Shmarya Rosenberg

Shmarya Rosenberg (born Scott Rosenberg in 1958) is a blogger and journalist who publishes the blog FailedMessiah. He is a former Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Jew who became a critic of Jewish Orthodoxy after leaving the Chabad-Lubavitch movement because of its stance regarding Ethiopian Jews.

Rosenberg, who was described as “without doubt one of the Jewish blogosphere's most respected and erudite commentators” by the Israeli daily Haaretz, was the only American Jew listed both among the Jewish Daily Forwards 50 and Heeb's 100 in 2008.

Biography

Rosenberg grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota in a non observant Conservative Jewish family. His parents ran a beauty supply company. His grandfather's grandfather was the chief aide to the third Lubavicher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneersohn. He had to flee the rebbe's Hasidic court and the town of Lyubavichi, after he corrected a citation error in one of Schneersohn's responsa. Rosenberg's mother, Helen Mae Rosenberg née Gleckman, was the daughter of Leon Gleckman, a bootlegger known as the "Al Capone of St. Paul". Rosenberg was active in Jewish student politics at the University of Minnesota, and served several years on the North American executive of the World Union of Jewish Students. He first met a Chabad-Lubavich emissary in the summer of 1983, when he was trying to get support among local rabbis for Ethiopian Jewry. He became a baal teshuvah and joined the Chabad-Lubavitch movement as an ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Jew dedicated to study and rigorous observance, abandoning his ambitions of becoming a songwriter. He worked in the kosher-meat industry in the Twin Cities and planned to become a rabbi.

After joining the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, Rosenberg sent a letter to Menachem Mendel Schneerson, then the Lubavitcher rebbe, asking the Chabad movement to aid in the effort to rescue the Jews of Ethiopia. He never received an answer from Schneerson, but in 2004, he came across an unsigned draft of a letter written by Schneerson in 1984, published in K’far Chabad magazine, which had originally been addressed to him, but was never sent. Schneerson, in his response, suggested that Rosenberg focus his efforts on helping Jews in his own community. Rosenberg was outraged and posted his own letter and Schneerson’s respons and other supporting documents on a blog he called Failed Messiah. The blog was widely read and resulted in his summary “excommunication” from his Orthodox Jewish community. He now describes himself as secular, but avoids non-kosher food and observes the Sabbath to some extent. He also admits to being homosexual.

His income comes from some consulting and copywriting and from what he makes from donations and merchandise he sells, for example, a T-shirt with a picture of a bleeding cow with the caption, “I was slaughtered Glatt kosher and all I got was this horribly painful hook in my throat”, referring to the slaughtering practices of Agriprocessors, once the biggest kosher-meat plant in the United States. However, his income is insufficent to support himself and he is not successful in raising donations so he receives welfare and SSI which are the main sources of his support.

Career as a blogger and journalist

When Rosenberg first started his blog in 2004, he only wanted to put his and Schneerson's letters on the internet, but went on blogging out of fear that the blog service would take down the account if he didn't, posting stories mostly on Chabad messianism. It was what he calls his “excommunication” about one month after he first started the blog, and the treatment he received from former friends, which made him decide to turn FailedMessiah into a large, frequently-updated blog.

Rosenberg also writes for the Jewish Daily Forward, Tablet Magazine, Moment, Sh'ma Magazine, Guilt and Pleasure, Jewish World Review, Jewcy, the Minneapolis StarTribune, the Daily Beast, and a weekly column for Heeb called "Crimes and Misdemeanors".

FailedMessiah

The name of the blog FailedMessia refers to the belief among some Lubavitcher Hassidim that their late rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the messiah, but is seen by Rosenberg as reference to Jewish Orthodoxy as a whole. FailedMessia serves as a news outlet with the motto Covering Orthodox Judaism since 2004. Using the blog as a means of reaching a wide audience and covering the largely under-reported Haredi/Hasidic sector, Rosenberg reports as a watchdog and whistle blower, in “a combination of muckraking reporting and personal grudge into a must-read digest of the actual and alleged misdeeds of the ultra-Orthodox world. He has broken news about sexual misconduct, smear campaigns and dubious business practices conducted by or on behalf of stringently religious Jews.”

When PETA released a video in 2004 of the slaughtering practices at Agriprocessors, a kosher-meat plant in Iowa owned and operated by members of the Rubashkin family, Lubavitcher Hasidim from Brooklyn, Rosenberg started to post his own investigative pieces on his blog in addition to those of other journalists.

He had his first scoop in 2008, when he discovered the sock puppet scam of the public-relations company 5W Public Relations, hired by the Rubashkins, who fabricated online postings to several websites including FailedMessia in the name of Rabbi Morris Allen, a Conservative rabbi who was pushing for ethical reform in kosher foods.

In May 2011, FailedMessiah broke the news that the Hasidic newspapers Di Tzeitung and Di Voch had photoshopped Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Director for Counterterrorism Audrey Tomason out of the picture showing President Barack Obama and his national security team watching the raid that killed Osama bin Laden from the White House Situation Room.

Ancestry

Rosenberg's maternal grandfather was Leon Gleckman. Known as the "Al Capone of St. Paul", he was a bootlegger who at one point was considered the unofficial "czar" of St. Paul. Mr. Gleckman's maternal grandfather, in turn, was Rabbi Chaim Yehuda Litvin, a rabbinc prodigy who although himself having been a follower of Chabad had at an early age departed from the movement (due to inability to get along with fellow Chabad members). Litvin went on to become the leading non-Hasidic rabbinic decisor in the town of Smorgon and as early as the year 1900 expressed his unabiding support for for the nascent Zionist movement.

External links

• Failed Messiah