It’s Firefighting Day at the Lev Chabad day camp at Meir Hospital, and four-year-old Shira Maatuf is impatient for activities to begin. She has been in the hospital for a few days with a lung infection and while it interrupted her carefree summer vacation, for Shira, the Lev Chabad activities at Meir Hospital are more than an acceptable substitute. The organization’s day camps offer a fun and meaningful alternative to what would otherwise be long, tedious and lonely days spent in a hospital ward.

Over 1,300 people gathered at the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza to celebrate forty years of Chabad in the Conejo, California. Headed by Rabbi Moshe and Matty Bryski with Rabbi Yisroel and Leah Levine and two other emissary couples and several assistants, Chabad of Conejo serves thousands of Jews. They often mark milestones with galas, but this one surpassed the norm.

It's a little over thirty years in the making, but Chabad of Wimbledon now has its very own center! Original concern: regulations in England specify that only properties designated with D1 certification are allowed to be used for non-residential use. After a year of exhaustive searching, the only D1 property they could find was rundown and significantly beyond their budget.

Leading the commemoration for victims of recent anti-Semitic attacks at Limmud FSU’s second annual conference for Jewish Russian-speakers was Rabbi Avi Bukiet, director of the Center for Jewish Life in Arlington-Belmont. Several hundred Jewish young adults attended the event this Sunday, as part of Limmud FSU’s (Former Soviet Union) mission to strengthen Jewish identity for Russian-speakers.

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on Thursday night fell less than fifteen meters (fifty feet) from the Chabad center in Sderot and hit a neighboring yeshivah building. No students were in the building at the time as they had already left to spend Shabbat with their families.

Jewish college students in Jacksonville, Florida, and the city’s Southside Jewish community celebrated the opening of their new $3.8 million Morris and Lillian Tabacinic Chabad campus and Finker-Frenkel Chabad center earlier this winter, in style. Rabbi Shmuli and Chana Novack, of Chabad Southside, have been family to the area’s 500 Jewish college students and Southside community, and this new space provides a welcoming and more permanent home for them.

Last month, darkness made its way into the foyer at Chabad of Poway, California. On Wednesday, it was a scene of joyous celebration.

When Sara Covelli walked across the stage at Union College last spring and accepted a rolled parchment proclaiming that she had earned her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Policy and Climate Change, her parents, Robin Laveman and Irwin Krasnow, sat in the audience, poised to give a graduation gift of a different rolled parchment of great significance.

London's new kosher shop had previously operated informally out of the home of Rabbi Nissan and Sarah Dubov, who founded Chabad of Wimbledon in 1988. An expanded version of the shop, now called Kosher Corner, opened last month at the new Chabad center, and is run by the Dubovs’ son-in-law and daughter, Rabbi Yossi and Leah Zlata Moscowitz.

This upcoming June 16-23, Chabad's Young Professionals program is organizing a leadership trip to Russia for a select group of "ambassadors." Eligibility is restricted to 25-35 year-olds who are active members of the local CYP chapter and who are employed on a career track. The program seeks participants who demonstrate a passion for creating a sustainable Jewish community and who have previously held leadership and volunteering roles. ​