Map 23.1. Interwar Poland
IN A SOVEREIGN POLAND
IN THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR I, Europe was divided anew. A number of states, among them Poland, won their independence according to the principle of national self-determination. The borders of Poland were not, however, identical to those of the early modern Polish Commonwealth from before the partitions of the late eighteenth century. In addition to Congress Poland, the new Polish Republic absorbed Galicia, portions of Silesia, the Prussian Province of Posen (Poznań) and West Prussia, as well as Lithuania, Volhynia, and Western Belarus. The Polish state was nominally a democracy that promised equal rights to all the minorities living within its borders, chief among them the Jews, who constituted the largest minority, about 10 percent of the population. For a moment, it seemed as if the newly independent Poland would fulfill the old Hebrew word play according to which the name of the country—Polin—meant “rest here” (poh lin), that is a place where the Jews might find peace and security.
In the 1931 census, there were 3,113,900 Jews in Poland, a number that would rise to 3,351,000 in 1939. This population was augmented by refugees from the new Soviet Union, particularly during the brutal civil war that claimed the lives of many Jews and sent others in flight. Among them were Hasidic leaders and their followers who transplanted their courts from Russia to Poland, which now became the largest center of Jewish Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe. Although the conditions for Hasidism in Poland were relatively better than in the Soviet Union, Poland’s initial promise of equal rights and democracy foundered as antisemitic legislation threatened the livelihoods and cultural autonomy of the Jews. Some of these laws, such as those aimed against the Sabbath and kosher slaughter, necessarily affected traditional Jews—and among them Hasidim—more than others. Yet the primary challenge for Orthodox Judaism and Hasidism in Poland was the abandonment of religion, especially by the young, who embraced secular movements such as Zionism and socialism in unprecedented numbers.
Accelerating secularization affected not only ordinary Hasidic families but also the houses of tsaddikim. Ita Kalish (1903–1994), the daughter of Mendele of Otwock from the Vurke dynasty, traveled from Hasidism to Zionism, a journey that began in her youth with reading secular literature. Her father married her off to a Talmud scholar in the hopes of keeping her within the Orthodox fold. But Kalish left her husband and daughter and moved to Warsaw, where she lived with her two sisters. In 1923, she absconded with her daughter to Berlin, taking part there in Hebrew and Yiddish literary circles. After the Nazis came to power, she emigrated to Palestine, where she worked as a civil servant in the Jewish Agency and, later, the Israeli government. In Kalish’s richly detailed memoir, an important source for Hasidic life at the beginning of the twentieth century, she relates how, when she moved to Warsaw, she found herself part of a whole community of descendants of Hasidic rebbes who had abandoned religion.
Similarly, Shmuel Abba Horodezky, a scion of the Chernobyl dynasty, who was sympathetic to Hasidism, about which he wrote some important works, nevertheless abandoned the Hasidic way of life. Moshe Twersky, also from the Chernobyl dynasty, divorced his wife and decamped for Berlin and Paris, where he wrote polemics against Hasidism. The daughter of Rabbi Shmuel of Sokhachev joined the Left Po’alei Tsiyon (a radical Zionist-socialist party), while her husband, the grandson of the ultra-conservative tsaddik Ya’akov Yitshak of Biala, became an activist in the socialist Bund. Similarly, her brother, Moshe Bornstein (known best by his pen name M. B. Stein), abandoned religion and became famous as a journalist, author, and playwright. And one of the greatest modern Hebrew poets, Uri Tsvi Greenberg was the son of Rabbi Hayim of Glina from the Zlotshev dynasty and a descendant of Uri of Strelisk. He first became a socialist Zionist and then later went over to the right-wing Revisionist Zionists.
Some of the descendants of Hasidic rebbes even turned toward Communism: as mentioned earlier, Hannah Twersky, the daughter of Yosef Meir of Makhnovka (also of the Chernobyl dynasty) left her husband, the son of the Rebbe of Belz, and went to live in Communist Russia. Avraham Mordechai Klingberg (1918–2015), the nephew of the Rebbe of Ksheshovitz (Komarno dynasty), went to study medicine in Warsaw, changed his first name to Marcus, and he too became a Communist. After serving in the Red Army and spending some time in Sweden, he immigrated to Israel, where he became a spy for the Soviet Union until he was caught in 1983 and sentenced to a long prison term.
