Chabad--It Irritates and Inspires Jews in Southland : Religion: Despite its homeless shelter, drug program and other good works, controversy shadows the Hasidic sect.

On the eve of its yearly telethon, Chabad of California finds itself busier than ever and, as usual, strapped for cash, according to Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, the sect’s charismatic leader.

But this year is different, because the Hasidic sect is enmeshed in a bitter squabble that focuses on a Jewish student housing co-op near UCLA and has riled many in the Jewish community.

The dispute has again drawn attention to Chabad’s role among Los Angeles Jewry, where the black-coated rabbis of the mystical denomination have won support among many who have no other contact with organized religion.

At the same time, Chabad’s unabashed evangelical efforts have managed to irritate others who have viewpoints of their own, including some in the strictly observant Orthodox community.

The latest development came Thursday, when a two-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter appealed to show business celebrities to boycott tonight’s telethon on KCOP, held from 5 p.m. to midnight, when Chabad expects to raise more than $5 million.

“Is it true that Chabad obtained title to three Jewish student living cooperatives, with an equity value of $2 million, by fraud and deceit?” asked the advertisement.

The ad was placed by a group called Friends of the Bayit (which means “house” in Hebrew), which wants the buildings returned to the board that previously ran them. It urged performers ranging from Bob Hope to Whoopi Goldberg to press Chabad to go to court to settle the dispute, which has dragged on since last December.

Chabad has denied any wrongdoing, saying that it took over the properties only after other Jewish groups declined to underwrite the housing projects in Westwood, Berkeley and Santa Barbara.

Supporters of the previous board have scheduled a demonstration for 1 p.m. today outside Chabad headquarters in Westwood, but Cunin, Chabad’s West Coast director, said that he still expects a successful telethon.

Basically, the dispute is a messy, complicated legal wrangle over real estate. That it has become a hot topic of conversation and debate among Los Angeles Jews attests to Chabad’s ability to both inspire and irritate.

The sect, which traces its beginning to the 18th Century, has spread like Bermuda grass since Cunin arrived in Los Angeles 25 years ago.

Supporters praise Chabad’s drug rehabilitation and homeless shelter, its outreach to uncommitted Jews and its school network that provides Jewish education in areas where there are few other alternatives.

And they rave about the leadership of the silver-bearded Cunin, a 49-year-old father of 13.

Starting from the garage of his house in the Fairfax District, Cunin built a network of 42 synagogue centers, 12 social service facilities and 14 schools stretching from San Diego to San Rafael.

While no more than a few thousand Jews actually pray regularly at Chabad synagogues, about 10,000 pupils attend its Hebrew schools and youth programs, and thousands more have been touched through the telethon or personal encounters with Chabad emissaries, who often stop people on the street and urge them to say their daily prayers.

Sympathizers and detractors alike attribute the success of Chabad in California to the charisma of Cunin.

“Once you know him you kind of fall in love with the guy,” said Howard Furst, owner of AAA Flag & Banner Manufacturing Corp.

Furst met Cunin while trying to drum up business for his company. He now finds himself donating $30,000 worth of flags and banners to publicize the telethon, which last year featured appearances by a broad range of celebrities. Bob Dylan, for example, performed “Hava Nagila.”

The telethon, first aired in 1980 after a fire gutted the Chabad headquarters in an old fraternity house, raised $1.2 million the first year, increasing to $5.4 million in 1989.

Furst may be typical of the Jews who support Chabad without subscribing to its elaborate belief system, which is summed up in the three words whose initials make up the name Chabad--wisdom, understanding, knowledge.

“I won’t join their temple because that’s not the way I believe,” Furst said. “It’s too religious for me . . . (but) I got interested in the good things they’re doing.”

But others in the Jewish community say that Chabad is a maverick movement whose leaders would rather have little to do with the rest of the organized Jewish community.

