--- type: Person title: Rabbi Yoni description: Crown Heights rabbi who runs a bookable tour of Hasidic Brooklyn, takes Harry inside the Chabad world headquarters, and answers every question put to him including the awkward ones. tags: [united-states, new-york, brooklyn, judaism, guide, religion] timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z --- # Rabbi Yoni Rabbi Yoni Katz ([@RabbiYoniKatz](https://www.instagram.com/RabbiYoniKatz)) lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and runs a tour of the neighbourhood that Harry books and links. He carries the entire video: what the dress means, how the Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway came to be a converted doctor's house, how a kosher kitchen works, and what daily life looks like in a family of nine. His framing at the outset is that Hasidic Brooklyn is assumed to be closed and insular and that Crown Heights is the opposite β€” and the video bears it out, in that Harry can walk into the most famous synagogue in the movement unaccompanied and film in it. Two things distinguish him from a guide reciting a script. He answers the questions Harry hesitates to ask β€” including the underground tunnels story, which he raises himself once Harry approaches it and explains without deflecting. And asked about misconceptions, the one he picks is that the large family and the religious path are imposed rather than chosen. Asked what happens when the fighting stops, he gives the longest answer in the video: that the real question is what people talk about afterwards, that every country is responsible for protecting its own people, and that this makes nobody more important than anybody else. He and his family took no payment for the day. ## Appears in - [First Time in the Home of a Hasidic Jewish Family πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ](/videos/R8B356F8u2s.md) β€” guides the whole day and hosts Harry at home.