Mrs. Rochel Pinson, 102, Oldest Chabad Shlucha

When Mrs. Rochel Pinson joined the annual International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Shluchos a decade ago, she was the most senior Chabad representative present at 92 years old. A Chabad representative since 1953, Pinson had spoken modestly but briefly, like someone who lived her life knowing that actions matter more than speeches.

Hours before the Kinus began this year, Mrs. Pinson, 102, passed away on 16 Shevat — February 3, 2026. She leaves behind four generations of descendants and a community of thousands of North African Jews she led and inspired during her more than 70 years as a shlucha.

Born in 1924 in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) in the Soviet Union, Mrs. Pinson witnessed Stalin’s henchmen take away her father, a Lubavitcher chassid, to be executed for the “counterrevolutionary crime” of teaching Torah. She married Rabbi Nissan Pinson and the young couple fled the Soviet Union, arriving as refugees to Paris.

While many of her peers emigrated to America, the Lubavitcher Rebbe sent her and her husband as Chabad representatives to Morocco in 1953, and then to Tunisia in 1959. In Tunisia, Pinson raised five children and established Yeshivah Oholei Yosef Yitzchak Lubavitch—a school that, at its height before many Tunisian Jews left the country, had hundreds of students.

“There were difficult moments, but I don’t regret it,” Mrs. Pinson said to thousands of her colleagues at the Kinus in 2007. “As long as there are Jewish people there, we’ll remain. If today, the Rebbe would challenge us and say you are needed in a faraway place, I would do it.”