Chabad’s Rabbi Nochum Mangel leads a Business Ethics Roundtable

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

Beginning this month, a course designed and taught by Chabad of Greater Dayton Director Rabbi Nochum Mangel will be available for use to more than 4,000 Chabad-Lubavitch institutions around the world.

For more than a year, Mangel has led the monthly Business Ethics Roundtable in a lunch-and-learn format at offices in downtown Dayton. The course explores how issues in the current business world are dealt with in halacha (Jewish law).

Rabbi Shmuel Klatzkin, associate rabbi with Dayton’s Chabad, edited and co-authored the course for international distribution. Klatzkin has written the curriculum for courses used by Chabad’s Jewish Learning Institute, presented at 300 Chabad sites around the world.

“It’s unbelievable how timely all of it became now,” Mangel said of the business ethics class. “Some of the issues we’ve discussed are directly related to what’s going on in the economy now.”

November’s roundtable focused on priorities in taxation, drawing on texts from the Talmud.

“We’re making the class available all over because Rabbi Mangel really felt it’s been quite successful: a lot of interest and a lively class,” Klatzkin said, “so why not share it?”