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For nearly two years, Rabbi Levi and Chaya Mushka Notik searched Nairobi for a new home for Chabad of Kenya. Space, budget and security were among some of the considerations they had to consider in a city where many neighborhoods aren’t safe 

They finally found what they were looking for in an online listing. Chabad moved in one month before the High Holidays and held a dedication for the new center on Sunday, Sept. 6, joined by nearly 100 guests including local Jews and diplomats. Nairobi’s roughly 500 Jewish families include many diplomats posted to the U.S. and Israeli Embassies, the United Nations and other missions, alongside a steady flow of business travelers and tourists.

Until this summer, Chabad, which opened in Kenya three years ago, operated out of a home where a single living room served as synagogue, dining room and event hall that could comfortably fit only a few dozen people. The new center sits among Nairobi’s foreign missions, a short walk from the United Nations office and near both the U.S. and Israeli embassies. It has a dedicated synagogue, a kindergarten classroom, two guest houses and a large living room for Shabbat meals and holidays.

“The Lubavitcher Rebbe told Shluchim to find the biggest place they can — even bigger than they think they might need,” Rabbi Notik said. “It will be full.”

It took less than a month. Some 100 people attended Rosh Hashanah services, and over the High Holidays, at least 15 families who had never visited Chabad came through the door. Registration for the new Sunday Hebrew school closed after three days.

The location was a deciding factor. Crime rates in Nairobi are high, and Kenya’s anti-terror police unit secures Chabad’s major events. It guarded the original location around the clock for months after October 7. Embassy security now patrols their street.

“It’s the first time I’ve been able to go out on a walk after sunset,” Rabbi Notik said.

The long-term plan is a permanent Jewish center with a mikvah, a large synagogue and a home for Jewish education, on land of Chabad’s own. The Notiks are already on the hunt for a bigger property. Nairobi’s only mikvah is old and sits in an area residents avoid at night.

Barely a month after unpacking, the Notiks are back where they started. “Today,” he said, “We started our search again.”

“A proud Jew rather than a fearful one.”

That, student Noah Razak told some 400 people gathered on Severance Street Sunday night, is what Chabad at USC made of him. Razak, a senior and student co-president, was speaking at the grand opening of a new 12,000-square-foot home — a $10 million restoration twenty-six years in the making, in the middle of Fraternity Row.

The building was never supposed to be this. When Rabbi Dov and Runya Wagner first drew up plans some fifteen years ago, the idea was modest: raise a million dollars, add about a thousand square feet to the dining room. The project grew roughly tenfold. “We thought we were doing a little addition,” Runya Wagner told the crowd Sunday. “G-d had something much bigger in mind.”

Getting there took years of permits and historic-preservation review on a Victorian mansion that Chabad bought abandoned in 2003. “Anyone who’s done construction in Los Angeles knows what you would expect,” Runya said. The Wagners’ daughters, who spoke together, put it more simply: “A lot of construction. Like, a lot.”

The most consequential thing in the new building may be the kitchen. Chabad estimates some 2,000 Jewish undergraduates at USC and another 1,800 graduate students — and until this month, none of them could get a kosher dinner on campus. “There’s been a long history of trying to get better kosher availability on campus,” Rabbi Wagner said. “At some point we realized that if it wasn’t going to happen on campus itself, then we should do it.”

So Chabad built one — a commercial kitchen and a rooftop restaurant serving shawarma, schnitzel, wraps and burgers on weeknights, shaded by a canopy of twenty-foot bamboo poles sourced from the Amazon rainforest. The bamboo does double duty: come Sukkot, it serves as schach, the natural covering a sukkah requires. The Rooftop, as the new eatery was named, came together only days before classes began, with help from senior administrators. Any USC student on a campus meal plan can now use their meal swipes at Chabad.

The rest of the building leans hard into what was already there. The historic designation kept the front rooms at their original size and shape, so the entry is still a small dark vestibule of mahogany paneling and coffered ceilings. But there are Jewish fingerprints throughout — Jerusalem stone at the entrance and along a wall in the sanctuary, and custom chandeliers, some inscribed “Chabad — University of Southern California,” others with the Shema Yisrael prayer. Upstairs, there are apartments where students live year-round.

One of them is Ava Schwartz, the other student co-president, who has lived in the house for three years. She arrived at USC with Jewish values but no religious practice, she told the crowd, and is now fully observant. “I did not become a follower,” she said. “I was galvanized to become a leader.”

