Pursuing the Work : Judaism: Valley members of ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement press on with efforts to fulfill the mandate of late grand rabbi.

By DOUG SMITH

June 18, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ENCINO — By outward appearances, it was just another day at the Chabad of the Valley last week. Only four days after the death of the rebbe or grand rabbi--thought by many of his followers to be the Jewish Messiah who would usher in an era of peace in the world--the Valley headquarters of the international Hassidic movement seemed to be functioning as if nothing unusual had happened.

No consternation, tears, nor trappings of mourning. No frenetic politicking nor gossip over who might fill the shoes of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the messianic leader who departed childless and without choosing a successor.

Just rabbis and office staff pressing on with their daily work in the small complex in a converted house hidden behind a tall hedge on Hayvenhurst Avenue.

That is exactly what the late spiritual leader would have wanted, said Rabbi Joshua B. Gordon, leader of the San Fernando Valley’s contingent of the 200-year-old Lubavitcher movement.

“We would rather just sit back and cry, but we were taught by the rebbe that along with tears, along with the mourning, comes a recommitment to the teaching of the one that passed away,” Gordon said, measuring his words to negotiate the doctrinal crisis raised by Schneerson’s death.

Gordon said he completed his own formal mourning when he attended the funeral last Sunday in New York, tearing his jacket at the ceremony in the disciple’s customary gesture called kriyah .

Further memorial prayers are being said for the rebbe at each service, held three times a day in Encino, and a candle has been lit.

“With God’s help, we plan to keep going for a full year,” Gordon said.

Following Jewish tradition, a large public memorial, or Shloshim, will be held a month after the rebbe’s death. The event, scheduled for Sunday, July 10, at Eretz Cultural Center in Reseda, will bring together members of the movement from across the Valley, Gordon said. Tonight Gordon and the eight other Chabad rabbis will gather at his house for a small private memorial.

Other than those modest displays, the grief will be borne privately as work continues to fulfill the rebbe’s mandate, Gordon said.

The ultimate goal, he said, is to bring about true peace on earth with the coming of the Messiah. The movement being pragmatic as well as mystical, however, Gordon said his immediate task is the completion of Chabad of the Valley’s $3-million headquarters on Burbank Boulevard in Tarzana.

Five years in construction, it has been stalled by lack of funds. But Gordon said a bank recently extended $1 million credit for its completion.

“That building, God willing, will be finished in eight months,” he said.

Gordon, a New Jersey native, received his mandate 22 years ago when Schneerson asked him to bring the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement to the Valley.

Starting from scratch, Gordon built an establishment of eight centers with nine full-time rabbis. Each center holds services at least once, and as often as three times, a day, and offers services such as Hebrew school, religious studies and counseling.

Spread out from North Hollywood to Ventura, the centers have approximately 2,000 children enrolled in preschools, day camps, Hebrew schools and teen-age clubs.

Gordon said those numbers offer the best measure of the movement’s Valley membership because Chabad, an acronym coined by Lubavitchers from the Hebrew words for wisdom, knowledge and understanding, keeps no membership roster and collects no dues.

It relies on fund-raising events such as an annual dinner and fees for services such as Hebrew school, to finance its $1.4 million operational budget.

Although it is linked spiritually to the worldwide Lubavitcher headquarters in Brooklyn, where the rebbe lived reclusively, Chabad of the Valley is a separate entity which has taken on the low-key style of its 45-year-old hand-picked leader.

A small, intense man, Gordon not only retains his composure, but also a wry sense of humor, in this time of crisis.

“So, you see, we have real children,” he said, cracking a smile after posing for a photograph in the bustling playground at Chabad’s Tarzana Hebrew school. “Now we can send them back to the rental agency.”

Unlike his counterpart on the Westside--the flamboyant and controversy-seeking Rabbi Shlomo Cunin--Gordon has avoided publicity.

He downplays the doctrinal clashes that have fueled controversy over the Chabad movement within Judaism, and chides the media’s taste for the “exotic and controversial.”

Gordon said he sees no crisis of succession. He believes the elders of the movement will nominate no one because the rebbe was too great a person to be replaced. His teachings, contained in thousands of books, tapes and videos, will continue to guide the movement’s 2,000 autonomous centers around the world, Gordon said.

Schneerson was the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe . Born in Russia and educated in Berlin and Paris, he steered his disciples out of the usual seclusion of Hassidic practice, using modern media techniques in a campaign to draw Jews around the world to Orthodox Judaism.

While creating the world’s largest and most powerful Hassidic movement, he antagonized the less stringent conservative and reform Jewish mainstream, in particular with his political maneuvers to allow only Orthodox Jews to immigrate to Israel.

His aggressive, hard-line emissaries often ruffled feathers, and his followers, numbering hundreds of thousands, stirred controversy by promoting the rebbe as the Jewish Messiah. Schneerson neither endorsed nor denied that claim, but critics said he had encouraged it by saying that the coming of the Messiah was near.

“It’s a very sad commentary . . . that one has to wait for a man to deny it,” said Rabbi Harold Schulweis, senior rabbi of the conservative Valley Beth Shalom synagogue of Encino, who sees disillusionment ahead for many of Schneerson’s followers.

“I think when a movement (depends) on a miracle man who is considered to be in a real sense infallible, it spawns self-destruction,” Schulweis said.

Orthodox Rabbi Marvin Sugarman of Shaarey Zedek Congregation in North Hollywood had a more favorable analysis. Foreseeing “a very difficult period to have to go through,” he said, nonetheless, the movement is “too resilient and energetic to have any major repercussions. I can’t conceive of Judaism without the input of Chabad.”

Gordon dismissed the predictions of mass defections now that followers have witnessed their rebbe’s mortality.

“I don’t believe this will be a big disillusionment,” he said. “I believe there will be a tremendous feeling of pain and sorrow.”

He said the rebbe’s death ends his personal hope that Schneerson was the Messiah, but doesn’t dampen his belief in the rebbe’s messianic vision.

“We believe everything the rebbe said is valid and true,” Gordon said. “Surely the prediction of the arrival of a true peace in a messianic era will still come about.

“And now that the rebbe has passed on, God will find a way to bring it about.”

Then he paused, always measuring his words.

“Prediction is a bad word. It’s more like promise or revelation.”

Valley religion writer John Dart contributed to this story.