Source: Syracuse.com
Wire Service: AP
http://www.syracuse.com/religion/index.ssf?/base/national-39/1248472864104230.xml&storylist=religion
For the past three weeks, Leibel Kahanov and Ephraim Zimmerman have traveled throughout Montana, encouraging other Jews in their faith.
The two young men are not hard to spot. They wear identical black pants and white dress shirts, yarmulkes - or skullcaps - on their heads and long, curly, dark-brown beards.
Kahanov, 22, of Jacksonville, Fla., and Zimmerman, 23, of Chicago, are members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, one branch of Orthodox Judaism, which has its headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Both are rabbis who study at Central Chabad Yeshivah in Brooklyn, N.Y.
"Chabad" is a Hebrew acronym for the expression "wisdom, intelligence and knowledge" - words that describe the theology of the movement. Lubavitch is a town in White Russia, now Belarus, where the movement was based for more than a century.
Unlike other branches of Orthodox Judaism, the Chabad-Lubavitch movement seeks to reach out to Jews who have grown up without getting in touch with their heritage and their identity. For more than 40 years, it has sent out emissaries in pairs, both in the United States and beyond, to encourage nonobservant Jews to adopt Orthodox Jewish observance.