Death and Resurrection: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
David Biale, Benjamin Brown, and Samuel C. Heilman
INTRODUCTION: THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, one might have been tempted to write the epitaph for Hasidism. The crisis of Hasidism described in chapter 20 of the previous section escalated and took on new dimensions. During World War I, rebbes and their followers endured death and dislocations, with many fleeing the front for the safety of cities like Vienna. Following the war, the movement faced persecution and defections in the newly established Soviet Union after a very brief cultural spring, and lost many adherents in interwar Poland to secularism and new political movements. The impoverishment of the late nineteenth century had sparked mass emigration out of Eastern Europe to America and Western Europe, with smaller numbers reaching Palestine. After World War I, new political and economic pressures provoked additional migrations out of Eastern Europe, although quotas that the United States imposed in 1924 made it much more difficult to find refuge in that country, which had absorbed millions of Jews over the previous half century. Meanwhile, the Balfour Declaration in 1917 energized Jews to move to Palestine in the hopes that Zionism might provide a refuge. While the vast majority of Hasidim remained in their heartland and homeland, the conditions that had made possible Hasidism’s nineteenth-century Golden Age had largely collapsed.
What this section of our story reveals, however, is that the final chapters of Hasidic life had yet to be written. The twentieth and now the twenty-first century would turn into a tale of death and resurrection. After the Holocaust had decimated their ranks, the Hasidim discovered that the very places their rebbes had warned them against—the Zionist state and the democratic countries of the West, primarily North America—became the havens where they flourished as never before. These were places that provided them with economic and political stability, relatively little persecution, and conditions where they could gain confidence and numbers in ways they could never have dreamed of during the early 1900s.
A movement many believed had passed its Golden Age would have a second Golden—even Platinum—Age. This would be a time of both rebuilding and reinvention, especially after the extraordinary losses of the Holocaust. The Hasidim of this century were not radicals; they were increasingly conservative and Orthodox. They were no longer rebelling against the yeshivah world as they once had done; they often emulated it, with rebbes acting like yeshivah heads, recruiting their followers via their educational institutions. With the exception of Chabad and Bratslav, which made outreach to the less religious the hallmark of their movements, Hasidism no longer acquired followers from the non-Hasidic world, as it had done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For most Hasidic groups in the latter part of the twentieth century, growth would come from fertility and through their educational institutions.
In their new places of residence, Hasidim would find themselves concentrated together in ways that were unprecedented in their history, and with modern travel and other forms of communication, even distances once thought obstacles to overcome seemed to shrink away to near nothing. Never had there been such a concentration of Hasidic courts in urban locations such as in Brooklyn, Jerusalem, and Bnei Brak, and never had Hasidim found themselves living in a sovereign Jewish state with a powerful government and army to defend them and offer them welfare. Living in such proximity and refraining out of conservatism from forming new dynasties with new names, new conflicts arose among and within courts, as they competed for influence and authority.
The result was a Hasidism that claimed to be faithful to the past, even as it fashioned itself anew. Although the modern, interconnected world, which this post-Holocaust Hasidism tried to keep out, seeped into their cloistered communities, as the twentyfirst century dawned, there were signs of cultural and social change. Some tried to ignore it, or to characterize the change as continuity. Others fought it tooth and nail. This was a period of great nostalgia for their lost communities of Eastern Europe, but, having thrived in the State of Israel and democratic countries of the West, the Hasidim were now firmly anchored in the postwar world.
This was also a century in which women, once marginal to Hasidism, became more fully engaged as Hasidim (more correctly: Hasidot). Certainly, this was true in Chabad, but no Hasidic court could ignore its women, and they played a growing role in every court, in some cases, like Satmar, even acting like a rebbe. This development paradoxically occurred as Hasidic leaders insisted more stridently than ever before on gender segregation.
This section of our book is divided into two parts. In the first part, we will examine how Hasidism tried to meet the challenges of World War I and then the interwar period in the Soviet Union and the new states—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania—that arose out of the dismantling of the Russian and Habsburg Empires. The movement fought a rear-guard action to survive in these new conditions. Yet, even in the face of new forms of antisemitism and accelerating abandonment of religion, the movement did not lack for pockets of vitality and innovation. Side-by-side with increasing rigidity, we will find attempts to respond to the new challenges. And then came the Holocaust that almost totally destroyed what remained. Hasidism responded to this unprecedented catastrophe both by mobilizing traditional strategies and by examples of remarkable adaptation. In the second part of this section, we turn to the dramatic story of resurrection after World War II, focusing particularly on the State of Israel and the United States, the two places where the preponderance of Hasidim can be found to this day. We will consider their political, social, and cultural manifestations, bringing our account as close as possible to the present time.