The Storm That Nearly Swept Away Everything They Built: Rabbi Yaakov & Mushkee Raskin

00:00 Speaker 1 Melissa was crazy

00:01 Speaker 2 That's Mushki Raskin, Chabad emissary to Jamaica, along with her husband, Yaakov. And the Melissa she's referring to is the deadly Category 5 hurricane that devastated parts of Jamaica in October 2025, including the Raskins' Chabad House.

00:20 Speaker 1 200 mile per hour winds, like, we were not expecting that. Things were flying off the roof, banging sounds, boom, boom, and then boom. The sounds that we were hearing from outside were unimaginable. Like, you've never heard such sounds.

00:34 Speaker 2 But even as he desperately fought to keep his family safe and save his Chabad House, Rabbi Yaakov Raskin was thinking about what needed to be done once Melissa had departed the island nation.

00:47 Speaker 3 It was like, "What would the Rebbe tell me right now to do? How can we be there and help others and bring the light of Yiddishkeit and Torah to everybody?"

01:01 Speaker 2 I'm Gary Wolk, and this is Lamplighters, stories from Chabad emissaries on the Jewish frontier. Life as a Chabad emissary is often joyous, but it can be unpredictable and even dangerous. Chabad has become a ubiquitous presence in every corner of the world, but behind every Chabad House are emissaries, regular people striving to transcend their circumstances and a community that supports and relies on them. These are their stories. Back to our story in a moment, but first, I'd like to tell you about a great opportunity. You can partner with Lamplighters in sharing stories of Chabad emissaries doing amazing work all over the world. Please consider dedicating an episode. You can email us at podcast@lubavitch.com to explore dedication opportunities. That's podcast@lubavitch.com. You can also let us know how we're doing and about the shluchim you think we should consider for upcoming episodes. Please rate and review Lamplighters to make it easier for other podcast listeners to find us. Lamplighters is a project of Machne Israel, the social services arm of Chabad Lubavitch.

02:29 Speaker 3 I grew up in Côte Saint-Luc, Montreal, Canada. I'm fortunate to be a third-generation Rebbe Shliach.

02:36 Speaker 2 That's Yaakov Raskin, whose parents are Rabbi Mendel and Rabbanit Sara Raskin, who run a Chabad House in Côte Saint-Luc, a residential suburb of Montreal. Raskin says his young life was centered around that Chabad House.

02:54 Speaker 3 Activities every day, excitement.

02:57 Speaker 2 Yaakov's grandparents, Rabbi Leibel and Raisl Raskin, were sent to Morocco by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1960.

03:05 Speaker 3 And he pledged to give a special book to every grandchild called Sefer Hashlichus. All the Rebbe's talks about the importance of going out on the mission to bring Moshiach to be a Shliach.

03:17 Speaker 2 Rabbi Leibel passed away in 2004, but Yaakov took the message to heart. Raskin studied in France, England, and New York. He did Merkos Shlichus all over the world, including in the ABC Islands of the Caribbean, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. He received Smicha in 2013. Mushki Raskin grew up in Crown Heights and attended Chabad schools in New York and Israel. She knew from an early age that she wanted someday to be an official Chabad Shlucha.

03:52 Speaker 1 So my parents were Shluchim in Panama. They were there up until before I was born. They actually were there for a few years. They left when the war broke out. It was very dangerous.

04:07 Speaker 2 The Wilhelms resettled in Crown Heights at the direction of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. There, Mushki's parents were totally dedicated to the Chabad community. Her father, Rabbi Zusha Wilhelm, served as Rosh Yeshiva at Mesivta Ohale Torah. Her mother, Esther, is still a principal at Bais Rivkah.

04:27 Speaker 1 I grew up with that very strong connection, and I always knew that I wanted that.

04:31 Speaker 2 When Mushki began dating for marriage, her parents had a question.

04:35 Speaker 1 "Mushki, are we looking for somebody that's going out on Shlichus, or you're staying put?" And it was always the Shlichus answer.

04:47 Speaker 2 Mushki met Yaakov Raskin in early 2013. While they were dating, Yaakov had a question of his own.

04:55 Speaker 1 "Will you move out to Morocco?" And my answer was yes.

04:58 Speaker 2 Mushki passed the willingness to travel far test, and the Raskins were married in the summer of 2013. Shortly after their marriage, the Raskins began looking for a place to establish a Chabad presence. Rabbi Mendel Zarchi, the head Shliach of the Caribbean, suggested Jamaica, so Raskin reached out to the Bochurim who visited Jamaica the year before to get the list they'd compiled of the 80 or so Jews known to live there.

