Map 22.1. Geopolitical Map of Interwar Eastern Europe
WAR AND REVOLUTION
IN AN APPEAL TO POLISH HASIDIM IN 1919, we read the following description of the effects of the war and revolution that had devastated the Jews of Eastern Europe:
Our dear Brothers, listen to us and may God listen to you!
It is well known throughout our lands that the horrendous times [we’ve lived through], the torrents of troubles that have wrapped around our necks in the last few years; the horrible war in which thousands of Jews were martyred by fire and water have devastated and depressed the livelihoods of most Jews, wherever they reside. But worse even, was their impact on spiritual life with the destruction of most traditional Torah study institutions. The great yeshivot have mostly closed down; the best of our young men, the flower of Israel, have been taken away and removed, against their will, from the study of the holy Torah. The houses of study have been abandoned and empty, the Torah left in a forlorn corner, no one seeks it, nor pursues it.1
World War II and the Holocaust have today overshadowed Jewish memories of World War I, as well as the revolutions, civil wars, and new nationalisms that came in its wake. These momentous events shattered the world of the nineteenth century and ushered in dramatic ideological, cultural, and social changes that would shape the interwar period and beyond. In the West, the memory of World War I focuses largely on the trauma of trench warfare, but on the Eastern Front, the devastation to civilian populations rivaled what was to occur on the same swath of land in World War II.
More than 1.5 million Jews fought on every front and in every army of World War I. In the East, around 650,000 Jewish soldiers served in the Russian army, and 320,000 in the Austro-Hungarian. Despite accusations to the contrary, their percentage in all the armies exceeded the percentage of Jews in those countries’ populations and their casualty rate was correspondingly high. About 225,000 Jewish soldiers perished at the front. It is impossible to estimate how many Orthodox Jews, not to speak of Hasidim, took part in the hostilities, but the millions not in uniform found themselves directly in the path of the armies of both sides. Indeed, the number of Jewish civilians who died during the war was at least as high as the number of military casualties.
Already in 1914, Russian forces invading Galicia, and German forces invading Poland, caused very great material and human losses, as well as mass flight. As many as 400,000 Jews—over half of its Jewish inhabitants—fled Galicia as a result of the atrocities of the antisemitic Russian army. For the vast majority of them, this meant financial ruin and many years of wandering. Things were not much better for those who stayed. The Russians expelled almost 500,000 Jews to the East, under suspicion of collaborating with the advancing German army. Those who returned often found that their houses and workshops had been plundered, and so they became dependent on public assistance. The population of the former Kingdom of Poland, including the Jews, found itself on the edge of a complete economic abyss. On the territory that the invading German army seized from the Russians, the situation was better. Indeed, Jews often greeted the German soldiers as liberators, quite the opposite of what would be the case less than three decades later. However, the economic situation was very hard, because the Russian authorities, when evacuating Central Poland, carried off a great many factories, most of the banks and their assets.
After a temporary cessation of antisemitic propaganda in the first months of the war, accusations directed at Jews revived very quickly and with double the intensity. All the armies suspected Jews of spying on behalf of their enemies. In Russia, and later in Germany too, widespread public opinion saw the Jews as supporting the enemy, and as acting in ways calculated to lead to the downfall of their own country. Especially after the publication by the German High Command of an appeal calling on Russian Jews to revolt, the authorities and Russian public opinion became obsessed with rumors of Jewish treachery. Jews were also suspected of speculation and of attempts to enrich themselves at the expense of the economy’s collapse.
These misfortunes hardly ceased with the end of the war. In fact, as a result of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Soviet wars, as well as the revolution in Hungary, for the Jews of Eastern Europe, World War I did not really end until 1921. Events like the November 1918 anti-Jewish pogrom in Lwow, or the executions of Jews accused by the Polish military authorities of spying on behalf of the Soviets, weighed on later Polish-Jewish relations. The most atrocious mass executions took place in Pińsk, Vilna, and Lida. In the wave of pogroms during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921, at least 70,000 Jews perished. In October 1921, over 200,000 Russian Jews were still in exile without a permanent right of abode or a new country.
Thus, for the Jews, as for others in Eastern Europe, the mayhem of World War I extended well beyond the end of formal hostilities. In this chapter, we will extend our discussion past the end of World War I to include also the effects of the Bolshevik Revolution—that is, not only the Civil War in Russia but also the Communist regime up to World War II. Since the Soviet regime proscribed Hasidism and drove it underground, the fate of the movement in Russia—including the lands where Hasidism originated—may be considered a continuation of the dislocations of World War I. In chapters 23 through 25, we will turn to the rest of the story of Hasidism in the interwar period in Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Land of Israel, and America.
Figure 22.1. Nahum Moshe of Kovel, a rebbe of the Rakhmistrikve branch of the Chernobyl dynasty, blesses Polish soldiers during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921, photograph. Courtesy of Yitzchok Meir Twersky.
The War’s Effect on Hasidism
The war hit Hasidic courts, especially in Galicia and Bukovina, with exceptional ferocity. Several of them served as a shelter for the Jewish population escaping from the front. Then, soon afterward, they became frequent victims of destruction and plunder, which at least in part was the result of antisemitic prejudice and a conviction that the tsaddikim had amassed treasure in their luxurious quarters. In this way, the accusations of ostentatious wealth and luxury that non-Hasidic Jews had leveled against the tsaddikim rebounded against the Hasidic leadership in the broader antisemitic atmosphere of the war. In the course of the war, the court and much of the town of Belz were turned into ruins, and a similar fate befell Husiatyn, Jeziorna, Sadagora, and Boyan, where the Jewish quarters together with the Hasidic courts were burned to the ground.
