The moment had been waiting for months. At Chabad's flagship annual youth gathering in New York – the event that fills Times Square with the sound of a generation – hostage survivor Segev Kalfon took the stage Saturday and cried out "Shema Yisrael." Standing beside him was fellow freed hostage Matan Zangauker. The 4,578 young Jewish voices that had packed Manhattan's iconic square joined the declaration in a roar that seemed to shake the plaza.
Kalfon was abducted on October 7 and held for months before his release from Hamas captivity. He had spoken before about his intention to recite the prayer the moment he was free. Saturday night, he made good on it.
The occasion was the opening of CTeen's 900th branch – a milestone that brought thousands of teens from 60 countries to New York. But celebration was not the only note of the evening. Young people from the Bondi community took the stage to speak about loss. Their community had been shattered by a shooting attack during last Hanukkah that killed 15 of its members, among them Rabbi Eli Shlanger – the Chabad emissary who had built the local youth branch from scratch just months before his murder.
Rabbi Shlanger's daughter, Priva, addressed the crowd, speaking about the mission her father had left unfinished but not abandoned. Footage of the Bondi teens – raw, unfiltered testimony about the moments of horror and the long road since – played on the event's giant screens. What came through, again and again, was not despair but a fierce, almost defiant pride: "We will keep being Jewish, loudly and proudly."
Rabbi Menachem Kutlarski, the chairman of Chabad Youth Worldwide, told the crowd that "darkness will not have the last word," and announced that a new youth center in Sydney would carry Rabbi Shlanger's name forward.
The youth Shabbaton, now in its 18th year, had drawn teens from 486 cities worldwide to New York. They had spent Shabbat together in Crown Heights, and the Times Square event served as the culmination of the gathering.