05:29 Speaker 3 And I started, uh, going through the list, calling the people, say, "By the way, maybe you guys would be interested in a Chabad House." They all said, "Of course, we would love one." And the next step was to get down to Jamaica to check it out in person.

05:44 Speaker 2 And so in the spring of 2014, the Raskins left for the island.

05:49 Speaker 3 We were living on Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights, so from Kingston Avenue, we flew to Kingston, Jamaica. We're gonna check out Jamaica, scout out the island to see if it's possible to open a Chabad House over here.

06:01 Speaker 2 They rented a car and spent the first week of their exploratory trip trying to avoid the potholes and stray goats on roads in and around Kingston.

06:12 Speaker 1 And as soon as we got on those roads, like, oh my. Thank God we know where that spare tire is.

06:17 Speaker 2 So you actually got a flat tire?

06:20 Speaker 1 We did.

06:21 Speaker 2 But it was well worth it. The Raskins met scores of people on their list.

06:26 Speaker 1 Giving them a Shalom屋 and talking to them about Purim, giving them something in connection to a, a upcoming Yom Tov. And we rented an Airbnb in Kingston, and we actually had a beautiful Shabbos meal then. Did not expect the amount of people that would come.

06:42 Speaker 2 Which was over 20. And then they noticed some interesting details about one person on their list.

06:50 Speaker 3 His name was Mr. Raymond Dawick, of blessed memory. The only Jew that it said on the list that he's kosher.

06:56 Speaker 1 So that was intriguing. Like, "Oh, wow, somebody on the island keeps kosher."

07:01 Speaker 2 The Raskins wanted to visit Raymond, but he was in the hospital.

07:04 Speaker 3 We find out the room and knock on the door, and as this lady opens the door, she gives a shout.

07:10 Speaker 1 "Ah, Chanie's brother? What are you doing here in Jamaica?"

07:16 Speaker 3 I'm like, "Wait, who's this?"

07:19 Speaker 2 It was Debbie Flaks. She and her husband Michael are supporters of international Chabad houses. Raskin had met the Flaks while visiting his sister, Chanie Matasoff, the shlucha in Monaco.

07:32 Speaker 3 And I, uh, and I, "Mrs. Flaks, what are you doing here?" She says, "Raymond is my uncle, and since he got ill, we came to be by his bedside."

07:43 Speaker 2 Rabbi Raskin helped Raymond wrap tefillin and say the Shema, and then the Flaks asked him why the Raskins were there.

07:50 Speaker 3 "We're thinking maybe we're gonna open a Chabad in Jamaica. We're not sure." And, you know, they shared to us, "Oh my gosh, that, that'd be amazing. Raymond would always love a Chabad House here."

08:00 Speaker 2 But the Raskins weren't yet sure that Jamaica was their place. They visited Montego Bay, Mandeville, and Ocho Rios. The Raskins returned to New York and weighed their different possibilities in Jamaica, the US, and Canada. They wanted clarity, so they made a trip to the Ohel to write a letter to the Rebbe. What happened next still astonishes them.

08:24 Speaker 3 And we wrote in the letter that we should have a, a clear answer from Hashem, and just like the Rebbe guided my grandfather to go to Morocco and my father to go to Montreal, so too he should take us like a father holds his son by the hand, and we should merit to a clear answer which location should be our shlichas for life.

08:45 Speaker 2 And just then, while the Raskins were still at the Ohel, Rabbi Raskin got an email from the Flaks.

08:51 Speaker 1 That said, "Raymond unfortunately passed away. We're bringing his body to Israel. Would you come to the levaya?"

09:00 Speaker 2 Raskin had about 24 hours for that trip and little time to plan for it, but he went.

09:06 Speaker 3 The family was happy to see me.

09:08 Speaker 1 They started introducing my husband, saying, "Oh, this is the Chabad rabbi of Jamaica," before any announcements. Like, "He, he's opening a Chabad House in Jamaica."

09:18 Speaker 3 The brother of the deceased, of Raymond, his name is Albert. He asks me, "Rabbi Raskin," with his nice English accent, "So what's going on? Are you gonna open Chabad in Jamaica or not?" I said, "I don't know."

09:37 Speaker 1 And the next thing he said was, "It was Raymond's dream to have Chabad in Jamaica."

09:43 Speaker 3 He says, "Listen to me. If you open Chabad in Jamaica, I'm giving you my brother's house to start off in, and we're gonna be your first supporters." I almost dropped on the floor. Sunday we asked a blessing for a clear answer. Wednesday night we have a location to start off in and our first support. As soon as I called Rabbi Zachi and I told him the news, he said, "Mazel tov, we have the new shliach." And here we are.