Sunday’s ceremony filled the lawn with about 400 alumni, parents, donors and students. USC President Beong-Soo Kim spoke, as did Board of Trustees Chair Suzanne Nora Johnson and Dean of Religious Life Varun Soni, who has been Chabad’s principal campus partner since 2008. The mezuzah on the front door was affixed by alumni Shelly and Dr. Moshe Bernard Baseri.

Then the ribbon came down, as nightfall brought in Chai Elul, the eighteenth of the Hebrew month and the birthday of both the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chasidism, and the Alter Rebbe, founder of Chabad. Eighteen is the numerical value of chai, life. “Our prayer is not simply that this building will be filled,” Runya Wagner said. “Our prayer is that it will be alive.”

It already is. Two nights before the opening, 400 students turned up for Shabbat dinner and Chabad was seating people in the front hall again. “We’re bursting at the seams from this new space,” Rabbi Wagner said.

Noah Razak was thinking about that Friday night when he got up to speak. He had come to USC in part because of this house, promised to him as a construction site during Admitted Students Weekend, and now he was standing in front of it, finished. “After Shabbat dinner on Friday,” he said, “you might want to consider starting construction on an even bigger house.”

A storefront on the main road in Calvi, on Corsica’s northwest coast, is now home to the island’s fourth Chabad center. Walk out of the town’s train station and it’s directly across the street — wide windows, no shutters, visible from the sidewalk. For a town of fewer than 6,000 permanent residents, it’s a conspicuous addition. For the Jews who’ve been coming to this Mediterranean resort town for decades, it’s the one thing that was missing.

Michel Madie was nine years old when his family arrived in Calvi in 1967 from Algeria. His parents — his father a descendant of Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition, his mother a Berber Jew from the Algeria-Morocco border — had lost everything in the expulsion of 1962. They were on vacation when they were told not to go back. They never retrieved a single possession.

In Calvi, the family were some of the only Jews in town. Madie grew up with no synagogue, no community, no visible Jewish life at all. He left at 18 and has lived in Manhattan for the past two decades. His mother still lives in Calvi.

He was back for the inauguration. “I wouldn’t even consider such a thing as a possibility when I was a kid,” he said. “Entering the Chabad center — being seen from the street, from the main road of Calvi — it was incredibly emotional.”

Rabbi Levi and Mushky Pinson, who’ve directed Chabad of Corsica from the capital city of Ajaccio since 2016, opened the Calvi location this summer with an inauguration that drew some 50 people. The center joins existing operations in Ajaccio, Bastia, and Porto Vecchio, giving Chabad a presence in each of the island’s four main regions.

Jewish history on the island runs deep. Some historians trace the first Jewish presence to Roman times, after the destruction of the Second Temple. Jews from Egypt settled in southern Corsica around the ninth century, and Sephardic Jews and Marranos fleeing the Inquisition arrived in later waves. In the eighteenth century, Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican independence leader, granted Jews equal rights — ahead of most of Europe. During the First World War, several hundred Jews from Tiberias were resettled to the island by the Ottoman Empire after refusing to renounce their French citizenship, building the Beth Meir synagogue in the port city of Bastia. And during the Second World War, Corsican authorities refused to cooperate with Vichy, saving thousands of Jewish refugees. Over three-quarters of the island’s Jewish population survived.

Today, the permanent Jewish community is small — a few hundred people scattered across the island. But Corsica draws thousands of Jewish tourists each summer, mainly from mainland France, and Calvi’s Balagne region has become a popular destination for Jewish weddings. Rabbi Pinson estimates some several dozen Jews live in the Balagne year-round, though he expects to discover more.

The center offers a synagogue, kosher food on-site and for delivery, a small grocery corner, and a snack bar. A group of rabbinical students is running it for the summer. All kosher food is ordered from Paris and shipped through Marseille — the same route that supplies most of the island, where 90 percent of food arrives by cargo ship. Some of it reaches Calvi aboard the train that winds along the coast, dropped off steps from the Chabad house door.

For Madie, who grew up in that town as one of its only Jews, the location is the point. The Chabad house sits next to the post office, next to the bank, on a street no one in Calvi can avoid. Years ago, his parents held Shabbat dinner behind closed doors in a town where no one really knew they were Jewish. Sixty years later, the light from the Chabad house spills onto the main road of Calvi, and no one is closing the curtains.