Lubbock, Texas Welcomes Chabad Presence

It was a Friday afternoon, and the hot, northwest Texas sun was beating down on students as they walked to and from classes along the broad Engineering Key at Texas Tech University. A small folding table stood along the way, a lone figure standing near it. A smiling rabbi, black fedora perched on his head, sleeves rolled up in the Texas heat, asked student after student, “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” 

Of the more than 40,000 students at Texas Tech this year, some 400 are Jewish. That Friday on the Key, they found a welcome sight. 

Chabad had come to Lubbock, Texas. 

Rabbi Zalman and Chana Liba Braun moved to Lubbock earlier this year, to serve the needs of Jewish students at Texas Tech as well as the local Jewish community. With a population of 250,000, Lubbock was the largest remaining U.S. city without a Chabad presence.

Lubbock’s Jewish community traces its roots to the early 1900s, when a Jewish couple opened a dry goods store in the then-tiny town along the Santa Fe Railroad. Today, several hundred Jewish people call the city home. Andrea Herrera is one of them. 

When the Brauns first visited Lubbock, Herrera and her husband Alex met them for coffee. “We spent an hour and a half kibitzing,” Herrera recalled. “They were trying to decide whether to move here.”

It wasn’t an easy decision. Lubbock is five hours away from the nearest Chabad house, hundreds of miles from the closest kosher supermarket or mikvah. But here was a community excited to welcome a new rabbi and rebbetzin. Here was a college — the sixth-largest in the state — that had never had Jewish infrastructure in its nearly century-long history.

The Brauns visited again, this time on Chanukah. They held a public menorah lighting on campus at Red Raider Plaza, and another at South Plains Mall, where the nascent Chabad center was greeted by Mayor Tray Payne and other public officials.

“It was very well attended, very public—it was wonderful,” Herrera said. “It was then that I began to realize that they were considering moving here.”

The Brauns hit the ground running, with a Purim party, Passover Seders, High Holiday services and Shabbat dinners. Jewish students welcomed the new Jewish presence on campus—eight of whom even joined the annual Chabad on Campus  Shabbaton in New York, last week. 

Nowadays, Chabad’s table on campus at Texas Tech is becoming a familiar sight, as Jewish pride takes off in northwest Texas.