Kfar Chabad Settlement

Kfar Chabad is a collective settlement belonging to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, located in the central occupied Palestinian territories, between Beit Dajan and Lydda. It was previously located on the lands of the depopulated Palestinian village of al-Safiriyya (known in the Byzantine and Crusader periods as Sifria or Saviria). During the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Sultan granted the lands of al-Safiriyya to his charitable kitchen (imaret) in Jerusalem. Under Ottoman rule, the area belonged to the Lydda subdistrict, which extended from present-day Modi'in–Maccabim–Re'ut in the south to El'ad in the north, and from the eastern foothills across the Lydda plain to the outskirts of Jaffa in the west.

Kfar Chabad was established in 1949 by Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. Until 1957, it was known in Hebrew as "Tzafrir" or "Shafrir."

The first residents were new immigrants from the Soviet Union, survivors of World War II and Stalinist persecution. One source noted that this immigration had several distinctive features: members of the Chabad movement rejected all offers of assistance from religious and political organizations, and insisted on settling the land and learning modern farming methods, considering it an honor to live as they had been raised, relying solely on the work of their own hands.

Kfar Chabad is located on the outskirts of the city of Lydda, about 8 kilometers southeast of Tel Aviv. It includes agricultural land in addition to a number of educational institutions, and serves as the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement in Israel. It is a Chabad-affiliated community, and its population in 2022 was about 6,720 people.

Sources:Due to the scarcity of Arabic sources, the following Hebrew sources were relied upon:

• The settlement's official website (Hebrew)

• Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics

• Information on the village of al-Safiriyya from the aforementioned website.