Say It in English     

Rabbi Yonah Avtzon a”h was just a bochur when he decided to manage the translation of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s farbrengens into English and distribute the pamphlets around the Jewish world.

When he passed away nearly seven years ago, with thousands of translations in print, his son, Shmuly, became the unwitting successor of Sichos in English, growing an enterprise that began with a copy machine and typewriter into a technological hub of Torah learning

Rabbi Shmuly Avtzon was just 31 years old when his father, Rabbi Yonah (known informally as “Yaineh”) Avtzon, passed away at the young age of 61 in January 2019. Yaineh Avtzon was known throughout the Chabad community as the director of Sichos in English (SIE), an organization dedicated to translating the sichos and other teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson zy”a, as well as other foundational chassidic texts from previous Rebbes. For over 40 years, SIE translated and compiled reams of chassidus. But now Yaineh was gone, and to the great surprise of Shmuly — then a teacher of chassidus to bochurim — he unexpectedly found himself as the next leader of SIE.

Today, nearly seven years later, Shmuly Avtzon has grown SIE from a single-digit core of employees to a small corporation with almost 40. The budget has expanded into the millions of dollars, with some big-name donors and scores of works being published in print and online. An enterprise that began with fax machines and typewriters is now assiduously incorporating AI to aid with translations and expand the reach of Torah learning.

“These days, English is a first language for almost everyone, even in Yiddish-speaking homes,” Shmuly says. “So it’s very important that we make texts available in the language most comfortable for most people.”

SIE has two offices. We first stop in to the original one in the “770” building in Crown Heights, a slightly dilapidated-looking space on the third floor, easily missed amid the warren of staircases and offices that line the building’s interior like the cells of a honeycomb. But the creaky simplicity of these old, hallowed halls is deceiving: These offices are powerhouses of Torah dissemination. Among them are Chabad.org, the offices of the Rebbe’s secretaries, and the offices that oversee Chabad shlichus in, as the old joke goes, every country in the world that you can find Coca-Cola (and probably a few more).