Thousands of Shluchim Gather for Annual Convention, Days After Colleague was Murdered

Rabbi Bentzion Butman was on a long, long flight. 

He was on his way from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to New York City, where this week some 6,500 Chabad-Lubavitch shluchim (emissaries) and their guests will convene for the Kinus, the annual International Conference of Shluchim.

Rabbi Butman is the Chabad emissary to Cambodia, He left Phnom Penh for the Kinus Wednesday morning, one of thousands of rabbis taking flights that vary from an hour or two to Butman’s — a multi-stop, twenty-plus-hour trek long enough that he recited Shacharit multiple times en route — to join a conference that is annually a time to reconnect, grow and be inspired. This year, however, the Kinus is taking on a solemn and urgent tone, as it begins some 48 hours after Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Zvi Kogan, who was abducted and murdered by terrorists in the United Arab Emirates, was laid to rest in Israel.

The convention will include workshops and training sessions, with unique daylong seminar tracks covering topics including adult education, Chabad on Campus, educators, Chabad Young Professionals, mental health and wellness, youth leadership, fundraising, and technology. 

Throughout it all, they will gather to draw strength from one another, to grieve the loss of their colleague, and to honor the mission he gave his life for.

Rabbi Mendel Ehrenreich is the youth director at Chabad of Forsyth County, Georgia. For Ehrenreich, Kogan’s murder hit especially hard. As yeshiva students, the two of them —Ehrenreich and Kogan — volunteered together at Chabad of the UAE in the months following the Abraham Accords in 2020, as more than 60,000 Israeli tourists visited the country, and Chabad stepped up its services to provide for their Jewish needs. 

“I really got to see what it means to be dedicated,” Ehrenreich recalled. “He didn’t stop for a second. When someone called the Chabad House and asked to join us for Shabbat dinner, and we were already sold out, with 400 guests filling the hotel ballroom to capacity, found a way.”

“He called the hotel and got them to squeeze another table, another two tables in. He’d call the caterer and ask them to prepare another few trays of food,”  Ehrenreich said. “If there was a Jew in a foreign land who needed something, Kogan’s answer was always yes.”

The Kinus will include a memorial gathering in Rabbi Kogan’s honor, and the gala banquet — the closing event of the Kinus — will open with a tribute to his life. Emissaries will gather at the Ohel, the Rebbe’s resting place, to pray for their communities and for the Jews of Israel. There will be time to grieve and time to find support, time to cry and time to heal. But most importantly, Ehrenreich says, there will be a call to action.

“This was someone who committed his life to Judaism; to helping Jews in a far-flung place. As shluchim, as we head to the Kinus, we need to know that there’s a soldier missing,” Ehrenreich said. “Everyone else needs to fill the shoes of that missing soldier; everyone has to do their part to fill that void.”