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By: The Chabad.org Team
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Kazen was a visionary.
In the late 1980s, he was among the very few who saw the vast potential held by what eventually became known as the World Wide Web, and set about building a Jewish presence in cyberspace. It was dubbed Chabad-Lubavitch of Cyberspace.
When Kazen, a red-bearded rabbi known to one and all as “YY,” passed away in 1998 at the tragically young age of 44, he was already being hailed as a “web pioneer.”1 Twenty-five years since his passing the internet has only grown in importance in our day-to-day lives, and the Jewish island he envisioned on the nascent Web flourishes, serving as a lifeline for millions of people on all seven continents.
The enterprise that he founded in those early days—Chabad.org—has seen people through life-cycle events, personal and communal crises, a global pandemic that challenged communal religious observance, and now a terrible war in Israel, as well as the ensuing emergence of antisemitism around the globe. It has guided 12-year-olds seeking to learn how to read the Torah and 98-year-olds searching for Jewish wisdom they may not have had access to in their youth. It has lowered the barriers for entry to Jewish knowledge and observance for countless individuals, more so, arguably, than any other development in human history.
And it all started with Kazen deep at work in Room 404 on the top floor of the prewar walkup that serves as the office space for Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters. There, in a small room lined with shelves of books and spare computer parts, cables snaking along the floor, Kazen spoke of motherboards, modems, and megabytes—the stuff that made up Chabad.org.
Few understood him, but he saw the future. With the guidance and inspiration of the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—Kazen and his friend, Eli Winsbacher, founded Chabad.org, the site predating Amazon, Yahoo, eBay and The New York Times’ web presence. In fact, with a birthday in the fall of 1993, Chabad.org was one of the first 500 websites ever created, a pioneer among the 200 million websites now active.2
“The Hasidic branch of Judaism is rooted in the mysticism of 18th century Eastern Europe,” the Times wrote, “but the Lubavitch movement has long used modern means to propagate its teachings, and Rabbi Kazen staked a claim in cyberspace in the late 1980’s, before the World Wide Web existed.”
A true pioneer, he dreamed of a time when people could give classes that anyone could access from their home computer, of libraries of Jewish texts digitized and available for all to study, of rabbis sharing the Torah’s timeless wisdom via live video, and of communities of like-minded people forming despite geographical barriers.
And as a true lover of his people, he devoted nights and days to his ever-expanding flock of online Jews looking for guidance, information, and a person who cared about them.
In the process, YY Kazen became “the father of the Jewish internet.”
The Leap into the Unknown
It was only natural for Chabad-Lubavitch to enter the world of the Internet in its infancy.
The promulgation of Jewish thought and teachings via modern technology has deep roots in Jewish history. From Iberia to Italy, Jews were involved in the nascent art of printing. Records suggest that a Provençal Jew named Davin de Caderousse explored how to set Hebrew type before Gutenberg invented the modern printing press.3 Roman printings of Nachmanides’ commentary on the Torah, as well as the Talmudic glosses of the Rashba, are among the Incunabula—the earliest works of the printed word. And from the movement’s inception in the late 1700s, the seminal teachings of the Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbes were transmitted through printed pamphlets and books.
In this light, Chabad.org is merely the latest technological leap that is bringing Torah to people who would otherwise struggle to access it.
Kazen’s impetus to harness technology stemmed from the Rebbe’s revolutionary approach to tech. In 1975, the same year that the Altair 8800 was released and with it the birth of the “personal computer,” the Rebbe spoke about computers as a paradigm for a person’s service to the Creator.
“The programmers who coded the computer made it for specific uses,” he said in June 1975, “yet we see today that computers are used in many unintended fields.” Likewise, the Rebbe argued, by looking into the Torah as his or her “source code,” a Jew can find unprecedented ways to impact the world.4
More than viewing technological innovation as merely a means to transmit the Torah, the Rebbe viewed the act of harnessing technology for spreading the “wellsprings” of Chassidic teachings as a means of revealing the very purpose for which the technology was created.
Quoting the dictum of the sages that, “All that G‑d created was created for His honor,”5 the Rebbe articulated that, “All the scientific discoveries of recent years—their purpose is to add honor to G‑d by using them for holiness, Torah and mitzvot … .”
It was in this rich environment of technological innovation that Kazen and others began to explore how the Internet could be harnessed to “spread forth the wellsprings” of Chassidic thought.
Perhaps epitomizing the work of these Chassidic hackers was WLCC, the so-called “hook-up room” in the back of Chabad Headquarters that served as the de facto incubator for many of the movement’s forays into emerging communications, including broadcasting the Rebbe’s public talks to hundreds of communities around the world and documenting the day-to-day happenings at the Rebbe’s court.
Other forays into technology included Torah classes on the radio, and of course the televising of the Rebbe’s farbrengen gatherings on cable and satellite.
As a student, Kazen worked at WLCC, restoring archival recordings of the Rebbe’s talks and running operations in the hook-up room. A natural schmoozer with a keen interest in technology, he brought his penchant for gadgets to his next job at the United Lubavitcher Yeshiva.
“I always liked to play with modern technology,” said Kazen at a session of the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries in 1994. “I got to use the computer in [my work at the] yeshivah. I streamlined a lot of work in the office, and once you do that, you twiddle your thumbs, because you don’t know what to do ….”6
Soon, Kazen became a regular contributor to Keshernet, the Jewish BBS (Bulletin Board Service). In 1989, he received an email about a Jewish woman in Texas who was being targeted by missionaries online. The woman was eager to respond with Jewish sources, but she faced a dilemma; she was allergic to ink and thus found her access to Jewish texts, and by extension Judaism, cut off.
