On the face of it, there should be almost nothing connecting an Israeli backpacker wandering through Sapa in northern Vietnam, a Jamaican Jew whose ordinary speech rolls like reggae and a U.S. Marine stationed thousands of miles from home. Yet at the Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries 2025, I found myself thinking about all three — and especially about someone I only just met: Staff Sgt. Benjamin Craig.
Until this week I had no idea who he was. Benjamin, as it turns out, or more precisely Staff Sgt. Benjamin Craig, is an active-duty Marine with 10 years of service. He grew up in a small, unremarkable New England town outside Boston. Other than having a Jewish family name, he had no connection to Jewish practice. He never had a bar mitzvah. If someone in Israel were casting an American action hero, Benjamin would fit the part perfectly.
But in 2020, his unit landed on Okinawa, the tropical island that hosts major U.S. military bases. There he spotted something he had never before seen on an American officer: a serious beard and white ritual fringes — tzitzit — hanging from a uniform. The man wearing them was Capt. Levi Packer, an Air Force chaplain and a Chabad emissary serving the Jewish personnel stationed on the island.
From that moment, Benjamin’s life began to shift. He discovered Shabbat, learned how to put on tefillin — the black prayer boxes worn on the arm and head — and today he teaches younger Marines not battlefield skills but Jewish heritage. His story surfaced this week at the massive annual salute to Chabad emissaries, where thousands gather from around the world, forming a mosaic of communities from India to Hawaii. It was just one tile in the wider picture of the sprawling network of Chabad centers around the globe.
Organizers reported that 6,224 emissary families now serve in more than 115 countries. The newest Chabad center opened only weeks ago in Sapa, Vietnam, where Rabbi Akiva and Giti hosted more than 150 Israeli travelers this past Shabbat.
And then there is Jamaica. Just days ago, local Jews there endured a hurricane with winds reaching 295 kph (183 mph). They have not stopped thanking Rabbi Yaakov Raskin, the Chabad emissary on the island, for the support he provided during the storm — and thanking God for sending him to live in their Caribbean nation. One Jamaican Jew put it plainly in reggae cadence: once he felt like a lonely Jew, and now he no longer does. “We are blessed that the Rebbe’s spark reached here,” he said. “Ya man, we love Chabad.”
As I watched Benjamin’s story, and as I listened to the voices from Jamaica, something clicked. Every year the emissaries gather for a giant group portrait outside 770 Eastern Parkway — the red-brick Brooklyn building identified with the late Lubavitcher Rebbe. The photo is enormous, powerful, shot with wide lenses to capture emissaries from every corner of the world. But I realized that it is not the real picture.
The real picture is made of all the Jews the Rebbe touched through his emissaries — people whose choices shifted, whose daily lives gained meaning, who discovered roots they never knew how to access, who learned they were never alone.
For 20 years I have attended this conference as Chabad’s emissary to the Israeli media. This year I brought my son Mendi, who is soon celebrating his bar mitzvah. On Friday, in freezing weather, we joined all the emissaries at the Rebbe’s resting place in Queens to pray for Jewish communities worldwide. We carried with us hundreds of thousands of personal notes sent by Jews across the globe.
Standing there, I heard again the words Rabbi Raskin had said from inside the hurricane in Jamaica: gratitude for being a messenger of the Rebbe, and the belief that you are not thrown into circumstances but create them. You do not look around and ask what you lack — and in his case he lacks almost everything: a kosher bakery, a Jewish school, a mikvah, a synagogue. Instead you roll up your sleeves and begin to build.
And as one Jamaican Jew summed it up to a reggae beat, “Once I felt like a lonely Jew. Now I am not alone.”
Ya man. They love Chabad.
I left New York carrying that thought — and the sense of a worldwide network of souls connected from Okinawa to Jamaica to the mountains of Vietnam, all bound together by the mission the Rebbe set in motion.
Rabbi Moni Ender is Chabad’s emissary to the Israeli media and has just returned from the conference that took place in New York.