Shalom Dovber Kobesh, 24, son of a well-known Chabad emissary in Hungary, has built an unexpectedly popular Arabic-language social media project explaining Judaism to Muslim audiences. His short videos, which have drawn hundreds of thousands and in some cases close to a million views, focus on basic Jewish practices in simple language and have sparked intense discussion across the Arab world.
Kobesh said he grew up in a Chabad household in Hungary and was sent at age 14 to study in Chabad yeshivas in Antwerp and later Kiryat Gat, before continuing to rabbinic ordination studies in Hebron. Alongside his Torah studies, he developed a strong interest in languages, already speaking Hungarian, English and Hebrew, and decided during the coronavirus period to learn Arabic. His father, Rabbi Shlomo Kobesh, encouraged the idea.
The project took shape after he returned to Israel and studied in Hebron, where daily contact with the local Arab population sharpened his desire to master the language and understand how the other side thinks. Kobesh said that after the October 7 massacre he felt even more strongly that it was essential to understand what motivates others and how they see reality and the Jewish people. He also drew a distinction between Western European antisemitism and Arab antisemitism, saying the latter is more violent but more recent and driven mainly by systematic false propaganda.
The initiative began after an informal conversation in Arabic with an Arab man in a barber-shop line in Hungary, which showed him there was deep curiosity about authentic Judaism. Since then, he has been posting weekly one-minute clips about tefillin, tallit, Shabbat, Gemara, mikveh and modesty, while avoiding political flashpoints. The response has been striking, with some videos nearing one million views and generating thousands of comments, many of them inquisitive rather than hostile.