10:17 Speaker 1 We always say because of the story that we did not choose Jamaica, Jamaica chose us.

10:24 Speaker 2 Moushki and Yaakov Raskin returned to Jamaica in the summer of 2014. Their only possessions were two suitcases, two boxes of kosher food, and one sefer Torah. They stayed the first six weeks in Kingston at Raymond's brother's house, as promised. They met local families and organized activities, meals, and a summer camp program for eight children.

10:48 Speaker 1 Which was like, wow, like, we just said hi to these people, and all of a sudden we're having a beautiful camp.

10:54 Speaker 2 Things were going well in Kingston, but they were very intrigued by the possibilities in Montego Bay, a city in Northwest Jamaica.

11:03 Speaker 1 And we started meeting the people there. A lot of tourists come through the doors, and we realized that the Tego Bay is probably the place that we should set up a permanent place.

11:14 Speaker 2 So the Raskins rented a townhouse in Montego Bay and prepared for the 2014 high holidays. They had good turnouts for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. On the first night of Sukkot in their new community...

11:28 Speaker 3 My wife prepared a whole meal, and nobody showed up. I remember dancing with the security guard of the complex.

11:37 Speaker 2 But during Chol Hamoed, the Raskins went out looking for Jews who wanted to observe the mitzvah of lulav. They knocked on the door of one man.

11:46 Speaker 1 It was his first time ever saying the blessing on the lulav and esrog. He comes outside and he starts to shake, and he bursts out in tears, and that really left a very, very strong impact on me, and I'm sure my husband as well.

12:04 Speaker 2 Word spread about the Raskins' presence in Montego Bay. Their Hanukkah in the Sand menorah lighting event attracted nearly 100 people that first year. They held Shabbatons in local hotels that drew hundreds, and they made takeout available for those who wanted to keep kosher. Their community of residents was growing, but by 2017, the Raskins realized they needed a better way to reach tourists.

12:32 Speaker 3 And what we felt we're missing a big opportunity of people coming off cruise ships. People are not able to find us easily. So we started looking where we can find a little storefront where people can find us.

12:44 Speaker 2 The idea was to open an informal welcome center with a kosher restaurant. One day, they were driving down Jimmy Cliff Boulevard, named for the famous Jamaican singer and songwriter, and a small retail space caught Mushki's eye.

12:59 Speaker 1 There was an existing ice cream store there, and I'm like, "This is what we need, a nice square little hut, not like anything grand, and this would be perfect."

13:09 Speaker 2 It was on the main drag, visible to more than a million tourists per year, the perfect spot to declare to all of them that there was a Chabad on the island. A few days later, the commercial real estate agency they had been in touch with called to say that the shop was closing down. In no time, they had signed a lease and opened Kosher HotSpot.

13:32 Speaker 1 People could just, like, come in, chill. You want to order falafel? Great.

13:36 Speaker 3 Kosher food, falafel, fish and chips, smoothies. People wrapped tefillin for the first time in their life. So we call it TOB, tefillin on the beach. And nine years later, thousands of people on vacation walk through the Kosher HotSpot.

13:51 Speaker 2 Chabad of Jamaica's profile was rising, and Kosher HotSpot was the focal point. But by 2019, their townhouse could no longer hold the community, and again, there was hashgacha pratit. For Pesach of 2019, Mushki's parents, Rabbi Zusha and Esther Wilhelm, came from New York, as they sometimes did for holidays. They had noticed a beautiful nearby villa for sale.

14:21 Speaker 3 But it was totally out of our budget. We didn't even think we'd be able to get it.

14:24 Speaker 2 But Zusha Wilhelm had other ideas.

14:28 Speaker 1 And he took a walk on one of the Yom Tov days, and he saw a for sale sign at one of these houses, and he came back and he said, "Mushki, I think, oh, like, this house is great. We should look into it."

14:39 Speaker 3 And, uh, my father-in-law, the big rosh yeshiva, he calls the number up during Kol HaMot, and, uh, starts negotiating with them. He calls me up. He says, "You should check it out."

14:49 Speaker 2 They submitted an offer, and it was accepted. Hundreds of supporters helped them raise the down payment, and they began transforming the villa into a permanent Chabad house. But the Chabad of Jamaica also needed a mikvah.

15:04 Speaker 3 One day, I sent out a message to 2,000 people on WhatsApp. We started the mikvah in Jamaica. We didn't have the plans, uh, of everything yet, but, like, we decided we're gonna take the first step, make the pit and everything, so we show something concrete, not just theory.

15:21 Speaker 2 And then something amazing happened. Rabbi Yakov Raskin heard from Michael Flax after his seven-year absence.

