ON 12 JUNE 1994 the seventh leader of the Lubavitch branch of hasidic Judaism, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died in New York at the age of 92. The Lubavitch community, founded in late eighteenth-century Russia, mourned the loss of their leader of forty-three years, who died without leaving an heir to ascend his spiritual throne. Rebbe Schneerson, who pioneered outreach programmes in the Lubavitch community, had guided his followers in a worldwide mission to ‘create that dwelling place through the Divine service of the denizens of the lowly physical world’ where the Holy One would ultimately reside. From 1951 to 1994 over 100,000 Lubavitch Jews had resettled, with the Rebbe's blessing, from the community's home base in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to hundreds of locations across at least forty-six countries (Goldschmidt 2006: 113). What had been, in 1940, a self-contained immigrant community that practised its religion in seclusion was by 2007 a worldwide movement using multimedia technology and accommodating globalizing trends to practise its faith and spread it throughout the world.

The founding and expansion of a religious community are not new or unique phenomena in Jewish cultural studies. What calls for analysis, however, is the question of how Lubavitch Jews have maintained their identity and practice during their growth, and realized the Rebbe's vision of spreading holiness after his death by sanctifying new centres, or ‘Chabad houses’, around the world. Here I will address the theme of the role of ‘home’ for Jews, by examining the ways in which Lubavitch conceptions of space, place, and spirituality are sustaining a core identity for Lubavitch Jews in the absence of a living leader. Since the Rebbe's death, the act of sanctifying space through religious action has not only been a devotional practice; it has also performed a memorializing function. Central to the idea of domesticating Jewish identity through the conceptualization of home developed in this study are eleven Chabad houses, among the hundreds that exist, that have been designed and built as architectural replicas of 770 Eastern Parkway, the structure that was first the physical home and office of the Rebbe and which later came to be the ‘spiritual home’ of all Lubavitch Jews. My view is that these internationally dispersed reconstructions invoke the ‘sacred’ nature of 770 Eastern Parkway and invest the movement's disparate spaces with a holiness that asserts, strengthens, and perpetuates its identity and faith.