Perhaps the most dramatic story of all was that of Haya Kluger (1890–1942), a direct descendant of Hayim of Sandz. Since there there were no Orthodox Jewish schools for girls before World War I, she was sent to study in the Krakow gymnasium, but before she completed her studies in 1908, her parents married her off and ordered her to abandon her education. She nevertheless finished her matriculation exams in secret and even registered at the Jagellonian University. Her parents did everything to block her from continuing her secular education, but she refused to comply. In 1909, shortly after she was divorced from her husband, she fled with her sister, who was also a student in the gymnasium, to a monastery where both hid while filing a lawsuit against their parents to force them to finance their studies and living expenses. When a lower court rejected the suit, they appealed to an appellate court, which overturned the lower court. Kluger then finished her studies and even went on to earn a doctorate in history. She married a Jewish lawyer from Krakow and worked there as a teacher in the Jewish high school until World War II, when she and her family were murdered by the Nazis.
The overall scale of defections from Orthodoxy in general and Hasidism in particular in interwar Poland is hard to know for certain. It has been estimated that between a quarter and a third of young men were students in Hasidic yeshivot at the beginning of the interwar period. Other estimates put the percentage by 1939 at around 20 percent, still a significant number given the size of the Polish Jewish population, but nevertheless a steep drop from the nineteenth century. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the dislocations of World War I undoubtedly accelerated trends that had started in the late nineteenth century.
In addition to quantitative decline, Polish Hasidim also experienced a sense of qualitative deterioration. Like all Orthodox movements, Hasidism had always believed in the moral and religious “decline of the generations.” But now the nostalgia for an earlier Golden Age was accompanied by a severe critique of the present age. The criticisms leveled by Hasidim against both Mitnaggdim and Maskilim in the nineteenth century were now heard increasingly within the Hasidic camp itself. The Yiddish and Hebrew writer Hillel Zeitlin, whom we met in chapter 21, was born to a Chabad family, abandoned the Orthodox world, but partially returned, inspired by his own “neo-Hasidism.” He wrote the following in the 1920s:
Hasidism in our days is very far from what it was in the time of the Baal Shem Tov.… Hasidism in our time lacks the strength, energy and vitality … of the Baal Shem Tov.… There are “Hasidim” who bury the essence under layers of interpretations, sermons and casuistry that hide it and cover it up; they make Hasidism into mere externals. They study and pray without any taste while they chase after wealth and honor no less than those who are not Hasidim. They worship their [own] rebbes and denigrate other rebbes.… Dynasties quarrel with dynasties, raising an interminable ruckus, as they argue over the appointment of rabbis, ritual slaughterers and other religious functionaries. They think of themselves as holy and pure and consider everyone else who doesn’t act as they do wicked and impure. They indulge in needless fanaticism while ignoring the pure love and fear of God. They persecute the youth over every trivial matter, thus driving them into the hands of leftwing groups and into destruction and heresy.1
Zeitlin’s voice was not alone in this criticism that included the Hasidim themselves. They were aware of the decline in their numbers and the spiritual impoverishment of those that remained, so they felt themselves very much on the defensive.
But the twin traumas of World War I and interwar secularization did not paralyze Polish Orthodoxy entirely. In a number of realms, they found new ways to strengthen the faithful and do battle with their enemies. This battle was waged on a number of different fronts—spiritual, political, educational, and social—with the Hasidim often leading the charge. Hasidism adopted two apparently contradictory strategies, resembling in certain ways the Catholic reaction to the Protestant Reformation or the conservative European responses to modernity. On the one hand, it developed a growing tolerance for “fellow travelers,” who were not connected to a specific court, and for “à la carte” Hasidim, who sampled from different courts. They might pay homage to a tsaddik only if he came to visit their town, when they chose to send him a petition or when they paid a visit to the local shtibl to drink vodka. As Yeshaya Trunk notes in his memoir: “the owners of fashionable collars and trimmed beards were no longer thrown out of the shtiblekh, as they had been in those good, God-fearing pre-war days.”2 Or as another contemporary observer wrote:
Hasidim and half-Hasidim, followers of Mizrahi [Religious Zionist party] and followers of the Agudah [that is, Agudat Yisrael, the non-Zionist Orthodox party] were able to pray side by side. There was also room there for those who had escaped from other shtiblekh … or who had been asked to leave the Ger shtibl on account of their progressive wives … [for those] who sent their children to a heder, as well as those whose children attended Tarbut school [a secular Hebrew school system], and those whose children attended a Polish school.”3
But side-by-side with this loosening of norms was an ideological call to arms in the form of political organizing. As we have seen, in the nineteenth century, Hasidic leaders such as Yitshak of Vurke and the third and fifth Chabad rebbes, Menahem Mendel Schneersohn and Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn, had already pioneered a modern form of political lobbying, while the first Orthodox political party, Mahzikei ha-Dat, was formed under the auspices of Belz Hasidism in 1867.