Beyond the courts, dozens of Hasidic shtiblekh were destroyed in every area affected by the war and it was not always possible to rebuild them. In Tshizhev (Central Poland) after the destruction of the synagogue in which the shtiblekh of the Hasidim of Ger and Aleksander had been located, the rebuilt synagogue no longer included such facilities. In Kolomea (Eastern Galicia), the shtibl of the Hasidim of Chortkov and Sadagora was destroyed. In Drohiczyn Poleski (Belarus) after the destruction of the local community’s synagogue, non-Hasidic Jews took over the Hasidic shtibl. And after the destruction of part of the town and the Hasidic house of prayer, the tsaddik Shmuel of Sokhachev closed his yeshivah and moved to Łódź. These are just a few examples out of hundreds.
One indicator of Hasidic losses was the high death rate among the leadership, the direct result of the hostilities or of hunger, disease, or exhaustion. In Turobin, Yankele Weisbrod, known as the “artisans’ tsaddik,” was accused of treason and hanged by the tsarist army. In Chekhanov, Shmuel Yitshak Landau suffered a heart attack and died immediately after the army arrived. The tsaddik of Opoczno, Israel Aharon Podobna, died from injuries caused by Russian soldiers; his wife and daughter were wounded as well. Meir Moszkowic, the tsaddik of Zborów in Galicia, died of exhaustion shortly after fleeing to Hungary. Avi Ezri Shapira fled from Mogielnica to Warsaw, where he died in 1916 from disease. Naftali Horowitz of Mielec fled to Vienna at the start of the war and died there in 1915. Pinhas Rokeah died shortly after fleeing from Dolina to Munkatsh. After the bombardment of Kozhenits, Shmuel Shmelke Rokeah fled to Radom, where he died shortly afterward. The tsaddik of Bursztyn, Nahum Brandwajn, moved to Stanisławów and died there in 1915. Although in most cases, we do not know the actual cause of death, the numbers, compared to the mortality rate in earlier periods, tell the whole story: during the period 1900 to 1913, the number of deaths of tsaddikim was around five a year (fewer, if we exclude the bloody revolutionary year of 1905), while the average for the years 1914–1918 was almost double (around nine), and as high as triple (fifteen deaths) in 1918, possibly a result in the latter case of the beginning of the Russian Civil War.
Even after the end of the war, rebbes continued to suffer disproportionately. Hayim Shapiro of Płock (1879–1920) came from a family of tsaddikim from Kozhenits and Mogielnica. His father, Shalom Shapiro of Przytyk, perished in 1915 at the hands of Russian soldiers, accused of spying. Hayim lived in Płock during the war, where he led a small house of prayer and a little Hasidic community. But during the invasion by Bolshevik forces of Płock in August 1920, he, like his father, was accused of spying by making secret signals from his balcony to the Bolshevik forces. He was sentenced to death by a military tribunal and shot. The case caused great shock, since Shapiro was widely known for his detachment from earthly matters, ecstatic forms of prayer—which the military tribunal interpreted as secret signals—and a complete lack of political awareness.
The reaction of the tsaddikim to the deprivations of the war at times aroused controversy. The writer and ethnographer S. Ansky claimed that in Warsaw a rumor arose that the tsaddik of Ger had forbidden the eating of food from war assistance kitchens. This was enough for Warsaw Hasidim not to use them. Although Ansky was able to clarify that the tsaddik had said no such thing, the readiness with which the rumor was believed reflected the Hasidic élite’s reluctance to accept this kind of public relief. As the tsaddik’s sister averred, such a kitchen could never have been set up in Ger, for the Jews there were too proud to use it: “You have to know our town. We have many destitute people, but they aren’t simple paupers; they used to be part of the rebbe’s court, and they spent their time studying the holy texts. A Jew like that won’t go to a free kitchen organized by the city council—no matter how kosher.” Ansky—a secular intellectual—commented acerbically and perhaps unfairly: “In her words I sensed an attitude permeating the Hasidic aristocracy—a brutal indifference to the simple poor.”2
A New Hasidic Geography
Since the dynastic principle in Hasidism usually guaranteed continuity, in most of these cases, new leaders replaced those who died and their courts continued to operate much as before, although not necessarily in the same place. Flight and resettlement, which assumed massive proportions, left an even greater mark on the geographical and social structure of Hasidism in Eastern Europe. Already in 1914, a great number of rebbes fled from Galicia and Bukovina. They typically settled in Hungary, Moravia, and Austria, and some of them also fled to Romania, the relatively smallest number moving from small towns to larger ones within the confines of Galicia and Bukovina.
The most common destination was Vienna, where between 80,000 and 130,000 Jewish refugees found shelter, including many Hasidim. Before 1914, Hasidism was essentially absent from the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but in the first year of the war, a number of tsaddikim, accompanying families and an even greater group of rank-and-file Hasidim arrived in the city. Almost overnight, Vienna became an important center of Hasidism, with possibly several tens of thousands of Hasidim residing in the city. Interestingly, some native Viennese Jews became followers of Hasidism, something that would have been highly unlikely before the war. Among the rebbes who came to Vienna were Hayim Hager of Ottynia, Hayim Meir Yehiel Shapira of Drobitch, Yitshak Ya’akov Twersky of Stanisławów, and Yitshak Mordechai Shapira of Gwoździec, the Hagers, tsaddikim from the Vizhnits dynasty, the Horowitzes of the Ropshits dynasty, as well as a number of tsaddikim from lesser dynasties. Most prominent, however, were the many branches of the Sadagora dynasty, especially that of Yisrael Friedman of Chortkov, who established his court on Heinestrasse, and later on Rossauerlaende. According to a contemporary register, twenty Hasidic courts, including sixteen courts of, or related to, the Sadagora dynasty, operated in Vienna during the interwar years, most of them established during the war.
