60 Tanks for the Rebbe

Dana Chivvis – AOL News

On Aug. 26, 1944, French tanks rolled down the Champs-Elysées in Paris, celebrating liberation from the Nazis. On June 5, 1989, tanks driving through Beijing were stopped by a lone dissident standing in their path. And Thursday morning, Mitzvah Tanks rolled across a bridge into Manhattan, blasting Hebrew music and stupefying bystanders as they passed.

The Mitzvah Tanks are not really tanks but rental RV’s. They aren’t driven by soldiers wielding guns but Hasidic Jews wielding matzo. They aren’t on a battlefield of war but a “battlefield of life,” promoting goodness and kindness, not death and destruction.

In New York, the Mitzvah Tank Parade is an event put on every year before Passover by the Chabad-Lubavitchers, a group of Orthodox Jews whose worldwide headquarters is in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The movement was founded 250 years ago in Lubavitch, Russia, and today has more than 3,300 institutions worldwide. The Chabad-Lubavitch center in India was attacked by terrorists during the 2008 three-day siege in Mumbai, India, which left six members dead.

At 9:30 a.m. Thursday, 60 Mitzvah Tanks — one for each year of the parade’s existence — lined both sides of a quiet city block. In Judaism, a mitzvah is a good deed. The idea of the parade is to turn the concept of a tank upside down.

The tanks were decorated with posters saying “Welcome aboard the Mitzvah Tank!” and “Shabbat candles on board.” Also in the vehicles were matzo, the unleavened bread eaten by Jews at Passover, and tefillin, small leather boxes containing biblical passages that are used at prayer. Hundreds of excited Chabad-Lubavitcher boys hung out of tank windows and doors and raced around the street. Each boy was assigned to a tank, where three or four bearded men were at the helm.

“If you’re on your way to Manhattan, you’re gonna see 60 tanks,” Shmuly Bryski, a 12-year-old in glasses and a beige “I’M A TANKIST” T-shirt, explained outside an RV. “It’s a lot of fun.”

The purpose of the parade, which is organized by rabbinical students and young rabbis from the community, is to promote awareness of Passover among other Jews in the city and “general awareness of goodness and kindness,” explained Berel Lerman, who describes himself as 99 percent of a rabbi (he has one more exam to take), radio host and motivational speaker. The parade is also a birthday celebration for the group’s leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, who would have been 108 today. He died in 1994.

As 11 a.m. approached, the Mitzvah Tanks started their engines and, with police escort, turned onto Eastern Parkway, a broad, tree-lined boulevard that runs through Brooklyn past the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters. The caravan rattled across the Manhattan Bridge, kids’ faces pressed against the windows, the same music blasting from each RV, and arrived in Chinatown, where throngs of Chinese passers-by looked on with confusion.

“When was the last time 60 mobile homes paraded up and down Fifth Ave?” Lerman asked from the backseat of a minivan “support” car that was racing in and out of traffic, handled deftly by Zalmen Hackner, a New Jersey ambulance driver.

As the Mitzvah Tanks made their way up the island of Manhattan, New Yorkers, normally accustomed to daily spectacles, took pictures with their phones, accepted boxes of matzo and sometimes cursed the inconvenience of having to wait an extra five minutes to cross the street. As the parade turned south in front of the Plaza Hotel, a man in a lime-green sweater and mustard-yellow sport coat barreled through the traffic, smacking three Mitzvah Tanks’ mirrors as he went.

“People have so much anger,” Hackner said, speeding past the caravan on Fifth Avenue. At 37th Street there was a tank-on-tank collision that threatened to slow the parade’s progress.

The 60 RV’s were rented from various locations in the tri-state area on Tuesday and Wednesday, so many that their mirrors are marked with a sticker to ensure they are returned to the right place.

The parade ended at Madison Square Park, and the Mitzvah Tanks dispersed to different street corners of the city. At one tank, a class of 27 7- and 9-year-olds were clustered on the sidewalk, surrounding their teacher and occasionally approaching strangers to ask, “Excuse me, sir, are you Jewish?” If the answer was yes, the unsuspecting Jew was offered a chance to pray and walk away with a box of matzo and an awareness that Passover is coming on Monday. If the answer was no, the boys replied, “OK, have a nice day.”

Mostly, though, the second-graders took the opportunity to ask each other if they were Jewish, a rhetorical question rewarded with peals of laughter and no matzo.

Photos: Boruch Ezagui