15:29 Speaker 3 He sends me a message, "Call me in a few weeks." I said, "A few weeks is three weeks," put it on my calendar. Oh my God, that is the day of his uncle's yahrtzeit.

15:39 Speaker 2 Remember that the Flax uncle was Raymond. On that very day, Rabbi Raskin called the Flax.

15:47 Speaker 3 Says, "Tell me, how much is it for the mikvah, and what do you need to finish the Chabad house?"

15:54 Speaker 2 After the quiet months of COVID and more than three and a half years of construction and lots of other challenges, what had once seemed like a distant dream finally became a reality. In late December 2022, on the eighth day of Hanukkah, Jamaica's Jewish community celebrated with the Raskins the opening of a deluxe new Chabad house dedicated in memory of Rabbi Zusha Wilhelm, who passed away in 2022, and the Rose Dallek Mikvah. Now, this would seem to be the perfect storybook ending, but in October 2025, disaster.

16:35 Speaker 4 Breaking news this morning, Hurricane Melissa now a Category 5 storm. The latest advisory coming in from the National Hurricane Center-

16:43 Speaker 2 Melissa approached the Caribbean as a Category 1 hurricane, but by the time it made landfall in Jamaica, it was Category 5. Melissa's sustained winds of nearly 200 miles per hour took lives and crushed Jamaican infrastructure as it made its slow crawl across the island.

17:04 Speaker 4 Ripping apart into Montego Bay, which is about 50 miles, uh, to the west of where we're at, where over 25,000 tourists are stranded in hotels and in peril-

17:15 Speaker 2 The Raskins had secured their windows with plywood barriers and had placed sandbags all around the house to keep water out.

17:26 Speaker 1 My husband ran out to the shul and took all the Sifrei Torah and put it into the mikshol room.

17:33 Speaker 2 Because the mikvah had no exterior windows or doors.

17:37 Speaker 1 And we stayed, the upstairs floor of the Chabad house, which is, like, our apartment area, and it started getting really heavy. My kids were coloring, and everything was fine up until the main glass doors of our upstairs living area flew in. The wind was very strong. My husband quickly took all our bed frames out of all the bedrooms and the couches and started, like, pushing it against those glass doors, or else we would be completely flooded. The sounds that we were hearing from outside were unimaginable. Things were flying off the roof, banging sounds, like boom, boom, and then boom, and like you've never heard such sounds. My husband was like with every strength holding everything down, and with tears coming down was like, "Hashem, just end it. Just stop it." There's only so much that I could hold. It was about five hours, and then it stopped.

18:42 Speaker 5 Had it hit the Kingston side, the devastation would've been 100 times or more worse.

18:47 Speaker 2 That's Mark Rosenblum. He's head of school at Hillel Academy, an international school located in Kingston. Mark is a regular at Chabad of Jamaica events, and very fond of the Raskins. So after confirming that his school had been largely unaffected by the hurricane, Mark's thoughts turned to them.

19:08 Speaker 5 Rabbi, Rabbi, Rabbi, Mushki, Mushki, Mushki, children, and I'm just super anxious.

19:16 Speaker 2 Mark couldn't communicate directly with the Raskins because of outages, so he picked up a friend, and they headed out on the highway towards Montego Bay, a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the northwest on a normal day. But as night fell, they began to witness scenes of devastation.

19:34 Speaker 5 Big yachts in the middle of the highway, multi-ton cement poles across the road like sticks, spaghetti of wires live everywhere.

19:45 Speaker 2 They carefully wove through the obstacles until hours later they arrived in Montego Bay. They walked with their flashlights up the muddy road to the Chabad house.

19:56 Speaker 5 The car in the driveway has a big air conditioning unit that flew off the roof. Nothing left on the roof. There was a gazebo. Yeah, that's gone. You didn't even know where it was.

20:06 Speaker 2 Mark found the Raskins and their children in the pitch black, looking out over the sea. They were shaken, but fine.

20:14 Speaker 5 And we all are at the banister on the patio where we hold all of the Shabbats, looking out in the dark, and I don't even notice that the Rebbetzin went inside somewhere, and she comes back with food. I said, "Mushki, where did you even get that?" She said, "I have reserves of things." I was like, "Really?" And she's like, "Well, it's right here, isn't it?"

20:37 Speaker 2 Not all had been so fortunate. Melissa was the strongest recorded storm ever to strike Jamaica. 95 people lost their lives in the hurricane, and hundreds more were injured. Damages totaled over 12 billion US dollars. It was presumed it would take months, even years to recover.

