Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries often serve as critical points of contact for Jews around the world—be it a family looking for community, a traveler stranded in Athens for Shabbat, a sudden Jewish burial in Kaliningrad, Russia, or someone looking to deepen their connection to their heritage through in-person Torah study in Peoria, Ill. With more than 5,000 emissary couples in 100-plus countries and all 50 states, helping people easily locate a Chabad House or rabbi near them can be a daunting task.
Chabad.org’s Chabad Locator has long been the first place millions of Jews look when trying to find a Jewish community or synagogue. It’s the largest synagogue directory in the world and one of the oldest on the Internet, and while updated regularly over the last decade, those updates have only been incremental.
"Chabad.org’s Chabad Locator has long been the first place millions of Jews look when trying to find a Jewish community or synagogue." Chabad.org has announced in a news story that its team of developers and designers has now entirely revamped its Chabad-Lubavitch Center Directory, and is releasing it as a public beta on Chabad.org at Chabad.org/New-Directory.
Harnessing the power of Google Maps and the ingenuity of Chabad.org’s development team, the new directory will provide a seamless transition between a global view of the thousands of Chabad-Lubavitch centers worldwide—an incredibly vast network that spans six continents across all 24 time zones.
The new platform will enable a user to easily identify individual offerings and the precise location of each center, including contact information, particular services offered and any other pertinent information. Users can instantly filter their search to only centers providing a Hebrew school, mikvah or any other specific service they require.
In addition to being able to connect more efficiently with the 3,500 Chabad institutions, the new map-centric web app offers a better appreciation of the global reach, impact and scope of Chabad-Lubavitch worldwide. Simply taking the map for spin, swiping across the globe, can feel like a massive sprawling game of Jewish geography.
With new Chabad centers popping up all over—from the United Arab Emirates to the rural United States—this tool will prove to be more useful, and frankly, more impressive, than ever before.
Take the new Chabad Locator for a test drive at www.chabad.org/new-directory.