The most influential leaders of this dynasty, the tsaddikim from Chortkov, Boyan, Husiatyn, and Sadagora, remained in Vienna after the end of the war. Although they made sporadic visits to their followers in the more important towns in Galicia, their influence in the Hasidic world weakened considerably and their successors enjoyed rather meager followings. It may also be that their willingness to adopt European culture, already evident in the tsaddikim of Sadagora from the time of the dynasty’s founder Israel of Ruzhin, meant that the Friedmans succumbed more easily than other tsaddikim to the charms of big-city life. In addition, the Polish-Ukrainian civil war and the Polish-Soviet war, which were especially destructive in Eastern Galicia—the Friedmans’ base—hardly encouraged them to return.
In Poland, fewer rebbes relocated, since most of them did not flee ahead of the front. Some even awaited the Germans’ arrival with hope, more out of dislike of Russian rule than sympathy for the Germans, who were perceived as the carriers of dangerous modernization and secularism. The burdens of military occupation, economic difficulties, and growing danger did, however, incline an ever-growing number of Polish Jews to move eventually to the larger towns. As Ita Kalish, the daughter of the Rebbe of Vurke recalled:
The war had lasted longer than had been expected. Jews began gradually to leave their old-established homes in towns and villages and to flock to the capital of Poland [Warsaw] in the hope of greater security and peace, and where they hoped to find shelter from the common enemy, that is, hunger, and from the specifically Jewish fate, that is, pogroms, expulsions, persecution.3
The tsaddikim also moved after them; paradoxically the “leaders” did not lead, but rather followed their followers reluctantly. However, unlike in Galicia and Bukovina, where Jews crossed borders, here the migration was internal, as Jews moved from small towns to Warsaw and to a lesser extent also to other urban centers such as Łódź, Kielce, Radom, Płock, Lublin, and even little Otwock.
In Ukraine and Belarus, there was a similar movement of tsaddikim to the cities. In autumn 1915, the leader of Chabad, Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn, left the centuryold home of the dynasty in Lubavitch and resettled in Rostov on Don, a large transportation and commercial center in central Russia. This move replicated the famous escape of his ancestor, Shneur Zalman of Liady, a century earlier during the Napoleonic Wars. However, unlike his great-great-grandfather, Shalom Dov Ber did not connect his escape with support for the Russian cause in the war, since the Hasidic leadership was becoming increasingly estranged from the tsarist authorities.
The tsaddikim in the Ukraine, such as Yehudah Leib of Hornostaipol, Aharon of Skvira, and Yeshaya of Makarov—all from the Chernobyl dynasty—fled mainly to Kiev, but also to Minsk, Odessa, as well as to Poland and even overseas, although the main wave of resettlements in Ukraine and Belarus came only during the civil war of 1918–1920. But even the end of the civil war did not bring stability to the areas of Eastern Belarus and Eastern Ukraine, since the Bolsheviks attacked all forms of religion and especially the highly visible dress, hairstyle, and customs of the Hasidim.
These migrations led to the appearance of new centers of Hasidism in areas where the movement had hitherto been either weak or completely absent. A similar process that we observed in Vienna took place in Hungary and Romania. For example, a community of Chortkov Hasidim developed in Budapest during the war, and their house of prayer survived until World War II. Similarly, the tsaddik of Vizhnits, Yisrael Hager, left Bukovina in 1915 just as Russian forces arrived in the city, and arrived in Hungary by way of Romania. He finally settled in Oradea (Grosswardein) in Bihar province, a town without a Hasidic community in which he created a strong center of Hasidism.
If the places of residence of tsaddikim are a good indicator of Hasidic influence, the movement now found a foothold in Slovakia, the Hungarian provinces of Erdely, Bihar, Hajdu, Transylvania, and Wallachia (mainly Bucharest). Others moved to the province of Maramaros, which had been a Hasidic center since the mid-nineteenth century. The war thus caused certain courts hitherto associated with one nation-state to take up residence in another. For example, the descendants of Avraham of Trisk in the Russian province of Volhynia settled in Poland, where they succeeded in gaining considerable influence. At least in some localities, this process of geographical expansion caused conflict with non-Hasidim suspicious of the newcomers and their customs. In other places, it resulted in conflicts between competing Hasidic courts.
While the scale of this phenomenon is difficult to quantify, there is some fragmentary data from certain localities. For instance, in Łomża, a town in the northeastern part of Poland, the influence of Hasidism was traditionally weak: in 1897, there were around fifty Hasidim and just one shtibl, and the number of tsaddikim residing in the province was one of the lowest in the region. As a result of World War I, a significant number of Jews moved to Łomża, including Hasidim. Followers of the dynasties of Ger, Sokolow, Radzymin, Aleksander, Sokhachev, Vurke, and others appeared, and the combined total of Hasidim reached about four hundred. Unlike the examples mentioned previously, the dramatic increase in the number of Hasidim had nothing to do with the resettlement of tsaddikim, but rather of their followers.
The effect of the forced migration of Hasidim is typified by the story of Włocławek, a small city northwest of Warsaw. As the well-known scholar of rabbinical literature Ephraim E. Urbach recalled, during World War I the town quickly came under German control, and since conditions there were relatively better than elsewhere, a great many Hasidim from groups not present earlier in Włocławek came in. In just one courtyard at no. 15 Piekarska Street, there were now three Hasidic houses of prayer. Although after the war many of these Hasidim left, the structure of Hasidic settlement in the town had changed for good.
