Special story · Archival exhibition

The Rebbe
& New Zealand

A relationship conducted almost entirely on paper, and felt at the other end of the earth.

A huge group photograph of thousands of Chabad emissaries gathered outside 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Thousands of Chabad shluchos, gathered outside 770 — the address the world writes home to.
A huge group photograph of thousands of Chabad emissaries gathered outside 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn

Brooklyn

770

Crowded, urban, permanently busy. The centre of a movement that kept telling people to leave it.

A man in a hat looking across Auckland harbour towards the city skyline at sunset

The Pacific

New Zealand

Vast, quiet, and further from Brooklyn than almost anywhere a person can go.

770
to the edge
of the world.

Before shluchim could live everywhere, letters travelled first

770BROOKLYNMelbourneSydneyWellington788AUCKLAND
BrooklynPacificAustraliaNew Zealand

The bridge south

Australia first

Jewish life did not arrive in New Zealand directly from Brooklyn. It came down the same route almost everything else did: through Melbourne, through Sydney, and then across one more sea. Australia is here not as its own history, but because it explains how anything reached this far at all — the yeshivah in Melbourne, the rabbis who travelled, the infrastructure New Zealand borrowed until it could build its own.

770BROOKLYNMelbourneSydneyWellington788AUCKLAND
Brooklyn to Melbourne to Sydney to New Zealand. Great circles on a Pacific-centred projection — the way the distance actually runs.

Further south.

Regional and rural

One Jew is enough reason to go

Long roads, small towns, a van with a menorah on the roof, and a single name on a list. The logic that sent rabbis a thousand kilometres inland is the same logic that eventually put a mezuzah on a door in Remuera. (That phrase is ours, written editorially — not a quotation.)

And beyond Australia,
New Zealand.

This far.

770BROOKLYNLondonJerusalemJohannesburgSydneyMelbourne788AUCKLAND

New Zealand sits at the bottom edge of almost every map printed in the northern hemisphere. That is a fact about paper and geography, not about importance.

Equirectangular projection · 110m coastlines

Still not too far.

Gallery

At the edge of the Jewish world

A huge group photograph of thousands of Chabad emissaries gathered outside 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Thousands of Chabad shluchos, gathered outside 770 — the address the world writes home to.
A man in a hat looking across Auckland harbour towards the city skyline at sunset
Auckland, from across the water.
A nineteenth century view of Auckland from the harbour, 1859
Auckland in 1859 — the young town where Jewish prayer began above a Shortland Street store.1859
A photograph of the Princes Street Synagogue in Auckland
The Princes Street Synagogue, Auckland.1885
A crowd gathered outside the Raye Freedman Library building at 788 Remuera Road
788 Remuera Road, the whole community outside.
The white weatherboard front of the Raye Freedman Library at 788 Remuera Road, decorated with colourful Chanukah bunting
Chanukah bunting on the front of 788. The building dresses up when the community does.

The distance changed.
The purpose did not.

Sources

What this chapter is built from

  • Photograph

    788 Remuera Road today

    Chabad New Zealand

    Cleared for publication

    View 788 today

If you hold a letter, a photograph or a recording that belongs here, it can be scanned and returned.

The white weatherboard front of the Raye Freedman Library at 788 Remuera Road, decorated with colourful Chanukah bunting
Chanukah bunting on the front of 788. The building dresses up when the community does.

First, a letter.
Then, a journey.
Then, a community.
Now, a home.

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