Faye Karp

Faye Karp was a beloved figure in the Chabad Jewish communities of Auckland, New Zealand and Melbourne, Australia, known for decades of quiet hospitality and care toward young rabbinical students and families who arrived in New Zealand to build Jewish communal life. She died on 10 November 2026 at the age of 82.

Faye was born in Auckland in 1944. Her public legacy begins in the early 1990s, when the Chabad-Lubavitch movement's central organisation began sending young rabbinical students, known as bochurim, to New Zealand to help establish Jewish religious infrastructure there. According to a tribute published by the Chabad news outlet COLlive, Faye was born in Auckland in 1944. In the early 1990s, when Merkos sent bochurim to New Zealand she welcomed them with open arms, caring for them as a surrogate mother. That role, as an informal den mother to young emissaries far from their own families, became central to how she was remembered by the community.

Faye later moved from Auckland to Melbourne, where she became an integral part of the Chabad community there, before returning to New Zealand after the Covid-19 pandemic to live out the rest of her days in Auckland. Friends and community members described her as the heart and soul of the Chabad House community in Auckland. Her devotion to the growth of Jewish life in New Zealand was on public display on Yud Shevat 5783, when the Chabad of Auckland community marked the purchase of its first ever permanent building in the country, and she proudly exclaimed in front of the whole community, Rebbe you did it.

In a detail that friends have cited since her death as fitting given her lifelong devotion to the growth of New Zealand's Jewish community, Faye passed away two days after seeing the first Chabad mikvah ever built in New Zealand filled with rainwater, which brought her immense joy, according to the COLlive tribute. She did not live to see the mikvah formally completed and in use, but community members have taken comfort in the timing, treating it as a final, meaningful milestone in a life spent helping to build Jewish infrastructure in a small and far flung community.

At the time of writing, no cause of death has been made public, and detailed biographical facts about Faye Karp's early life, education, marriage and children have not been reported in available sources. Tributes so far have come primarily from within the Chabad and Jewish communities of Auckland and Melbourne, where she was remembered with warmth as a maternal presence who shaped the experience of a generation of young emissaries and families. People Forever will update this page as further verified details become available.