The real breakthrough in Hasidic politics came with the formation of Agudat Yisrael at a rabbinical congress in Kattowitz (then part of Germany) in 1912. The party began to be active in Eastern Europe only in 1916 when two German Orthodox rabbis, Pinhas Kohn and Emanuel Carlebach, with the full blessing of the German occupation authorities who saw their activities as a means to win the support of the Jewish populace, began talks with representatives of Hasidic communities. A decision was taken to form a Polish section of the Agudah. Although the Polish Agudat Yisrael formally represented various offshoots of the Orthodox Jewish community, the party from the beginning became the political arm of the main current of Polish Hasidism, dominated by the Rebbe of Ger, Avraham Mordechai Alter. The Gerer Rebbe’s support was a crucial factor in the party’s success, as Ger was arguably the largest Hasidic group in Poland of that time (see figure 23.1). Other rebbes, among them the rebbes of Sokolov, Slonim, and Sokhachev, also gave their support to the Agudah, although some courts, notably Aleksander, which was in a long-standing dispute with Ger did not, mainly because of the latter’s domination of the party. Other major courts that opposed the Agudah were Chabad, Belz, Munkatsh, Sighet (later Satmar), and Biala. With some exceptions, the Agudah occupied the “center” of Hasidic politics. Most of the Hasidic leaders who opposed it argued that it was too Zionist or too modernist, while a few Orthodox Jews criticized it from the other side for not being sympathetic enough to the idea of settling the Land of Israel, or for being too conservative generally.
Prominent Lithuanian or Mitnaggdic leaders also supported the new movement, among them Yisrael Meir Kagan (1839–1933), known as the Hafetz Hayim after one of his important literary works. Even though he belonged to the Lithuanian camp, he was revered by all the sectors of Orthodoxy, including the Hasidim, and endeavored to unite the Orthodox in one front. Thus the Agudah became a vehicle for overcoming the split between the Hasidim and Mitnaggdim in the service of a common political agenda in Poland, especially after the creation of the new Second Polish Republic in 1918.
Figure 23.1. Wedding of the son of the Rebbe of Ger, 1923, photograph. The picture gives a sense of the mass nature of Ger Hasidism, one of the two largest branches of the movement in inter war Poland. Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York. RG-120-yarg120po73.
As early as 1917, a report on Jewish political life in Poland claimed that the Agudah had the broadest social base of all the Jewish political parties and “at the moment there is no large or even small town in the Kingdom [of Poland] in which Agudah does not have superbly organized branches.”4 Adopting the prevailing culture of more secular Polish Jews, the Agudah organized its own youth movement, and the workers’ movement of the party, the Po’alei Agudat Yisrael, even prepared itself for agricultural settlement in the Land of Israel. The Agudah published newspapers and held mass rallies. Shortly after the formation of the Second Polish Republic, the Agudah had its first spectacular successes when its representative Joel Wegmeister became a member of the Polish Council of State. As a political party, the Agudah vigorously competed in communal, municipal, and national elections during the two decades of Polish independence after World War I; with its members typically voting in a bloc, the party was able to win a number of seats in the Polish Sejm for much of the interwar period.
The Hasidic leaders in Poland did not delude themselves that political activity by itself would fend off the onslaught of modernity. A number of them became acutely aware of the need to reform and restructure Hasidic education. In addition to the creation of the youth movement of Agudat Yisrael, and special collectives in the courts of tsaddikim, they also undertook the formation of new Hasidic yeshivot, as deliberate efforts to counter modern youth culture. As the 1919 appeal with which we started the last chapter continues:
This is no time to remain silent! It is time to act, to fight the war of the Lord, a war of defense and rescue, in order to protect the existing remnant, to protect and rescue it from the terrible conflagration that has taken the corner of the House of the Lord and will consume the whole of it. First and foremost, we need to open the gate to a house for the multitudes, a yeshivah, which will be a fortress; a fortress for the Torah, a guard tower for worship and a fire wall for religion and faith. And whoever seeks life—shall flee unto this place and live.5
In response to this initiative, two all-Hasidic yeshivot were founded: the Mesivta in Warsaw and the Hakhmei Lublin yeshivah in the city of that name. This was an unprecedented attempt to overcome the structural factionalism of the Hasidic movement by consciously imitating the Lithuanian yeshivot, although Hasidism’s opponents mocked these Hasidic academies as lacking the Talmudic rigor of their own schools. The Hasidic yeshivot focused, like the rest, on the study of the Talmud, but had Hasidic features: students also studied Hasidic books, wore Hasidic dress, prayer was in the Hasidic style according to the Sephardic liturgy, and the spiritual counselors undertook to instill Hasidic values.
