Another instance of Lubavitch’s insincerity was evident in a Chicago Tribune article yesterday. Apparently a Chabad Rabbi in North Miami Beach decided to “Bar Mitzvah” a 76 year old holocaust survivor who had never been “Bar Mitzva’d”. It seems that this fellow had been featured in a Valentine’s Day TV news story which told of how he met his wife as a child in a Nazi Concentration camp. The story which is quite poignant tells us that the young girl as a 9-year-old for months tossed apples and bread across a fence to help that little boy survive. He was later transferred to another camp and thought he had seen the last of her... only to find her by co-incidence14 years later on a blind date. He immediately proposed marriage and they have been living happily ever since. So this North Miami Beach Chabad rabbi, one Anchelle Perl, had heard about this and the fact that he never had a Bar Mitzvah he decided to make one.
First of all there is the question of how this young girl was able to feed this little boy apples from across the fence. The only way this could have happened is she wasn’t Jewish. That means he intermarried. (Unless she was Jewish and passed for being not Jewish during the holocaust... or that she converted before she married him. But these factors are too significant not to be mentioned.) So Chabad celebrates this man’s life of intermarriage by throwing him a Party?
But let’s give him the benefit of doubt and assume his wife is Jewish
How dishonest is this Lubavitcher! Anyone with even the slightest bit of Jewish knowledge on the subject knows that you don’t get “Bar-Mitzva’d”. There is no ritual requirement. Being a Bar Mitzvah happens automatically when you hit 13 years of age. Yet this did not stop this Lubavitcher from capitalizing on this fellow’s 15 minutes of fame and turning it into a Lubavitch event. His goal I’m sure was to get Lubavitch in the news as providing a long sought after Jewish ritual to a man who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis. But it was a lie. This seventy six year old Jew had been Bar Mitzva’d 63 years ago, automatically. But that didn’t matter to this Lubavitcher rabbi as long as he got good PR out of it. The fact that he was a Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen was no where to be found in the article. This rabbi did not want to spoil this tremendous PR opportunity with the truth, which would make this event entirely irrelevant.
This is why I say that to Lubavitch, the ends always seem to justify the means. They feel that the deception on their part was worth it because of the great PR Lubavitch gets.
With all the great potential Lubavitch has they never the less continue to do the kinds of things that alienates them from the rest of Klal Yisroel. And this is just another example of it. It is time they stopped misrepresenting the Torah’s views by participating in stunts like this. PR for Lubavitch is not what Torah is all about.