From time to time, tsaddikim fled to areas where Hasidism already had a strong presence. Then the appearance of a new tsaddik—insofar as he succeeded in creating a base in a new town—might lead to new competition for followers. Some tsaddikim lost support; others gained it.
The Urbanization of Hasidism
As these examples demonstrate, one dramatic consequence of the mass dislocations during the war was to drive Hasidim into cities. There had always been tsaddikim who had settled in large towns, such as Czernowitz (Czerniowce), Lwow, and Krakow, but until the end of the nineteenth century, these had been isolated cases. Moreover, this was so atypical that at times it merited comment, as in the case of Ya’akov Yitshak Horowitz, the Seer of Lublin at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or else ended with the tsaddik’s withdrawal into a smaller shtetl, as in the case of Yitshak Meir Alter of Ger in the middle of the century.
Only after the outbreak of World War I did numerous tsaddikim begin to settle in the great modern urban centers of Eastern and Central Europe. We do not know how many moved to Warsaw during the war, but in the interwar years there were twentysix tsaddikim living permanently in Warsaw, and most of them had settled in Warsaw in the days of war. Łódź, with thirteen tsaddikim, rivaled it, as did some smaller towns: Stanisławów with twelve Hasidic leaders, Lwow with eleven, Rayshe (Rzeszów) with eleven, Tarnów with ten, Krakow with nine, Kielts (Kielce) with eight, and so on.
Life in a great city was safer and more comfortable, but it also had economic advantages. As Pinhas Tsitron explained in his reminiscences of Kielce:
During World War I, living in small towns was dangerous because of their proximity to the battlefront, which kept moving from place to place. It was especially difficult for the tsaddikim to live in rural areas. They got most of their income from donations (pidyon) that people from other places brought to them. However, during the war, travel was restricted and the income of the tsaddikim suffered as a result; therefore, they moved to the large city that had a major concentration of Jews. In the large cities there was greater personal security, as well as a more readily available income.4
A number of tsaddikim took advantage of the move to a large and economically thriving city as an opportunity to succeed financially: Shlomo Hanokh Henikh Rabinovich of Radomsk developed a thriving business after moving to industrial Sosnowiec. During the interwar period, his Hasidim claimed implausibly that he became the wealthiest man in Poland.
However, economic success in a great city was not guaranteed. Even if the tsaddikim moving from small towns to the city often followed in the footsteps of their followers, not every follower left the small towns to make the same move. So taking up residence in a city often meant breaking or weakening the bonds between the tsaddik and his network of Hasidim. War and transportation difficulties only exacerbated the situation. The overwhelming majority of the followers of the tsaddikim of Chortkov or Husiatyn who remained in Galicia could not afford to visit Vienna. And tsaddikim now living on a few neighboring streets in Warsaw, Krakow, or Kiev were competing for the same sources of income, flowing from the visiting faithful, while these sources of income, in line with generally deteriorating economic conditions, were becoming ever more modest. So a significant number of tsaddikim, and especially their children, had to turn to paid employment.
The tsaddikim’s departure also had a catastrophic effect on the economic life of the towns they abandoned. As we observed for the nineteenth century, the tsaddik’s court and his numerous visiting followers provided an important source of income for the whole community. Therefore, small towns to which the tsaddikim did not return after the war, such as Chortkov, Sadagora, and Boyan gradually fell into disrepair and their former social structure disintegrated.
In addition, when tsaddikim left their historic residences for larger towns and cities, something in the culture of traditional Hasidism underwent a radical change. For Hasidim who lived in modern cities, courts located in small towns were a repository of the premodern world they had left behind, suffused in their imagination with the mystical atmosphere and moral values of tradition. At a time of dramatic modernizing, urbanizing, and industrial change, small-town courts provided ideological frames of reference for big-city Hasidim. As political struggles swept the Jewish world, the smalltown courts became bastions against modernity, which even more strongly bound city-dwelling Hasidim to their tsaddikim in small towns. But when the rebbes fled to the big cities during the war and after, they deprived their courts of this traditional identity.
The tsaddik and his court had to adapt to the conditions of big-city life. We recall that the visit of the tsaddik to a small town was always a great event that attracted the attention not only of the Hasidim, but of the whole town, including the Mitnaggdim, the Maskilim, and even Christians. It was different in a great city: at least several tsaddikim lived permanently within walking distance and were available on a daily basis. The hierarchy between a rebbe and a Hasid was less obvious than before, for they lived in very similar conditions in the same environment, rubbing shoulders with one another. One consequence of this new social arrangement was what might be called “à la carte Hasidism”—namely, young Hasidim who sampled different courts, picking various festivals with different tsaddikim depending on individual taste or indeed on the way different tsaddikim enacted different elements of Hasidic ritual. Some of course became permanent followers of the rebbe whose charisma they had sampled, but this was no longer the rule. So, for instance, Yosele of Wierzbnik would hold especially joyous Sabbaths, Arele of Kozhenits had an attractive tish, Shaul Yedidia Taub of Modzits (Modrzyce) was especially talented musically, while Yitshak Zelig of Sokołów was for some too rational, and Meir Shalom Rabinowicz of Parysów too young. Although such behavior, stemming perhaps from hybrid religious identification, had already been present in Hasidism in earlier years, urbanization during and after World War I meant that this phenomenon became more widespread and its effects more profound. And the long-term consequence was competition and an overall weakening of identification with Hasidism in the sense of adherence to a particular court and dynasty.
