Are You a Jew?

Along Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas, across from Radio City Music Hall, the young men in their black hats and beards stand poised for action in the summer heat. "Are you Jewish?" they ask startled passersby. "Racially Jewish," is the inaccurate reply of one tanned, neatly barbered man. "But not religiously." "Yes," mutters another hurrying by, "but I don't have time to stop." A middle-aged woman takes the counteroffensive: "So what's all this about?" She waves in the direction of a van parked near by, emblazoned with a banner reading "Mitzvah Mobile." Inside, more young men in black hats and beards are busy talking--and praying --with people they have stopped.

Named for the Hebrew word for "commandment" or "good deed," the Mitzvah Mobiles are a summer project of a unique group of Orthodox Jews who have made it their mission to awaken fellow Jews to Jewish identity and spiritual obligation. They are the Lubavitcher Hasidim, members of an Eastern European sect that now has its international headquarters in Brooklyn.* The Lubavitch Youth Organization mans the mobiles with vacationing Yeshiva (religious school) students and young rabbis. Half a dozen vans are on the road each week in New York City and its suburbs and in the "Borscht Belt" Catskills resort area upstate. The sect also operates vans in other U.S. cities (among them: Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Miami Beach and Los Angeles), and in Canada, Australia and Israel.

To the Lubavitcher leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the trucks are "Jewish tanks against assimilation" --a counterattack against the secularization of Jews in modern society. The immediate aim of the young men in the Mitzvah Mobiles is to persuade Jews to return to observance of five basic mitzvot that, they say, epitomize the 613 commandments of traditional Jewish Law.

God's Unity. Two of the commandments encompass the Law itself: a duty to study the Torah--Jewish teaching --and to keep Torah books (the Pentateuch, the Psalms and the Jewish prayer book) in the home. A third commands Jews to give charity, and as a reminder the Lubavitchers pass out charity boxes to be kept and filled in the home. A fourth commandment requires a householder to keep on each doorpost (except that of the bathroom) a mezuzah --a small container holding a handwritten parchment with a scriptural passage on the unity of God.

The fifth commandment requires a demonstration for many who visit the vans: putting on tefillin, the phylacteries that Orthodox Jewish males over 13 must wear on their foreheads and left arms (near the heart) during weekday prayer. The tefillin--two small leather boxes containing scriptures similar to those in the mezuzah and wound on with leather thongs--are a sign that the wearer subjugates his heart and mind to God. Wrapping on the tefillin for the first time is the high point of the Jewish religious initiation for males, the bar mitzvah ceremony. When an uninitiated Jewish male drops by a Mitzvah Mobile, the Lubavitchers show him how to wrap the tefillin, pray with him, and send him on his way belatedly bar mitzvahed.

The tefillin ritual attracts many to the mobiles. Manhattan Lawyer Paul Herman, 37, went out of his way to seek out a van, put on tefillin and pray. "It was an opportunity to perform a mitzvah," he said, "and I wanted to show my appreciation to these gentlemen." More mundane reasons also impel Jews into the vans. As a thunderstorm broke over Manhattan one day recently, a drenched mod couple climbed into the rear of a truck with a plaintive question: "Got room for two more Jews?"

* Hasidism is a mystical, enthusiastic and ritualistic movement in Judaism that first appeared in 18th century Europe. The Lubavitchers, the largest of the Hasidic sects today (a claimed 500,000 members and sympathizers worldwide), take their name from the White Russian town of Lubavitch, where the movement began.

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