Exhibitions: Tradition: Photographs of the Lubavitch in Brooklyn by Mal Warshaw

September 10, 1976: Tradition: Photographs of the Lubavitch in Brooklyn by Mal Warshaw, will be on view at The Brooklyn Museum, Eastern Parkway and Washington Avenue, from Wednesday, September 22, through November 28. The exhibition of about eighty recent photographs records the rituals and practices that sanctify the daily existence of the Hasidic community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, the center of a growing world-wide movement. Mal Warshaw, a prominent New York photographer and film-maker, is particularly concerned with the adaptation of traditional Jewish orthodoxy to the realities of contemporary urban life.

In his introduction to Tradition: Orthodox Jewish Life in America,* Mr. Warshaw writes: “Although I am a native New Yorker and have lived in this city all my life, the Crown Heights neighborhood was totally new to me and worlds away from the New York I knew....I was fascinated by the way in which my visual perceptions were suddenly and vividly eighteenth-century European and at the same time so obviously urban twentieth-century New York....I returned with my camera again and again....What had begun as a flirtation with the seemingly exotic became a transforming experience.”

Becoming close friends with the devout Jews in Crown Heights, Mr. Warshaw was invited to participate in family and community celebrations. For three years he photographed their daily services in the synagogue--study and prayer, the bar mitzvah, marriage--the moving rituals which order their entire life span. Mundane aspects of living are also included, with photographs of children at play, women shopping and keeping house, men at work.

Lubavitch (or "Chabad") philosophy is a synthesis of the mystical and rational currents of Jewish thought, blended into a cohesive religious philosophy. It provides an all-embracing world outlook and a way of life that sees the Jew’s central purpose as the unifying link between man and God.

Now marking its own Bicentennial, the Lubavitch movement was founded by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1813). Since 1950 the movement has been headed by its seventh successive leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, regarded by many as the foremost spiritual leader in the Jewish world today, under whose leadership the movement has flourished and taken on new dimensions.

Lubavitch institutions and regional offices can now be found in dozens of cities throughout the United States and Canada, and dozens more have been established in South America, Europe, Australia and Africa. The movement is well known for its network of institutions and variegated activities throughout Israel.

According to a spokesman, through its Mitzvah campaigns and outreaching concern for the material and spiritual well-being of their fellow Jews, indigenous to the basics of its philosophy, the Lubavitch movement has succeeded in bringing tens of thousands of Jews--especially among the young--back to their Jewish faith and heritage.

As both a still and film photographer, Mal Warshaw’s subjects have included many people and places. He has been a professor at Pratt Institute. Of his experience with the Lubavitcher community of Crown Heights he says: “Nowhere else had I witnessed such an intimacy with God and seen such joy in the most ordinary routines. I was awed by the strength of their commitment to God and tradition and amazed by such single purposed adherence to so simple a way of life--a way of life which had stubbornly and devotedly resisted the threats of annihilation in the Holocaust, the temptations of assimilation in America, and the ongoing lures of modernity.”

The exhibition will travel to other museums; the schedule will be announced.

Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1976, 008-9. View Original 1 . View Original 2