The tsaddikim in a great city also had to compete with the secular attractions of the theater, the cinema, the circus, and café life. Even if traditional Hasidim demonstratively rejected such pastimes, things were different in practice: ordinary Hasidim, and especially their wives and daughters, were seen in the audience at the theater. In the anonymity of the city, all kinds of behavior, unthinkable in the shtetl, became irresistible.
New Ideologies: The Politicization of Hasidism
City life brought about another dramatic change: exposure to modern politics. Of course, as we have already seen, in the nineteenth century, the ideologies of Haskalah, socialism, and Zionism became prevalent in the Jewish street. However, at the turn of the twentieth century, all these movements still represented a small percentage of Eastern European Jewry. Now, economic dislocations, migrations to the West, the 1905 revolution, and, finally, to a greater extent, World War I dramatically accelerated these changes. Ever more Jews, especially younger ones, were abandoning old customs, traditional dress, and lifestyle. Jewish society rapidly embraced modernity, including secularism, and Hasidism began to lose its followers. Resettlement in cities undermined the social controls of small towns. The city was made up of a multiplicity of communities; excommunication from one still allowed membership in another—something the village or shtetl did not allow. As punishment for nonconformist behavior disappeared, Jews could embrace new ideologies and associations.
The mass scale of suffering and destruction also had colossal consequences for intergenerational relations. The older generation had been unable to protect itself, or even diagnose appropriately the reasons for its helplessness in the face of the war’s disasters. The world of tradition was thus seen to be defenseless or simply irrelevant. Likewise, the collapse of the economy during the war left many family breadwinners destitute. This naturally led to a questioning of their role as heads of the family, especially if women or children turned out to be more effective providers of daily bread. An atmosphere of change always favors the young over the old. And the dramatic deterioration in standards of living led to radicalization and the decline of traditional authority.
The response of the tsaddikim seemed woefully inadequate. For example, Shmuel of Sokhachev interpreted the war as a sign of the appearance of the Messiah, the son of Joseph, the first of the two expected Messiahs, whose coming would be marked by suffering and not triumph. Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn, the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, likewise raised the possibility of a messianic advent. But there was no evidence that the Messiah, son of David, was on the horizon, unless one abandoned Jewish tradition and embraced some form of secular messianism. Another Hasidic writer, Alter Hayim Levinzon, also wrote about the Messiah’s birth pangs, which were meant to turn the people of Israel to repentance and back to the way of the Lord. And Hillel Zeitlin, whom we met in the last chapter, imagined an interview with the Besht in which he told him how much greater the catastrophes were that befell the Jewish people during and after World War I than anything the Jews experienced in the eighteenth century. Yet none of these ideas found much resonance among the young, who increasingly preferred secular ideologies as responses to the crises of the age.
The consequence of all these factors was the politicization of the Jewish community, including the Hasidim. For a great many people, this meant abandoning Hasidism and embracing political movements such as Bundism, territorialism, Zionism, anarchism, and even Bolshevism. Zionism in particular received an enormous boost with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that suddenly made a hitherto utopian movement seem plausible. As one Bolshevik supporter wrote: “Under the influence of the Russian revolution, a number of Zionist groups were established by the Hasidic children.… The so-called cream of the Hasidic local intelligentsia became increasingly drawn into the socio-political world.”5
This turn to politics became one of the most characteristic features of the younger generation of Jews in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe during in the interwar period, and it included those who abandoned Hasidism.
At the same time, the ideological and social crisis led to a Hasidic “counterreformation.” The formation of the Orthodox political party Agudat Yisrael (also known simply as the Agudah) and the Hasidic involvement in politics, as well as the rapid development of new organizational forms and educational institutions became features of Hasidism during the interwar period. In this sense, World War I catalyzed processes that transformed the Hasidic movement during the interwar period, and eventually shaped its resurrection and renaissance after the Shoah.
Thus, after four years of war and three more years of revolution and civil war, the map of Hasidism had radically changed. As a result of all the factors we have discussed, there were decidedly fewer followers of the movement than in 1914. Hasidism would continue to be a powerful religious, social, and political force in Eastern Europe in the interwar period, but it had lost its nineteenth-century dominance and now became more of a minority subculture. Even as it contracted, its geographical map changed, with the emergence of new centers, many of them urban.
Another consequence of this new map was a reordering of the influence of specific Hasidic courts. Some dynasties, notably Ger and Aleksander, became stronger, while other dynasties, like Chortkov, Sadagora, and Belz, experienced stagnation or even weakened. A fluctuation of influence can be proof of a movement’s vitality, but it can also be the sign of internal crisis. Dozens of former centers of Hasidism in the towns and villages of Poland, Galicia, Bukovina, Lithuania, Ukraine, or Belarus shrank or disappeared completely. Especially in the East, the long-term consequences of the war and especially the Bolshevik Revolution—to which we now turn—brought persecution and defections from the ranks of the movement.
Hasidism in the Soviet Union
With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Hasidism in Russia faced an enormous new challenge: how to survive government attacks on religion in general and on Judaism in particular, as well as the economic upheavals that Communism wrought. The end of the tsarist empire unleashed a veritable cultural renaissance among Jews in the new Russia, including a multitude of publications in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. During what has been called “the halcyon decade” following the Bolshevik Revolution, even Zionism blossomed, claiming 300,000 members in 1,200 localities. The revolution likewise made it much easier to assimilate and become fully Russian. In less than a decade, however, the Communists had suppressed Jewish political parties, eradicated Zionism and Hebrew, and either stamped out religion or driven it underground. At the same time, during the 1920s, Russian Jews migrated in disproportionate numbers from the small towns of what had been the Pale of Settlement into the cities and into new professions. In a few short years, then, the Jewish population in Russia underwent a political, economic, cultural, and religious revolution.
