Fundamentalists and modernists seem, at times, to work in contrapuntal interdependency. While the fundamentalist's rhetoric markets its image as celebrating the renewal of an authentic past identity in modernity, modernists state the need for and possibility of adapting a cherished past to modern assumptions. Yet, it seems as if it is the fundamentalists who are the ones to embrace a highly modern narrative and that it is the modernists who oppose it. In this article, we investigate this paradox by portraying the educational efforts of the Chabad Movement to introduce young Israeli trekkers in Southeast Asia, from secular, Zionist backgrounds, into a religious lifestyle. We show Chabad's strategies to be what, in modernist jargon, would be considered progressive informal educational activities, the very ones from which modernists seem to be retreating with the advance of Jewish day school educational technologies in the Diaspora. We suggest that the Chabad movement demonstrates an understanding of the covert symbolic power of formal educational approaches and that it resists them by enacting a radical epistemological change in all that guides their educational activity.