Tens of thousands of people have visited a Chabad website in recent weeks, hoping that newly launched facial recognition software could locate a picture of them with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, zt”l, taken decades ago.
Jewish Educational Media, more commonly known as JEM, introduced its artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition software just before the Rebbe’s 30th yahrzeit, which was observed this year on July 9. The process is a fairly simple one – upload a photo of yourself or a loved one to the site, and the JEM software searches hundreds of thousands of pictures taken of people who stood in lengthy lines to meet with the Rebbe for a brief moment.
The project quickly went viral as those who found pictures of shared them on social media, especially on the Rebbe’s yahrzeit.
“Found this picture of my mother with the Rebbe on Gimel Tammuz,” posted Uzi Moses in a July 9 Facebook post, sharing a picture of his mother listening intently as the Rebbe spoke to her. “Thank you facial recognition AI. This made her really happy.”
“This is so cool,” wrote Facebook user Daas Torah on July 2, sharing a link to the JEM software. “Finding lots of pictures of myself and others.”
Initially founded in 1980 to live broadcast the Rebbe’s public addresses via satellite, JEM has widened the scope of its mission of inspiring Jews worldwide over the last 44 years. It has been fielding requests for years from those hoping that Chabad’s enormous archive of video, audio recordings, and pictures might contain a photograph of them with the Rebbe.
The Rebbe himself was a big believer in harnessing the positive power of technology, explained Rabbi Mendel Gourarie, director of operations and organizational partnerships at JEM, which has been trying to implement facial recognition for several years. Being able to identify a person based on a single photograph poses significant challenges, particularly when dealing with profile shots and those with beards. JEM began seeing results approximately one year ago, and since the official launch of their facial recognition searches on their website, https://photos.jemedia.org/face-recognition, just a few weeks ago, over 500,000 searches have been performed.
“I knew it would be an important tool but didn’t realize how popular it would be,” Rabbi Gourarie told The Jewish Press, who explained that the photographs are still shots taken from video footage filmed over a four- or five-year period that he estimated began in 1988. Thousands of pictures taken in earlier years are still being tested for future inclusion in JEM’s facial recognition.
Fairlawn resident Tali Yess didn’t hit paydirt the first time he uploaded a picture of himself to the search engine, receiving photos of people who resembled him. Realizing that his appearance had changed significantly since he visited Lubavitch World as a 10-year-old, he used a picture of his father, singer Moshe Yess, instead.
“My father had been there many times and he looked the same once he reached a certain age, while I was a little kid,” explained Yess. “Once I found pictures of him, I searched the date, knowing I had been there with him, and I scrolled the results until I reached the right time stamp. I wound up finding not just my picture, but my older brother and my younger brother as well.”
Yess recalled how his father had instructed his younger brother, who was two years old when they met with the Rebbe, to take the proffered dollar with his right hand. But even as his brother reached out his right hand, the Rebbe moved the dollar over to the left.
“The dollar moved back to the right and then to the left, and it was almost like the Rebbe was playing a game with him, but the Rebbe didn’t play games,” noted Yess. “As it turned out, my brother ended up being ambidextrous.”
Yess found out about JEM’s facial recognition software from his class chat and, as someone who is interested in artificial intelligence, he couldn’t wait to try it out.
“I know AI has its quirks, but it gave me the clues I needed to find what I was looking for,” said Yess.
JEM’s facial recognition software was a source of solace for Rabbi Shlomo Katz of Efrat. The well-known singer and rav of Kehilat Shirat David heard about the software from a friend who discovered a photo of his wife getting a dollar from the Rebbe as a bas mitzvah girl.
“I thought he was kidding and didn’t understand how it worked, but he forwarded me the link and I thought it would be amazing if I could find that my aunt, who had been killed in a tragic accident a few days prior, had been there,” said Katz.
It took just seconds for Katz to find a picture of his aunt, Ellen Shimoni, receiving a dollar from the Rebbe. Being able to share that photo with his mother shortly after she finished sitting shiva for her sister felt like an incredible gift to Katz. Sharing the photo on Facebook Katz wrote ,“We found this epic moment thanks to chabad’s [sic] incredible new face recognition app. We miss our incredible Aunt Ellen more than words will ever express. The capturing of this moment is a tremendous consolation.”
Katz’s post was widely viewed, and he said that tens, if not hundreds, found pictures of themselves with the Rebbe. And while Katz himself never met with the Rebbe, he was able to find photographs of many of his friends and relatives.
Seeing a photograph of himself meeting the Rebbe as a child was literally a dream come true for Clifton, New Jersey’s Dr. Bin Goldman.
Goldman grew up as the son of a baal teshuva, and remembered his late father as someone who always seeking. That thirst for Yiddishkeit had the entire family spending a memorable weekend at a shabbaton in Crown Heights and Goldman caught his first glimpse of the Rebbe during a Shabbos farbrengen over Shabbos.
“I remember just seeing the Rebbe from across the room and not having any idea of what he was talking about, but getting this feeling, and then waiting online to get a dollar,” recalled Goldman. “I remember the moment of being face to face with the Rebbe, and feeling like it was nothing I had ever experienced.”
Goldman was similarly mesmerized when going to meet other gedolim, and a visit to see Rav Chaim Kanievsky, who seemed to be surrounded by an ethereal glow, rendered him speechless. As the years went by, Goldman found himself yearning to relive his childhood experience with the Rebbe, the new JEM software providing the perfect opportunity.
“Seeing that picture really blew me away,” said Goldman. “You can see me staring and the Rebbe is looking me in the eye, and I am just in awe.”
Equally poignant was finding pictures of the Rebbe with his father, who passed away 20 years ago.
“It was really very special to see him standing there,” mused Goldman.
Facial recognition software does have its challenges. Petach Tikva resident Nehemiah Stern was wearing a hat and a winter coat partially obscuring his face the day he met the Rebbe in 1992, so he took a different route to finding his Rebbe photo. After a family member reminded him how he had gone to visit the Rebbe with his Boy Scout troop, Stern decided to do some investigating. Reasoning that there were likely only one Jewish Boy Scout troop in Brooklyn, he googled “Boy Scouts meet the Rebbe” and was rewarded with a link to a JEM article describing Troop 611’s visit to 770 Eastern Parkway. Clicking on the article gave Stern the date of his visit and a search of the JEM archives for that date revealed pictures of himself, his family members, and a friend and his father as well.
Recalling that there had been thousands of people at Lubavitch World Headquarters on the day of his visit, and remembering waiting on line for more than two hours for a split second encounter with the Rebbe, Stern was shocked to discover a photograph of himself.
“I couldn’t believe that I found myself among thousands of people and that that moment in time had been preserved,” said Stern. “They must have videotaped thousands of Jews and it was amazing to see that split second in time.”
As a kid, Stern didn’t really understand the significance of meeting with the Rebbe. To him, going to 770 felt like an obligatory trip that all Jews living in New York made at some point in their lives, even if they weren’t card carrying members of Chabad. But with years of perspective now under his belt, Stern sees how visiting the Rebbe was a great equalizer, one that carried an important message.
“I thought as a kid that every Jew went to see the Rebbe, but really, there is just one level of separation between me and Bibi Netanyahu who also got a dollar from the Rebbe,” said Stern. “If you think about it, every Jew went to see the Rebbe – seeing the Rebbe was just something that connects us all.”