Many Orthodox Jews, including Hasidim, were swept up by the revolutionary atmosphere, abandoned religion and joined the Bolsheviks. Some even enlisted in the secret police: the head of the Kiev branch, for example, was Arkadii Twersky, of the Chernobyl dynasty. Others joined the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish “section” of the Communist Party that served as a tool of cultural and political control of the Jewish “street.” For most of its existence, the Jewish Section was led by Semion Dimanstein, a former student of the Lubavitch, Telz, and Slobodka yeshivot, who had received rabbinical ordination from the illustrious Lithuanian scholar Hayim Ozer Grodzinski of Vilna.
The presence of former Hasidim in the ranks of the Yevsektsiya would prove useful in identifying which institutions should be attacked. Between January 1923 and March 1924, 120 out of 320 Yevsektsiya campaigns were against religion. Between 1922 and 1923, over 1,000 traditional Jewish schools were closed, and during the decade nearly 650 synagogues were shuttered. Many of these were Hasidic. In some places, the yeshivah, the Jewish study hall, and rites like circumcision were “put on trial” by Jewish Communists who wanted to demonstrate they were more Communist than anyone else.
The regime severely restricted the Hasidim in their activities, harassed, and sometimes arrested them. A few Hasidim of the Ruzhin dynasty—whose origins were in Russia before Israel of Ruzhin was forced to flee to Galicia—remained briefly, but unsuccessfully, in the Soviet Union. The Chernobyl dynasty, the largest and most widespread of the nineteenth-century Russian Hasidim, tried desperately to hold on under the new regime. In Loyev, within the Minsk region, Shalom Yosef Twersky, continued to serve as rebbe, but would ultimately flee east toward the Samara region, where he died in July 1943. His cousin, Hayim Yitshak Twersky, tried to maintain his branch of Chernobyl Hasidism, moving in 1923 to the Kiev region, where he opened a study hall and ritual bath. However, he soon came to the attention of the Yevsektsiya and was exiled to Siberia where he lived off packages sent to him from his remaining supporters in Kiev. When at last he was permitted to return, he continued to serve as a leader until his second arrest around the time of World War II. Refusing to eat prohibited food on Passover, he tried hard to maintain his religious observances under the harsh conditions of his imprisonment. Sentenced to eight years internal exile in Siberia, he died in April 1943.
Others in the Chernobyl dynasty who stayed in the Soviet Union were Ze’ev of Rakhmistrivke (d. 1933), David Ya’akov of Zhitomir (d. 1943), Hayim Moshe Tsvi of Hornostaipol and later Kiev (d. 1933), Tsvi Aryeh Twersky of Makarov (d. 1938), Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Machnówka (d. 1964), as well as several others. The Soviet authorities constantly undermined their efforts to maintain Hasidic life, and later the Nazis finished their work in all the areas of Russia that fell under their control during World War II. Chernobyl, which had dominated Hasidic life in Ukraine for over a century, essentially disappeared from the Russian landscape.
Some scions of the dynasty fled to America. There, they, like other rebbes, would try to reestablish their courts (see chapter 25). In 1924, Moshe Twersky came to New York, ending up in Philadelphia, while his brother Meshullam immigrated to Boston in 1927. Shlomo Shmuel Twersky of Chernobyl fled in 1917 from Kiev to Brooklyn, and his cousin, Shlomo Benzion Twersky, after trying to find a place in Minsk and later Kiev, also came to New York about three years later. In 1927, likening America to bondage in Egypt, he thought seriously about returning to Chernobyl. In a letter dated November 20, 1927, the following message from one of his Hasidim urged him to reconsider:
Your honor our master, teacher and rabbi and my dear Rabbi Shlomo Benzion Twersky … I have been reluctant to write you my opinion.… Given the terrible waters that would drown the saving remnant at any moment, but in this year 5688, oh, my dear one, woe is us. Among our brothers, the children of Israel, whom we call merchants and store owners, life has been cut out of them during the last two years. We are now like abandoned objects with no owners! There is no mercy for us. Most Jews of this class are dying of hunger.… You wrote in your letter that we should pray that you are liberated from Egypt, but we cry for ourselves night and day, “Master of the Universe save us from our brother from the hand of Esau: Who is worse off? We suffer at the hand of Esau for our lives.” We beg the Creator, “Give me the people and the possessions take for thyself,” [Genesis 14:21].… Of course, the house is empty; most of the Jews have already given up all their furnishings and … Thousands of us are arrested for no reason.6
And then the letter-writer concluded with a reference to how differently the Hasidic community fared from others: “There are some Jews who are not living badly,” but he added, “My dear rabbi, can we call them Jews? Can we compare ourselves to them? They who have already thrown off the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven.” The clear message was that however bad the Rebbe might see life in America, things were much worse for his Hasidim in the Soviet Union. However, unable to abide America, Twersky ignored this warning and returned to the Kiev region, trying under great pressure to maintain a small Hasidic court until his death in September 1939. Little could he know that in the years ahead his fellow rebbes would thrive in the land he likened to the biblical Egypt.
Rebbes and many Hasidim who managed to carry on some activities after the revolution would at last be undone by the Nazi firestorm. Indeed, by the end of World War II, most of the synagogues in the Soviet Union were destroyed and their worshippers killed (see chapter 26). For example, Yisrael Tsvi Rotenberg of Kosoni (Novyye Kaush) became a rebbe in 1920 but was later killed in Auschwitz. Aaron Menahem Nahum Twersky of Azarnitz was likewise murdered during the Shoah, as was Mordechai Yisrael Twersky of Chatin (Chocim) and Yosef Yirushlamsky of Kishinov (Kiszyniow). Others managed to escape to America and Palestine or later the new State of Israel.
