissaries she connected with. “They occupy a space in the world that’s more solid. They have a quality of the innocence of the youth; they aren’t jaded. Hearing someone with such hope, faith and youth being able to hold my suffering—that juxtaposition is frankly so healing. They aren’t flippant or cavalier; the wisdom they have is so pure.”
“Truth,” says Benediktsson, “doesn’t have an age.”
Young Emissaries ‘Give Hope for the Future’
“It is a remarkable number of young people picking up the Rebbe’s call to serve communities all over the world,” explains Ron Wolfson. Wolfson, Fingerhut Professor of Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles and author of Relational Judaism and Creating Sacred Communities, explains that Jewish communities of all kinds share one concern: Will they go on into the future? This cohort of young women—born in the 28 years since the Rebbe’s passing in 1994—represent one half of the two-person team that forms a Chabad emissary couple. These young couples are poised to create a sea change of Jewish leadership for members of the Jewish community of all backgrounds and ages. Collectively they form the largest group of Gen Z spiritual leaders in the worldwide Jewish community.
“The baby boomers aren’t getting younger. The No. 1 concern is that Judaism thrives into the next generation,” says Wolfson.
Seeing young leadership gives hope for the future, he continues, adding that it’s the values that Chabad women and men live by and demonstrate that ensure their success.
“Chabad lives a complete Jewish life while in regular society,” he says. “One of the hallmarks of Chabad’s approach is to bring a traditional message and lifestyle to a population that doesn’t know so much about it. They have an advantage, especially with reaching the young generation; they have the authenticity that Gen Z is looking for.”
While young spiritual leadership can be found across the Jewish spectrum, Wolfson says by far, the largest number of young Jewish communal leaders today come from “the Chabad system where you have young couples willing to go out there, ‘put down the flag,’ and build communities…. There are many more examples of that work by Chabad than in other movements.”
Oftentimes, the pioneering spirit goes back to the communities and families where these young women were raised. Chaya Citron, 24, who co-directs Chabad on Campus SW Portland, Ore., and is also the director of a Chabad preschool in Portland where she’s the youngest staff member, says she was raised “with the mindset of shlichut” in her hometown Chabad community of Chicago.
From a young age, “we are always involved in outreach, volunteering, running camps; we are educated this way,” she says.
Chaya Sasonkin, 25, co-director of Chabad of Casa Grande, an Arizona town halfway between Phoenix and Tucson, says she and her peers could never come up with this idea—setting up a new community without any Jewish infrastructure and no top-down financial backing—on their own. “It’s really the Rebbe who empowered us to do this. The Rebbe gave us a passion to grow Jewish life.”
Sasonkin and her husband, Rabbi Moshe Sasonkin, moved to Casa Grande from Brooklyn two years ago. She grew up in the Tucson area, where her parents direct Chabad on River; he is from Long Island, where his parents also serve as Chabad emissaries. They looked into many places before setting their eyes on the small town they often drove past. “We realized it had no Jewish infrastructure, and visiting there we met Jews who commuted to Phoenix or Chandler for Jewish life,” she says.
Now, Chabad of Casa Grande has weekly Torah classes for men and women, regular Shabbat services, holiday services, an active Jewish Women’s Circle and Jewish education for children. They serve the nearby towns of Eloy and Arizona City as well, and her husband regularly visits the incarcerated in area prisons as well.
“The Rebbe,” Wolfson believes, “would be smiling.”
‘They Lead This Community Together’
David Garnice, 70, and his wife, Marcia, moved to Casa Grande a year ago from the Phoenix suburbs. His experience at Chabad has been “very different and very gratifying.” Different, he explains, because he feels the rabbi and rebbetzin care about him more than he’s experienced elsewhere. For example, when a family emergency meant they couldn’t make it to a Sukkot service, the rabbi walked to his home to bring the lulav and etrog to him. “That was really impressive,” says Garnice.
“A younger rebbetzin and rabbi are more active, more involved. They seem to be everywhere at the same time.” He says that the rabbi’s wife isn’t just a side role, “she is an equal. They lead this community together.”
In many cases, these young men and women aren’t just serving as assistant clergy at larger synagogues as their foray into the Jewish leadership world. Instead, they are creating new communities in places with no or limited Jewish infrastructure, bringing a Jewish presence to college campuses and designing new communities for teens and young professionals. These positions aren’t stepping stones on the way to a more prestigious role but in the majority of cases a lifetime posting.
In Tiburon, Kate Benediktsson’s emotional connection with Mirel Mintz has evolved into a thirst for the Judaism she never had growing up in Alaska with a Jewish mother and Evangelical father. This connection will soon take the shape of a fully kosher kitchen in her home.
“After I met them, my life changed dramatically. I connected with fabulous Jewish women; I go to Shabbat at Chabad,” she says. “Now we have this group of people who get together for Shabbat and outside of it. My new friend Rachel is moving, and all of a sudden, we’re all helping her move in real time. This didn’t exist before.”
She describes the joy at this past year’s Chanukah celebration and menorah-lighting in the center of town: “So many people were there! There was an energy to it, a joy and soulfulness. I can still picture the dancing. The infusion of connection and life they're bringing—it’s cool to see what will unfold.”
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