COLlive
COLlive is an online news service covering the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and Jewish community life, based in Brooklyn, New York, in the United States. Published at collive.com, it provides breaking news, photographs, and video from Crown Heights — the Brooklyn neighborhood that is the movement's world center — and from Chabad communities in the United States, Israel, and around the world. Its reporting focuses in particular on shluchim, the emissary couples who staff Chabad centers internationally, and on anash, the members of the Chabad community, whose family, institutional, and communal news forms a large part of its daily output.
The site describes its own remit in its standard summary: breaking news, photos, and videos from Jewish Chabad communities of Crown Heights, the United States, Israel, and the world, featuring shluchim and anash. It is independently run rather than being an official organ of the Chabad-Lubavitch organization, a distinction that shapes its character: it covers the movement from inside its community, with the access and vocabulary of an insider, while operating as a commercial news website.
Origins and Founding
The collive.com domain was registered on 12 September 2008, and the news service developed from that period. In an interview about her working life, founder and publisher Mica Soffer said she founded the website after seeing a need for a professionally run news website in Chabad, with her husband handling the advertising sales side of the business. She described deciding early on to work from home because the site demanded constant attention, calling it effectively a 24-hour job in which a quiet day could suddenly become hectic when breaking news arrived, and in which she sometimes had to rise at night to deal with a developing story, especially a sad event.
That founding model — a small, family-run digital newsroom, professionally organized but personally operated — remained characteristic of the service as it grew. Soffer also noted that the audience expanded beyond what the founders predicted: although built for Chabad readers, the site attracted thousands of readers from other parts of the Jewish world, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, who visited to learn what was happening in Crown Heights and the wider Jewish world. Her account of the founding, given when the site was nearly ten years old, aligns with its 2008 domain registration and its emergence in the first wave of Chabad community news websites.
Base in Crown Heights, Brooklyn
COLlive's home ground is Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the neighborhood surrounding 770 Eastern Parkway, the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and the synagogue and study hall associated with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Crown Heights is home to a large Lubavitch community, with yeshivas, girls' schools, publishing houses, charities, and the movement's central institutions concentrated in a compact area. A news service based there sits at the point where the movement's local life and its global network meet.
The site's coverage reflects that geography. Crown Heights stories — neighborhood events, community campaigns, local controversies, celebrations, and funerals — appear alongside reports filed from Chabad houses on every continent. When an incident occurs at 770 Eastern Parkway itself, such as the January 2024 episode in which students broke through a wall to prevent the sealing of an unauthorized tunnel beneath the synagogue, COLlive is among the first outlets to report it, because the story is quite literally on its doorstep.
Coverage and Content
The daily output of COLlive mixes several kinds of material. Its news core consists of reports on the activities of Chabad emissaries: new Chabad centers opening, buildings purchased or dedicated, public menorah lightings, holiday programs, campus outreach, and community milestones. It carries obituaries and tributes for community members and emissaries, reports of weddings, births, and bar and bat mitzvahs of communal note in summarized form, and coverage of large movement gatherings, above all the annual International Conference of Chabad Emissaries, the Kinus Hashluchim, which brings thousands of emissaries to New York each year.
Beyond movement news, the site reports Jewish news of general interest: events in Israel, visits by Israeli officials to the Rebbe's Ohel — the gravesite in Queens where Rabbi Schneerson is buried — statements by chief rabbis, and stories about Jewish life in places where Chabad is often the most visible Jewish presence. During wartime, its coverage has included gatherings of emissaries at the Western Wall in Jerusalem praying for safety and peace, broadcast live by the site, and reports from emissaries serving communities under fire. Photo galleries are a major part of the product; many stories are built around sets of photographs documenting an event, and a recurring Picture of the Day feature presents a single community photograph with a short explanatory caption.