20:59 Speaker 3 But Jamaican people are resilient. We know how to rebuild, and as the previous Rebbe said, "Our bodies are in galus, but the neshamah not." You could hit our buildings and, uh, our physical needs, but you can't hit our spirit.

21:12 Speaker 2 So the Raskins began reaching out to Jamaicans from all walks of life to help them recover. They began with Mark Rosenblum, who jumped in his Jeep the next day to distribute water to anyone he could find.

21:26 Speaker 5 I became the Rabbi's hands, and I wasn't the only one.

21:29 Speaker 2 In conjunction with several relief agencies, the Raskins brought in supplies.

21:34 Speaker 3 We brought in five containers, and we helped thousands of people right away with food and drink and tarps and clothes and shoes, anything they need.

21:45 Speaker 2 The Raskins opened up what was left of their Chabad house.

21:49 Speaker 3 So we were able to become a shelter. We had Jews, non-Jews, giving out food, generators. Our first Friday night after the hurricane, we had a local person who came to us, said, "Rabbi, I didn't eat for three days." And in the darkness we sat our first Friday night. We had, you know, canned food, and I was able to put up some rice, so we had some little hot food. She was just crying and just saying thank you. We turned over the Kosher HotSpot, and over there we were giving out meals to anybody who need it for two months.

22:19 Speaker 2 Chabad of Jamaica even partnered with sponsors to fund two full-time social workers who'll be on call until January of twenty twenty-seven.

22:29 Speaker 3 Going to local schools, talking to children to take care of their mental health. Our focus is get people back on their feet.

22:38 Speaker 6 So I happened to be in Montreal when the hurricane hit.

22:42 Speaker 2 That's Sybil Berenholz. She's a seasonal resident who has a home in Hanover Parish on Jamaica's far western tip. She met the Raskins shortly after they arrived in twenty fourteen, and says she fell in love with Shabbat dinners and with the Raskins' children. Sybil absorbed about 60,000 Canadian dollars worth of damage to her home, but that didn't stop her from joining relief efforts and even leading one very important one.

23:10 Speaker 6 I heard that one of my neighbors in the village had had a stroke and that he was in the hospital, and after three weeks when they brought him home, I would go visit him every morning and bring him a porridge or a homemade vegetarian soup, and he would cry to me, you know, a grown man, 49, and cry to me and tell me, uh, he can't live like this. He can't have his sons taking care of him. They go to work all day.

23:34 Speaker 2 The man lives in a small shack in the mountains above Montego Bay. Rabbi Raskin had just received an emergency shipment of wheelchairs, so he and Sybil delivered one of them to his door and had it assembled there in his home.

23:50 Speaker 3 So we're, we're happy to present you, uh, this, this, uh, wheelchair.

23:56 Speaker 1 Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

23:59 Speaker 6 And he was so thankful and grateful. Then he got strong enough to get into that wheelchair and just roll himself to the door where he could see outside.

24:13 Speaker 2 Rabbi Yaakov Raskin says his Chabad house is now 90% rebuilt.

24:19 Speaker 3 And, uh, we're, we're full of gratitude to the Aibishter that we're here to tell the story.

24:24 Speaker 2 Now, focus is turning from hurricane relief toward the expansion of programs for the island's approximately 500 resident Jews and the roughly 25,000 Jewish tourists they meet most years. The Raskins host Shabbos meals for hundreds of tourists and locals every year. There's also a weekly barbecue with kosher jerk chicken and other island delicacies. And Rabbi gives a weekly Torah class in Kingston, where he hopes to establish a full-time presence. And they're distributing hundreds of Ark boxes all around Jamaica, and also at Kosher HotSpot, which they've rebranded as the Ark Center.

25:05 Speaker 3 This Ark box is a tzedakah box that stands for three words: Acts of Routine Kindness. My dream is one day that every single Jamaican should have this box. They should think about doing acts of goodness and kindness to make the world a better place. And, uh, we're so humbled and honored to be the Rebbe's ambassadors, and we wish we can do more, and more, and more to bring Moshiach closer through another act of kindness.

25:34 Speaker 7 That's what allows us to continue and go strong.

25:47 Speaker 2 I'm Gary Wollek. Thanks for listening to Lamplighters: Stories from Chabad Emissaries on the Jewish Frontier. We welcome your questions and comments about what you've just heard on Lamplighters. Please email us at podcast@lubavitch.com. And if you know of a great story involving Chabad emissaries or the people they inspire, please let us know about them. That's podcast at L-U-B-A-V-I-T-C-H.com. To subscribe digitally to Lubavitch International Magazine or to receive it at your doorstep, please visit lubavitch.com/subscribe. Lamplighters is a project of Machne Israel, the social services arm of Chabad Lubavitch.