Malkie Schwartz and three stick figures

New York Times Magazine, September 21, 2003: Waiting for the Messiah of Eastern Parkway:

As a little girl, Malkie Schwartz,who is now 22, lined up with the masses most Sundays to receive a blessing and a dollar bill from the rebbe, as was the custom in his later years. After the rebbe's death, she attended Lubavitch camps where she and her fellow campers sang songs beseeching him to return and redeem them.

For a while, the rebbe's physical absence made her spiritual yearning for him that much greater. ''I believed full-heartedly that he was moshiach,'' Schwartz says one morning in early August outside a Starbucks on Astor Place. ''I longed for him.''

Over time, though, Schwartz began to have doubts -- doubts that she had a hard time sharing with her fervently messianic parents. In the fall of 2000, at age 19, she sat down at the kitchen table with her mother and father, picked up a yellow highlighter and a blank piece of paper and drew a box and three stick figures. Two were inside the box and one was outside.

''See,'' she said, pointing to the drawing. ''You're inside the box. You believe the Torah is divine and the rebbe is moshiach. I'm outside the box.''

Her father cut her off before she could elaborate. ''But the Torah is divine,'' he said, ''and the rebbe is moshiach.''

Two weeks later, Schwartz, who had been the valedictorian of her Crown Heights yeshiva, moved out of her parents' house and into Manhattan. That the hardest part of leaving was not abandoning her family and friends but turning her back on the rebbe, underscores the power of messianism's hold on many Lubavitchers. ''Even when I left I knew the rebbe was always right -- I knew I was messing up,'' she says.

Now a senior at Hunter College, Schwartz is starting a nonprofit for members of ultrareligious communities who are trying to make inroads into the secular world. Since leaving Lubavitch, she has forged a strained peace with her parents, but at the same time her feelings of guilt toward the rebbe have curdled into resentment. She doesn't doubt his worthy intentions, but she does feel almost personally betrayed by his failure to anticipate the problems that the messianism he tacitly encouraged would one day cause. ''If you're going to have people waiting on line for hours to see you . . . he had to have seen how enthralled everyone was,'' she says. ''What he was thinking? Where did he think this would go?''

P.S. There is a nice interview in the article with the father of the Zanzer Einikle of Boston.