The Kopust branch of the Chabad dynasty of Hasidic Judaism was founded in 1866 by Yehuda Leib Schneersohn after the death of his father Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the third Chabad rebbe.
It is named after the town of Kopys in the Vitebsk Region of present-day Belarus, where Yehuda Leib Schneersohn settled after his father's death.
The death of the third Chabad rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneersohn led to a dispute over his succession leading to the founding of Kopust.
While the youngest son, Shmuel Schneersohn assumed the title of rebbe in the town of Lubavitch, another son, Yehuda Leib Schneersohn, assumed the title in the town of Kopys, but died less than a year later and was succeeded by his son Shlomo Zalman Schneersohn.
[5] The oldest extant Chabad synagogue in Israel, the Ohel Yitzchok (אהל יצחק) synagogue in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem—also called the Baal HaTanya Shul (Yiddish: בעל התניא שול: "Baal HaTanya's synagogue")—active since 1900, was originally affiliated with Kopust.