The annual International Conference of Emissaries was held earlier this month at Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section.

This year’s conference brought together 4,000 men from 47 of the 50 states and some 75 countries. The men’s wives hold their own conference each spring.

It was the first gathering since the tragic murder of an emissary couple during a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, last November, in which more than 170 people were killed.

Events were held during this year’s conference to honor the memory of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, who were killed along with four Jewish guests. At one event, rabbis took turns lettering a Torah that will replace the one destroyed during the attack.

A New York Times’ story reported that Rabbi Abraham Berkowitz, the emissary who went to Mumbai to rebuild the center after the attack, said there had been an outpouring of support from individuals and government officials there.

“Our focus is always on restoration, on moving ahead,” The Times’ story quoted him, “so that not one day should go by during which those terrorists should prevail.”

Chabad emissaries assist small communities that have no rabbi of their own, or that seem to need a shot of enthusiasm to generate greater participation in Jewish life.

In Eastern Europe,The Times wrote, the organization seeks to reintroduce hundreds of thousands of people to their Jewish identities. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there came over the wall an entire generation of young Jews who knew nothing about what it means to be Jewish,” said Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, who settled in Berlin 13 years ago with his wife, with whom he has five children.

“Many came from the east to Germany, and Germany now has the world’s fastest-growing Jewish population,” he said, adding after a long pause: “This is very moving for us. That in this city, which once represented the essence of darkness and evil, where the Holocaust was planned, there is now a thriving Jewish community.”

The conference, while implicitly paying tribute in almost every speech and program to the great themes of Jewish history, focuses most of its daily work on practicalities.