Chabad mourns the death of Rabbi Shmuel Altain, known as Shmuli Altain, who died last Thursday at age 43 after a long battle with a serious illness. His passing came on the third day of Tammuz, the anniversary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s death, and prompted widespread grief in the Chabad world and among the Winnipeg Jewish community he helped build.
Altain was born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where his parents, Rabbi Avraham and Bracha Altain, have served as Chabad emissaries for decades. At 13, he left home to study at Chabad’s Metivta in Detroit, later continuing at Ahali Torah in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. After his studies he went to Australia for practical training, teaching at a rabbinical college, organizing summer programs and camps for children, and traveling to remote areas to find Jewish residents and bring them closer to tradition. In 2006, he returned to New York and received rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Zalman Labkovsky, head of the central Tomchei Temimim yeshiva at 770.
After marrying Adina, the daughter of Chabad activist Rabbi Mendel and Rachel Duchman of Los Angeles, the couple moved in 2008 back to Winnipeg to join his parents’ outreach work. His first major project was launching a branch of the Jewish Learning Institute and teaching adult Torah classes, which became widely successful.
The peak of his public work came in 2010, when the couple opened the Chabad Lubavitch Jewish Learning Centre in southern Winnipeg. About 500 people attended the dedication of the $3.5 million center, the first Jewish communal building constructed in Winnipeg since 1997. Altain said then that Jewish continuity depends on quality Torah education for all ages and that Chabad welcomes every Jew equally, without requiring formal membership. In recent years, after his diagnosis, the family moved to Wesley Hills near Pomona in Rockland County, New York, so he could focus on treatment. Despite his illness, he continued serving as an associate rabbi at the Baal Shem Tov synagogue in Wesley Hills. His funeral passed by Chabad world headquarters at 770 in Brooklyn before burial at the old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens. He is survived by his wife, five children, parents, siblings and a grandmother in Israel; the family is sitting shiva in Suffern, New York, until Thursday.
