In most of the world, Sukkot comes just as the leaves are turning and early autumn chills prompt us to pull our sweaters out of winter storage. It’s still usually pleasant enough to enjoy sitting around the table in the Sukkah. Not so in Siberia or Alaska, where outside temperatures are well below the freezing mark.
But there is no rain date for Sukkot, so the party’s on, rain or frost or shine. “We have heaters in the Sukkah,” Rabbi Benjamin Wagner of Krasnoyarsk, in Western Siberia, told Lubavitch.com. In Krasnoyarsk, where the first snow fell during Sukkot this year, people came just the same. “It wasn’t that bad on the second day of the holiday,” he says. "It was just below zero degrees.”
In Alaska too, says Chabad representative Rabbi Yossi Greenberg, the heaters are on in the Sukkah. And the community comes to celebrate, to make Kiddush and participate in the mitzvot of the holiday. It is after all, the most joyful of Jewish holidays.
With the following photos, Lubavitch.com brings readers snapshots of this week’s holiday observances from countries and climates that span the globe. The photos give a glimpse of Chabad’s penetrating efforts to bring the joy and the mitzvot of Sukkot to every segment of the Jewish community, including Jewish servicemen in Korea and our soldiers in Israel, and and too, the little children at the Chabad Brenenson Orphanage in Ukraine.
In a way, it’s all a warm-up for Simchat Torah, beginning Saturday evening (through Sunday night), when the dancing becomes euphoric and merrymaking is elevated to spiritual service.
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