A 24-year-old Chabad emissary from Hungary, Rabbi Shalom Duber Koves, has drawn wide attention with a series of Arabic-language outreach videos that explain basic Jewish concepts to Arab speakers in a direct, conversational style. The clips are getting unprecedented view counts, in the hundreds of thousands and even the millions, and are generating unusually strong interest across the Muslim world during a sensitive security period.
Koves, the son of Chabad emissary Rabbi Shlomo Koves in Hungary, grew up in a family committed to outreach inspired by the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He told the Hebrew weekly Shabbat Shalom, in the Jewish Life section, that at 14 he studied at Chabad yeshivas in Antwerp and then Kiryat Gat, later completing rabbinic ordination studies in Hebron.
Alongside his Torah studies, he developed a strong interest in languages. He said he already knew Hungarian, English and Hebrew, and decided during the coronavirus period to learn Arabic. When he told his father, “he smiled and said it was a great idea,” he recalled to Menachem Cohen. Back in Hebron, daily contact with the local Arab population and private study with a teacher sharpened his understanding of Arabic culture and thought.
Koves said the October 7 massacre strengthened his view that it is vital to understand “the other side,” including what drives it and how it sees the Jewish people. He contrasted what he described as older, culturally embedded Western European antisemitism with Arab antisemitism, which he called more violent but relatively new and driven mainly by systematic propaganda. He praised Hungary, where a large Jewish community remains visible and restrictive immigration policy has, in his view, prevented some of the social breakdown seen in Western Europe.
The project began almost by accident after he chatted in fluent Arabic with an Arab man in line at a Hungarian barber shop. The man was surprised to discover he was a Jew living in Israel, and Koves realized there was deep curiosity among Arabic speakers about authentic Judaism. With his father’s approval, he began posting weekly one-minute videos about tefillin, a tallit, Shabbat, Gemara, mikveh and modesty, while avoiding political flashpoints. Some videos are nearing one million views and drawing thousands of comments, with much of the response, he said, being genuine curiosity rather than hostility.