“I said to myself: one second!” Kazen later told Jeff Zaleski, who in 1997 authored The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. “Here’s a niche that hasn’t been filled!” 7
After emailing the woman Jewish texts he’d typed up, he began asking other Chabad activists—chief among them the staff of Sichos in English—for material to share online. Receiving the books from the typesetter, Kazen had to reformat the text, removing the Hebrew characters in order for it to display properly on the nascent Internet.
Thus was born Chabad of Cyberspace.
Personal Connections
Kazen began a listserv, sending out regular email blasts with insights from the Torah portion. He treasured the personal connections he forged with people on the other side of the world, as they did with him. Perched on an ergonomic backless chair in his Brooklyn office, Kazen exchanged emails with and gave advice to scientists in Antarctica, students in Australia and professors in California. In time, these emails became part of the first and longest-running “Ask the Rabbi” service on the Internet.
This calling, of helping people one at a time, serving them according to their needs, was at the heart of Kazen’s work.
In a tribute penned not long after Kazen’s untimely passing, a professor from Germany wrote that he’d been in touch with the rabbi since 1995 on behalf of his remote Jewish community around the U.S. military base in Garmisch, Germany. “For … years, almost on a daily basis, we turned to him for information, clarification and advice on a variety of halachic and community issues,” he recalled. “I always received [a] response in a few hours. He guided all of us with patience, tolerance and great love for the Torah and the Jewish people. … We are all indebted to Rabbi Kazen.”8
In the summer of 1996, Chaim Boehlje was on a work assignment in Kansas, 150 miles from the closest Jewish community, when he got the devastating news that his son had passed away.
Craving Judaic advice and a modicum of comfort, he turned to the Web. “The search engines and internet was not as refined as they are now, but I was led to Chabad’s web site. I emailed ‘ask the rabbi’ that night for advice in my situation.” Boehlje did not expect a rapid response, and went to sleep. When he woke up the next morning he checked his email. “There it was, a ray of hope, a friendly voice advising and consoling.” It was YY, who remained in touch with him throughout the grief, mourning, and beyond.
“[Kazen] rarely slept. He lived and breathed Torah, his family, and Chabad.org,” recalled Jane Davis, one of the rabbi’s regular online pen pals. “He sparked something in me that made me crave learning more and more. And this was his dream to share this kind of Torah enthusiasm with everyone he could, no matter the time of the day or night. Sometimes we would connect at 2 or 3 AM. We would be online at the same time, taking advantage of this unique medium that knew no time and never closed. This was the unique beauty of cyberspace. I would bring him the world in ways he would never experience. He would interpret that with a Torah teaching. He was relentless in his enthusiasm for teaching Torah.”9
Today, Kazen’s son, Rabbi Choni Kazen, a Chabad emissary in Montreal, serves as a member of the Ask the Rabbi team, fielding questions and providing Torah information and guidance just like his father before him.
And like his father, he is on call to help people at all times of night and day.
For someone like Aharon, a disabled veteran living outside Salem, Oregon, the service has been a lifeline. His home is remotely located, and while he appreciates his connection with a local synagogue, living far from Jewish resources like kosher supermarkets and Judaica stores can be a challenge.
Aharon goes to Chabad.org for everything from the Hebrew Word of the Week to the Kosher Cooking minisite to the Shabbat and Holiday Times app. But what means the most to him is that he can connect with a rabbi, anytime—just as Kazen envisioned 30 years ago.
“As a senior citizen and a disabled veteran, I live on a very fixed income, and Chabad.org has been a wonderful resource for me,” Aharon said. “I can write in or ask for a rabbi to call me. If I have to have counsel with a rabbi—maybe my rabbi is out of town and I need counsel—well I’ve got counsel. The rabbis get back to me in short order, they always answer my questions, and I really appreciate that feature.”
None of this would have happened without YY.
Demystifying Mysticism
When Chabad.org went live 30 years ago, it received thousands of visitors. Within three years, that number had blossomed to more than 60,000 unique visitors a week, along with another 30,000 weekly email recipients.
The site also generated considerable interest from the media. It was the subject of a New York Times cover story under the headline “The Computer Age Bids Religious World to Enter.” As the Times would later note, Chabad.org “served as a model” for other sites across the web.
“When you go to the Internet and you read about Judaism … the stereotypes fall away,” Kazen told the Times. “This is not an 18th-century guy on the street. It’s Judaism in practice.”10
For many people, Chabad.org would create a positive interaction with Judaism, one that has led to many embracing Jewish life and practice themselves.
One such individual is Howard, or Henoch, Duboff. Duboff had grown up in what he describes as “a somewhat religious household,” a proudly Jewish family which went to services on holidays and occasionally Shabbat. But Duboff found the Jewish life he’d been exposed to lacking “spark.”
In those early days of the internet, before Google and even browsers, there was a lot of information online, but it wasn’t always simple to find.
“I don’t recall exactly how or why I decided to search for information about Judaism, but I wound up finding messages posted by a Rabbi Yosef Y. Kazen,” Duboff wrote in a tribute to Kazen. “Rabbi Kazen would post the text of various weekly publications (such as ‘L’Chaim Weekly’) for others to read. Rabbi Kazen would include his contact information at the end of the publications, signing off as ‘YY’ from Chabad-Lubavitch in Cyberspace.”
In an age before the wide popularization of the internet, Duboff was struck by the idea of a black-hatted, long-bearded rabbi sitting at a computer. “Modern technology mixed with those old-fashioned rabbis!”