In the Soviet Union, Bratslav Hasidim had certain advantages over other groups in going underground. They lacked a rebbe who could be the focus of persecution, and they had no court to provide a physical target for harrassment. They also had long years of experience with weathering persecution as the bête noire of nineteenth-century Hasidism. Until 1925, the Bratslav Hasidim could still reach Uman every year for Rosh Hashanah and hold the “holy gathering” there, but after that year, the pilgrimage became impossible and the study house and mikveh were locked up.
The leadership of twentieth-century Bratslav started with Avraham Hazan, the son of Nahman of Tulchin, a senior Bratslav figure who had immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1894 but was trapped in Russia during World War I. Before his death in 1917, he became the teacher of Levi Yitshak Bender (1897–1989), a Bratslav Hasid from Poland. Bender remained in Uman for the next two decades, where he assumed spiritual leadership of the Bratslav Hasidim, together with Eliyahu Hayim Rosen (1899–1984), and presided in secret over the annual Rosh Hashanah kibbuts at the grave of Rabbi Nahman.
The Soviet authorities imposed death sentences on Bender and Rosen. They were reprieved owing to the intervention of a sympathetic Jewish official in Kiev and went underground. Rosen was able to get an exit visa to Palestine, where he immigrated in 1936. Bender returned to Uman for the 1938 pilgrimage and, after a series of hairraising escapades, was able to elude the authorities. He survived in Siberia, returned to Poland after the war, and then served as rabbi in a displaced persons camp in Bad Reichenthal, Germany. He finally immigrated to Israel in 1949, where he became a leader of the reconstituted Bratslav community there. Although individual Bratslav Hasidim remained in Russia, they had to function underground and most fell victim to the Nazis.
As opposed to other dynasties, Chabad Lubavitch managed to maintain, at least for a time, an organized presence under the iron fist of the anticlerical regime. Their leader was Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn (1880–1950), who succeeded his father Shalom Dov Ber in 1920. Chabad’s relative success had to do with its long experience creating a decentralized network knit together by emissaries. As we have already learned, in 1915, under the fifth rebbe, the Chabad court fled its longtime home in Lubavitch ahead of the German army and moved to Rostov-on-Don far in the South of Russia. From a distance, the rebbe continued to minister to his flock via emissaries. When the sixth rebbe consolidated his leadership, he understood that in order for his court to flourish, he needed to abandon the tiny Jewish backwater of Rostov and migrate to a city where there were many Jews whom he could attract to his court. He also believed, as did many Hasidim, that the cities would now be safer for their kind of life. Following the war, the flight to the cities that we have already described became a full-fledged migration, with Hasidic leaders following the Jews who were streaming to the larger cities. It would be a pattern of urbanization that would intensify later in the interwar period and become virtually the rule for Hasidim after the Holocaust and into the present.
In 1924, Schneersohn relocated to the former Russian capital of St. Petersburg (renamed Leningrad by the Soviets). He sent his devoted students from the Chabad Tomkhei Temimim yeshivah, which his father had founded and which he had run, as emissaries throughout the main Jewish settlements in the Soviet Union in order to keep his movement alive. Schneersohn proclaimed that he would stay in Russia as a matter of principle and prohibit his Hasidim from emigrating, particularly to the United States or Palestine, both of which he considered hotbeds of secularism and heresy. His prohibition would end up trapping a significant number of Lubavitcher Hasidim in a place perhaps more threatening to Hasidism than any other in the world.
Schneersohn set up a network called the Committee of Rabbis in the USSR, which he headed. During the first year of its existence, the committee was able to get the Central Legal Consultation Office of the Soviet Bar Association to agree that private, at-home instruction of religion to groups of five to six children was legal. They disseminated this opinion to rabbis and teachers throughout the Soviet Union to use in defense of Jewish religious instruction. The committee also organized petitions with a total of some five thousand signatures, protesting the persecution of Jewish religious teachers.
Schneersohn’s emissaries were often teachers but also ritual slaughterers who not only provided for the dietary needs of Orthodox Jews, but also came with a readymade source of income, as butchers charged a healthy fee. These emissaries also set up a network of schools for the teaching of Torah and Chabad Hasidism in particular. This broad network, which other rebbes who remained in the Soviet state did not enjoy, made the sixth Rebbe of Lubavitch the most prominent leader of Hasidim and of religious Jews generally in the Soviet Union, a role that we have seen earlier Chabad rebbes assumed in tsarist Russia. The new rebbe thus became a symbol of Jewish resistance to the Soviet system.
In the absence of any other networks, Jewish organizations worldwide that wanted to help Jewry in the Soviet Union looked increasingly to Schneersohn and his emissaries. The Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), originally organized in 1914 by American Jews to aid Palestinian Jewry in World War I, had begun in 1920 to aid Soviet Jews, many of whom had lost their private property, stores, and factories, and who were suffering from famine. Seeking someone inside the country who could distribute the funds they were collecting (at first for supplying Passover needs, but later for nearly everything), they concluded that the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his emissaries would be ideal for the job.