“The problem with Chabad is the perception not only that its way is the only way (to Judaism) but that Chabad is the only institution,” said Rabbi Laura Geller, executive director of the Pacific Southwest Region of the American Jewish Congress.

Geller’s group has been tussling with Chabad for years over whether to place a Hanukkah menorah in City Hall, something that the Jewish Congress opposes as a mixing of church and state.

Even in the Orthodox camp, where Chabad is among the strictest exponents of traditional Judaism, there are those who are disturbed by its zeal.

Chabad’s emissaries want to convert the entire Jewish people to their point of view, said one rabbi, who declined to be identified. Sme Orthodox Jews do not like the idea that somebody has a corner on truth, he said.

Chabad also has stirred up considerable controversy with its activities in Israel. Since 1970, it has been the driving force behind a campaign to change Israeli immigration laws so that only converts whose conversion was supervised by Orthodox rabbis would qualify for citizenship.

The initiative has been roundly denounced by Reform and Conservative Jews as an attack on their legitimacy in the United States, where they make up the bulk of the organized Jewish population.

Controversy is nothing new to Chabad, a sect whose origins lie in the Hasidic revival movement that took Eastern European Jewry by storm at the end of the 18th Century.

Hasidism’s founder, an itinerant preacher known as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), taught the importance of mystical belief, urging Jews to emphasize sincere, joyous prayer and good deeds.

His followers set up different schools, or courts. Chabad is also known as Lubavitch, after the town in Byelorussia that was its headquarters for a century.

Chabad’s current leader, Menahem Mendel Schneersohn, called the Lubavitcher Rebbe, was born in 1902 and came to the United States in 1940, where he oversaw from his Brooklyn headquarters the expansion of Chabad to dozens of cities in the United States and outposts overseas.

Not the least of his emissaries was Cunin, who vividly remembers the day when, as a young rabbi in the 1960s, he received his mandate from Schneersohn: “Go--California is yours.”

Only a few years ago, however, Chabad of California was so deep in debt that we were “well over the edge,” Cunin said in a recent interview, and Schneersohn criticized him in his internationally distributed weekly talks for “leaping too high.”

At one point, Cunin recalled, “We owed $18 million to an assortment of 40 banks and 18 individuals--and all of it (secured by) my beard.”

As Cunin knocked on the doors of mansions in Beverly Hills, following up old leads in the hopes of finding new contributions, he came upon a woman who later said their brief meeting had changed her life.

Hermine J. Weinberg, who was then going through a divorce from her hotelier husband, William, sent Cunin a check for $1,000, but that was small compared to the provisions of her will--a bequest of the bulk of her multimillion-dollar estate to Chabad.

William Weinberg and their children, who were cut out of the will less than two days before Hermine Weinberg took her own life in 1985, contested the bequest but a settlement was reached in 1988 in which Chabad netted $21 million.

“The Weinberg miracle,” Cunin calls it.

In its 25th anniversary magazine, Chabad claims to have brought Judaism to rapidly growing cities like Lancaster, Palmdale, Upland and Fresno, “where there had been but a dim flicker.”

Some would take issue with that statement. “There has been a lot more than a glimmer of Judaism at this synagogue for the last 40 years,” responded Rabbi Alan Henkin of Beth Knesset Bamidbar, a Reform synagogue in Lancaster.

Cunin says he has a mailing list of about 58,000 homes in Southern California, where his yearly telethon has made him one of the region’s most widely recognized Jewish leaders.

Chabad’s success is “an example of what L.A. can offer to people of an entrepreneurial way of thinking,” said Max Vorspan, a historian of Los Angeles Jewry and vice president of the Conservative movement’s University of Judaism on Mulholland Drive.

Said Rabbi Meyer May, executive director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center: “To the credit of Chabad, they recognized that they have a major responsibility for reaching out to unaffiliated Jews, and in this effort they are almost unparalleled. . . . Nobody has made as large a commitment as they have in L.A.”