Shabbat With Chabad at the Cannes Film Festival

The International Cannes Film Festival, emblematic in all ways of material girls (and boys), seemed a most unlikely venue for a spiritual encounter. Indeed, curious onlookers assumed it was a film shoot that had people dancing to the Shabbat liturgy of Lecha Dodi, on the French Riviera last Friday night.

But for the guests who took a detour from the Film Festival for a Shabbat evening celebration, it was an experience in contrasts that allowed them to trade in their stage personas for a few hours, and make connections of a different character altogether.

There they were—about 120 producers, actors and others involved in the film industry from a mix of foreign countries, singing the Kabbalat Shabbat services on a private beach, around tables decked out in Shabbat candles, a heimishe dinner, and the warmth of Chabad Shluchim hosting them.

“It looks like Moshiach times,” reflected film producer Scott Einbinder, “when many Jews from many different places and different backgrounds get together for Shabbat.”

Guests lingered at the tables late into the night. Some came the following morning for Shabbat services at the Chabad House. Others were reached by Chabad rabbinical students spotted during the 10-day Festival as they invited Jewish visitors to wrap tefillin or a accept a gift of Shabbat candles.

"Always," says Rabbi Mendel Matusof, co-director of Chabad of Cannes with his father, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Matusof, "we give them the contact info of their home-based Chabad representative so that they can look their local Chabad reps up in their own home towns."

Generally speaking, he explained, the Jewish people at the Cannes Festival are rather remotely affiliated, if at all, to anything of Jewish substance, and this provided them with a rare opportunity to establish a meaningful connection.

It's the third year that Chabad has been hosting the Shabbat dinner, and says Rabbi Matusof, the event is growing from year to year. The event was organized with the help of film producers Max Gottleib and Emmanuelle Fredj, along with Rabbi Mendel Schwartz of the Chai Center in Los Angeles.