CYP Shluchim to Tackle AI and Tough Halachic Questions At Kinus Workshops

Young-professional shluchim will leave Kinus workshops with working AI tools, practical halachic guidance, and ideas shared by colleagues facing the same questions in communities around the world.

When Rabbi Mendel Lebovics walks into this year’s CYP Kinus workshop, he wants shluchim to bring their laptops, and leave with more than notes.

By the time the session ends, participants will have worked directly with AI apps and agents, setting up tools they can begin using immediately in their own communities.

“Very, very practical tips,” said Rabbi Lebovics, shliach at CYP St. Pete, Florida, who will lead the hands-on session together with Rabbi Avi Winner of CYP Upper East Side.

For shluchim working with young professionals, technology is already part of the world they navigate every day. Their community members are building careers, starting families and living in a workplace increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. The challenge for shluchim is not simply understanding that shift, but figuring out where new tools can remove administrative friction and leave more time for people.

“AI is the new frontier of technology,” Rabbi Lebovics said, reflecting on his work introducing AI tools to fellow shluchim. “It helps us focus more on our shlichus and less on the work that slows us down.”

Rabbi Lebovics taught a session on artificial intelligence at last year’s Kinus. Since then, he has watched the conversation change. Many shluchim who were then experimenting with the technology are now using it comfortably and looking for more advanced ways to put it to work.

This year’s session, “AI for Shlichus: Set Up Your Toolkit,” moves from explanation to implementation. Shluchim will work with specific applications and AI agents during the workshop rather than simply hearing about what they can do. The goal is for each participant to leave with a functioning toolkit already in place.

But the afternoon will not revolve around technology alone.

Immediately afterward, Rabbi Mordechai Farkash, CYP rov and shliach to Bellevue, Washington, will lead CYP shluchim through practical halachic questions that arise in their work with young Jewish professionals. The discussion will focus on the standards that guide CYP shlichus and how those standards shape decisions in the complicated situations shluchim encounter day to day.

Placing the two sessions alongside one another reflects a tension familiar to many shluchim: how to embrace new possibilities without losing clarity about the principles that guide their work.
Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, Executive Director of Merkos 302, said the value of the workshops lies in shluchim learning from one another as they face that challenge.

“CYP shluchim spend their days with young Jews who are building careers and families, and they keep looking for ways to reach one more person,” Rabbi Kotlarsky said in the context of the Kinus workshops. “Now they are teaching each other tools that give them more time for that work.”

That approach, he said, is inspired by the Rebbe’s teachings on harnessing new developments for a holy purpose: not treating technology as an end in itself, but asking how it can serve shlichus.

For Rabbi Lebovics, one of the largest barriers is often not the complexity of the technology but the assumption that it is difficult to begin.

“It’s a matter of people realizing how accessible it is,” he said.

The AI workshop will run Thursday from 3:45 to 5 p.m. at CYP HQ, 1457 Union Street. Participants should enter through the side entrance and bring a laptop. Rabbi Farkash’s halachic discussion will follow from 5 to 6 p.m.

Throughout the Kinus weekend, CYP HQ will remain open to shluchim with coffee, mezonos, fast WiFi, computers and workspace. Shluchim considering expanding their work with young professionals can also stop by the office to learn more.

Then, at 9:30 Thursday night, the screens will give way to a farbrengen. CYP shluchim from communities around the world will sit together, trade stories from the field and continue a conversation that no AI agent can replace.

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