In 1924, Schneersohn’s committee began to receive clandestine funds from the JDC. Besides defending and financing Jewish religious education, the Committee of Rabbis allocated money for other activities, including repairing and constructing synagogues and mikva’ot, providing material aid to Jews unemployed because of their Sabbath observance, and distributing funds for the purchase of hard-to-come-by Passover foods. Control over these significant funds made the Lubavitcher Rebbe even more powerful and influential. While favoring his own Hasidim with these resources, Schneersohn solidified his position as leader of all Soviet Jewry and the premier Hasidic leader in the Bolshevik state.
Yet the rebbe’s success also made him and his followers a prime target of the regime and particularly the Yevsektsiya. They understood that Schneersohn’s international contacts, funds, and projects ran the risk of undermining their revolutionary efforts more than perhaps any other remaining Hasidic court. Accordingly, they called the attention of the secret police to his activities. He was labeled a “foreign agent,” running a “counterrevolutionary network” that they argued imperiled the Communist state. In June 1927, a detail of the secret police, headed by two former Lubavitch Hasidim turned Bolshevik, and accompanied by the Yevsektsiya, made a midnight raid on Schneersohn’s home in Leningrad and, after searching his premises, arrested him. Later, they would also arrest his secretary, Hayim Lieberman. Schneersohn’s young cousin, Menachem Mendel Schneerson—the future seventh Rebbe of Lubavitch—who was outside the rebbe’s apartment after having returned from an evening out with the rebbe’s middle daughter (who would later become his wife) and who was not arrested, tipped off Lieberman to the raid. Lieberman managed to destroy a number of letters and documents before the police came for him. Schneersohn’s only son-in-law at the time, Shmaryahu Gourary, was also detained.
Reportedly condemned to death, in fact Schneersohn was soon released at least in part owing to the efforts of Ekaterina Peshkov, a Red Cross activist and former wife of the famous author Maxim Gorky, as well as by the heads of the JDC. Also involved in freeing the rebbe were Senators Robert Wagner of New York and William Borah of Idaho, the latter a dominant member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who had called for American recognition of the new Soviet government and who was seen as an important friend of the Soviet Union. Borah’s crucial involvement was enlisted by American Reform rabbi Stephen Wise, who saw himself as an advocate for world Jewry. The Soviets needed imports of wheat and were willing to trade a Hasidic rebbe whom the Americans mysteriously favored.
After his release, Schneersohn returned to Leningrad, but his situation deteriorated under the continuing surveillance by the secret police. He decided to leave, and, in spite of his previous instruction to his Hasidim that they remain where they were, began negotiating his own, his secretary’s, and his family’s departure from the Soviet Union. Along with the help of Jewish leaders from Agudat Yisrael, politicians in Latvia and America, and a host of others with whom he had established connections, Schneersohn managed to get into Riga, Latvia, in October of 1927, where he would relocate his court. Here, beyond the reach of the Soviets, he continued his activities from across the border.
Yet it was not simple for a rebbe to leave behind his Hasidim. Attempting to explain his actions, he wrote to his followers:
I wish to make clear to everyone that no credence must be given to the reasons advanced for my leaving the country. They are illogical in the extreme. I am not leaving under duress—far from it! I am doing exactly what I planned to do.… Know that I shall be with you always … know that what you are seeing [referring to himself] is a neshamah (soul), as it exists in Gan Eden (paradise) clothed in a body.7
Schneersohn obviously wanted his Hasidim to believe that he could accomplish more for them if he were beyond the reach of the Bolsheviks, from whom he had obviously fled (no matter how he tried to deny it). His hopes to continue his leadership from across the border largely failed, and by 1929 the Committee of Rabbis began to fall apart when a number of its hidden yeshivot were discovered and closed, and their heads arrested. By the 1930s, the network was shattered. Chabad Hasidim also went underground.
In the mid-1950s, a delegation of American rabbis who visited the Soviet Union announced at a televised press conference that they had come to “the melancholy conclusion the Judaism in Russia is seriously threatened with extinction.”8 This was certainly true of Hasidism, although Chabad continued to operate a clandestine network from its postwar headquarters in New York. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that when the Soviet Union finally crumbled at the end of the twentieth century, Chabad was well positioned to become the dominant face of a newly public Judaism and the chief rabbi of Russia would be a Lubavitcher emissary. Bratslav Hasidim also returned to Uman as pilgrims visiting their rebbe’s grave. In this unexpected way, Hasidism returned to its cradle from which it had been banished.
1 Mossad ha-Yeshiva ha-Gedolah ve-ha-Mefo’arah Metivta (Warsaw, 1922), no. 7, 5.
2 Ansky, The Enemy at His Pleasure, 41.
3 Ita Kalish, A Rebbishe Haym in Amolikn Poyln (Warsaw, 2009), 94. There is an inaccurate English translation in Ita Kalish, “Life in a Hassidic Court in Russian Poland toward the End of the Nineteenth Century,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 13 (1965): 277.
4 Pinhas Tsitron, Sefer Kielts: Toldot Kehilat Kielts mi-Yom Hivasda ve’ad Hurbanah (Tel Aviv, 1956/1957), 176.
5 Bunem Yidel Kril, “Deraynerzngen fun a Rakishker sotsyalist,” in Yizkor-bukh fun Rakishok un umgegnt, ed. Meilech Bakalczuk-Felin (Johannesburg, 1952), 116.
6 Aharon Feder, DerIberklaybung fun Hasidus tsu di Farinigte Staten fun Amerike (The Movement of Hasidism to the United States of America) [Orot Sivan 5771 (June 2011)], quoting the archive of Mishkenot Ya’akov, 79–80.
7 Cited in Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 81–82.
8 Rabbis Morris Kertzer and David Golovensky, quoted in Yaakov Ro’i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration 1948–1967 (Cambridge, 1991), 117–118.
