Crown Heights and the Practice of Lubavitch Communities Worldwide

Crown Heights is home to 770 and many of the central institutions of Lubavitch. It is also a gathering place for Shluchim, Anash, bochurim and families who come from communities around the world. Tishrei and the Kinusim make this especially visible, while visits to Crown Heights continue throughout the year.

That gives the public practice of Shabbos in Crown Heights a reach beyond the people who live in the neighborhood. Visitors see what is treated as normal, take part in communal life while they are here, and then return home. The halachic status of an eruv still depends on the facts and psak of the place in question. Crown Heights has a practical influence because it is a center that people visit, rather than because its local psak automatically determines the halacha of every other community.

The current Crown Heights Beis Din addresses this reality directly. Its 5786 notice was addressed to the "residents and visitors" of the neighborhood and repeated that carrying in the streets of Crown Heights and its vicinity is forbidden on Shabbos and Yom Kippur. The inclusion of visitors was deliberate: the same notice warned that publicity encouraging carrying could cause confusion among guests and others.

Why Visitors Matter

The concern that public carrying in one place can affect practice elsewhere appears explicitly in Rav Moshe Feinstein's discussion of Yerushalayim.

In Igros Moshe, Orach Chaim I:139, Rav Moshe asks why an eruv was not made in Yerushalayim if, according to the position under discussion, the city's walls could have allowed one. He suggests that people came to Yerushalayim from many places for the regalim and throughout the year. If visitors from places without comparable halachic enclosures saw people carrying in Yerushalayim, they might return home and carry there as well. Rav Moshe then applies that concern to Manhattan and nearby places that could not be properly enclosed.

This passage is important, and so is Rav Moshe's later qualification of it. In Igros Moshe, Orach Chaim V:28, he returns to the same argument and writes that it does not apply in the same way to ordinary towns, where people historically came only from nearby places. He then distinguishes New York in modern times, writing, המציאות הוא עתה שבאין לנוא יארק מכולי עלמא, that the contemporary reality was that people came to New York from the whole world.

Rav Moshe explains that air travel had changed the practical situation, since people could arrive within hours even from distant places. He therefore says that the Yerushalayim consideration can be learned for New York, "and perhaps also for Brooklyn," adding an important condition: this is when there is no separate defect in the enclosure itself.

Rav Moshe's responsa discuss New York and potentially Brooklyn. They do not name Crown Heights or Lubavitch. Their direct relevance here is the halachic concern itself: in a place that receives visitors from far beyond its immediate area, a public practice of carrying can affect what those visitors later do elsewhere.

Read Igros Moshe, Orach Chaim I:139, in full

Read Igros Moshe, Orach Chaim V:28, in full

The Rebbe's Concern About Habitual Carrying

The Rebbe discussed a closely related practical problem in his 5724 letter to Rabbi Eliyohu Jung concerning the proposed Manhattan eruv. The letter begins with an important principle: where an eruv can be established according to halacha, it should be established. The Rebbe then turns to the conditions of contemporary Jewish life and the danger of an eruv becoming invalid after the public has learned to rely on it.

The difficulty, he wrote, was that the establishment of an eruv could quickly become common knowledge, while news that it had later become posul might reach only those in regular contact with the Rabbonim or the shul. He added that people "might get into the habit of carrying on Shabbos" and might not readily stop even after learning that the eruv had broken down.

For that reason, the Rebbe wrote that an eruv, where one was halachically feasible, should be made "in the utmost secrecy." Its purpose in such circumstances would be to reduce the issur for people who were carrying regardless, without creating a new public practice of carrying among observant Jews. The same letter expressly left the halachic feasibility of Manhattan itself to Rabbonim who had investigated its local details.

Read the Rebbe's letter to Rabbi Eliyohu Jung in full

The Rebbe returned to the habituation concern in a handwritten response to Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner about a proposed eruv in Melbourne, dated 5 Iyar 5741. He wrote that if a recognized person or organization established an eruv knowing that it would become public, this could become a severe stumbling block. Inevitably, he wrote, one Shabbos could come when the eruv was posul; after people had become accustomed several times to carrying on Shabbos, an announcement that carrying was again forbidden might no longer stop them. He concluded, ואין לעשות עירוב אלא בסודיות, that an eruv should be made only discreetly.

Read the Melbourne response in full

These two sources address somewhat different settings, yet the practical concern is the same. Public carrying does more than solve an isolated need on a single Shabbos. Once it becomes ordinary behavior, people can retain the habit even when the facts have changed or when they are in a different place.

Returning Home to a Different Local Practice

For a visitor, seeing people carry in another city is therefore not enough to determine what may be done at home. An eruv depends on local boundaries, local halachic conditions, continuing supervision and the psak under which it is used. A person returning to a community without an accepted eruv cannot carry there on the strength of what he saw elsewhere.

The same local principle applies while visiting Crown Heights. A guest who comes from a community where an eruv is accepted still follows the Crown Heights psak while in the neighborhood. This is why the Crown Heights Beis Din's current notice speaks to visitors together with residents and tells both groups that the streets may not be used for carrying on Shabbos or Yom Kippur.

Melbourne provides one example of the distinction between an eruv existing in a city and the practice followed within a particular Lubavitch community. A later published account of Rabbi Yitzchok Dovid Groner's conduct reports that after an eruv was eventually established, he did not permit his community to rely on it and avoided arrangements that would encourage its use. The account comes from later testimony rather than a contemporaneous written directive, so it serves here as a description of practice, alongside the Rebbe's actual written response.

There is no need to turn that example into a single rule for every Lubavitch community. Rabbi Yonason Johnson of Melbourne made the local distinction explicit in a 5783 letter. He wrote that a Rav who concludes that his own community requires an eruv may decide accordingly in that community. He separately rejected presenting such a local decision as though it were itself the Rebbe's policy.

Crown Heights remains unusually important in this respect because so many Lubavitchers come through it. The neighborhood's public no-carrying practice is therefore encountered by people who live under many different local circumstances. Rav Moshe's discussion explains why the conduct seen by visitors can matter after they leave, while the Rebbe's letters explain why a public habit of carrying can be difficult to reverse once it has taken hold.