Preventing intermarriage was and is the focal point of most kiruv operations; at least they’ll keep thar and not be lost to klal yisroel.
Since when is having a bar mitzvah even a mitzvah? Who cares if a frei kid has one or not; kids don’t become frum because of bar mitzvos with (usually) treif food and dancing.
Most rabbonim will not reach out to an intermarried couple; rav shmuel Kamenetzky was asked this a few years ago at a shiur, if our approach should change because of how vastly ignorant frei people are that they think intermarriage is not a big deal…rav shmuel(I think it was rav shmuel, may have been another of the ziknei rosh yeshivos) said absolutely not; they marry out, they’re gone. Dead to us. If they come back, then great, but we don’t reach out to them. They’re gone to the jewish people.
It’s not something i decided. It’s something basically everyone outside of wherever you are thinks, even traditional jews who don’t keep shabbos but recoil at the thought of intermarriage. Perhaps when chabad was being mekarev you they didn’t talk about that – and neither would any sane kiruv person, as it’s not the kid’s fault – but when you venture out a bit you’ll see what the jewish community collectively thinks of the situation. No kiruv shuls support bringing non jewish spouses to shul, etc…unless that spouse has an interest in converting… that’s a different story.
But aside from that, chabad likes to hype up individual mitzvos to the exclusion of a bigger picture; seeing the trees without seeing the forest. The forest, is that in the Lubavitcher rebbes time, more than 90% of jewish people were not frum. The number of Orthodox jews vs. non frum has risen precipitously since his petirah. This shows that in his lifetime he did not bring jews back to Torah. He didn’t hurt them, but he only helped a little bit, on a microcosmic level, where a tiny fraction will do a mitzvah here and there.
That is a far, far cry from bringing klal yisroel back to Torah. In terms of net mitzvos, the litvishe and chasidishe yeshivos produced more net mitzvos, because their talmidim learn and keep everything. Every word of torah is a mitzva. Imagine 10,000 nen saying 10,000 words of torah a day. That’s 100,000,000 mitzvos in one day.
Let’s say there are 6,000 chabad centers…maybe. each one gets a person to do 2 or 3 mitzvos a day. That’s only 18,000. And that’s now, not during the Lubavitcher rebbes lifetime.
So if BMGs founder resulted in more net mitzvos, perhaps rav aharon kotler was bechezkas moshiach?