Live Broadcasts, Classes, and Features
COLlive is not only a text news site. It offers live broadcasts of events, including farbrengens — Hasidic gatherings — conferences, concerts, and prayer gatherings, and it hosts recorded and live Torah classes, known as shiurim. A daily class in Chitas, the cycle of daily study portions of Chumash, Psalms, and Tanya, has been among the shiurim it promotes, presented as a watchable daily video feature. These religious features place the news service inside the devotional life of its audience as well as its information life.
Recurring editorial features include a weekly item built around a moment with the Rebbe, drawing on the extensive video archive of Rabbi Schneerson's public addresses and private audiences that circulates in the Chabad world. Photo-driven coverage, video reports credited to COLlive reporters, and community-submitted material all contribute to a format that is closer to a community wire service and bulletin board combined than to a conventional newspaper website.
Relationship to the Chabad-Lubavitch Movement
Chabad-Lubavitch is a Hasidic movement founded in the eighteenth century, known for its outreach to unaffiliated Jews through a worldwide network of emissaries. Its emissary system, expanded greatly under Rabbi Schneerson, places couples in communities, on university campuses, and in remote locations to provide synagogue services, education, kosher food, and holiday programming. That network is COLlive's beat. The movement's structure generates a steady stream of the exact stories the site exists to tell: a new emissary couple arriving in a city, a mikvah or synagogue opening, a public celebration, a local official visiting a Chabad center.
Because it is independently run, COLlive is not the movement's official voice; the movement's official institutions maintain their own websites, including Chabad.org and the headquarters site. COLlive's position is that of a community newspaper for a global movement: close enough to receive photographs, announcements, and reports from emissaries and readers everywhere, and journalistic enough in form to present them as dated, bylined, and photographed news. Its coverage of internal community disputes and of sensitive events at 770 Eastern Parkway shows that its reporting is not limited to official announcements.
Audience and Reach
The site's audience is centered on the Chabad community in Brooklyn, across the United States, and in Israel, with readers in the many countries where emissaries serve. Its own summaries emphasize that it covers happenings in Brooklyn, Israel, and Chabad-Lubavitch communities worldwide, and third-party website analyses have consistently ranked it among the more heavily visited Jewish community news sites, with daily readership in the tens of thousands by those external estimates. Such third-party traffic figures are approximations, but the site's longevity, its large indexed archive of stories, and its active social media presence under the COLlive News name support the picture of a substantial and habitual readership.
For that audience, the site performs a connective function. Emissaries serving in small or isolated communities use it to follow movement news and to see their own work reported to the wider community; families in Crown Heights use it to follow relatives on shlichus, or emissary service, abroad. Announcements, campaigns, and appeals published on the site can reach the entire movement within hours, which gives the service an agenda-setting role inside Chabad life disproportionate to its small staff.
Publishing Model and Operations
COLlive is a free-access, advertising-supported website. Its founder's account describes a division of labor in which editorial work and advertising sales were handled within the founding family, with advertising directed at businesses serving the Orthodox and Chabad market. Stories are credited to COLlive reporters or published as staff and reader-contributed reports, and the volume of photography suggests a network of contributors — emissaries, community members, and professional photographers at events — supplying material to the central site.
The site is organized around continuously updated news pages, category coverage of topics such as Torah and Chasidic thought, community sections, and multimedia features. Its archive, accumulated since 2008, amounts to a searchable visual and textual record of Chabad communal life in the internet era — a resource used by community members, journalists, and researchers tracing the movement's activities, personalities, and institutions.
Significance
COLlive's significance is as an example of movement media: a news service created from within a religious movement, by members of its central community, to serve a readership defined by shared affiliation rather than by geography. Chabad is a global movement whose members are dispersed among thousands of local centers; a service like COLlive gives that dispersion a single news feed, in which a menorah lighting in a small town, a gathering at the Western Wall, and a neighborhood event in Crown Heights appear in one continuous stream.
For the WorldNM directory, COLlive is classified as a community news service and agency-style source for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, based in Brooklyn, New York, publishing in English at collive.com, with daily news, photographs, video, live broadcasts, and Torah classes for a worldwide Chabad readership.