The Warsaw yeshivah was founded by two Ger Hasidim, Rabbi Meir Dan Polotzki (1867–1928), and Rabbi Menahem Zemba (1883–1943). Even though Hasidic leaders generally opposed secular studies, they allowed two hours a day for such subjects in order to obtain financial support from the government. When he heard of this, Hayim Elazar Shapira, the Rebbe of Munkatsh who was one of the leaders of militant Orthodoxy in Hungary, became infuriated. After visiting the yeshivah, he lodged a vehement protest with the Rebbe of Ger, who was widely considered its patron. All efforts to explain the contingencies to Rabbi Shapira failed to change his views, and he convened a rabbinical assembly in the town of Csap in Czechoslovakia, where he engineered the passage of a resolution condemning the yeshivah and its leaders. But as a rebbe whose sphere of influence was in Hungary and who was well known for his belligerence and extremism, his accusations carried little weight among Polish Hasidim.
The yeshivah was chronically short of funds and unable to secure accommodations for all its students. Many of them took positions as night watchmen in Jewish stores, where they could occasionally lay down their weary heads. Rabbi Meir Shapiro (1887—1933), the head of the Hasidic yeshivah in Lublin, joked that one should be thankful to the thieves, for it was on their account that the merchants of Warsaw provided the yeshivah students with places to sleep. The yeshivah’s stature was, however, undermined as other Hasidic yeshivot opened in Poland, including in Warsaw itself, and the level of rigor declined. This was especially so after the establishment of the Yeshivat Hakhmei Lublin, its main competitor.
Rabbi Meir Shapiro, a Hasid of the Rebbe of Chortkov, had an advantage over his colleagues in Warsaw since he had already established several smaller, if less successful, yeshivot earlier on. He was not only a Talmudic scholar but also a community functionary and an active member of Agudat Yisrael, representing that party for several years in the Polish Sejm. He first introduced the idea of creating the yeshivah at the “Great Assembly” of Agudat Yisrael in 1923, where he also launched the practice of Daf Yomi (studying a daily page of Talmud, whereby in a seven-year cycle one reads the whole corpus). This innovation was intended for the whole Jewish world—and not just Hasidim—so that wherever a Jew goes he can meet another Jew who is studying the same page. Both resolutions were approved and building began on the new yeshivah in 1924. Facing governmental obstacles in Poland, Shapiro went on a fund-raising tour to the United States. When it opened in 1930, the yeshivah quickly became a jewel in the crown of Polish Hasidism.
Avraham Shimon Engel Horowitz (known as Reb Shimele Zhelikhover; 1876–1943), a Kozhenitser Hasid who had taught at the Stolin yeshivah and at the Chabad Tomkhei Temimim yeshivah, was the key figure at Hakhmei Lublin from 1932. Engel Horowitz taught Talmud, but was also renowned for his knowledge of Kabbalah and for his inspired, ecstatic praying. He served as a spiritual mentor for the students, much like a mashgiah in the Lithuanian yeshivot. When Rabbi Meir Shapiro died in 1933, Reb Shimele became the head of the yeshivah and introduced a more spiritual emphasis in prayer and inward devotion. He also expressed reservations about the extreme sexual asceticism adopted by many of the Hasidic young men. Owing to internal dissension, he was forced out as head of the yeshivah but continued to play a key role in it. He was murdered by the Nazis during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto.
Under pressure from the German administration in occupied Poland, Agudat Yisrael in 1916 founded a heder in Warsaw named Yesodei ha-Torah, where the teaching included some secular subjects. The Rebbe of Ger, who permitted opening this innovative heder, agreed to instruction in secular subjects as long as it was limited to two hours and came at the end of the school day. This was balanced by six hours of traditional religious study and a requirement to teach the secular subjects in Yiddish. This school created a precedent when compulsory education was instituted in Poland in 1919, requiring all children in the country to attend public or government-approved schools. The leaders of the Agudah convinced the authorities to recognize the hadarim as such schools and they were granted temporary official recognition that continued for ten years. The new curriculum included study of Polish language, mathematics, geography, and basic science. Later, handicrafts, drawing, singing, and physical education were added, and this curriculum became the dominant template for the Agudah education of Hasidic children. This same model was adopted in Tel Aviv as a way of attracting students, even though there were no governmental requirements there.
The reform of Hasidic education in interwar Poland included a highly revolutionary development: schooling for girls. In 1917, Sarah Schenirer (1883–1935; see figure 23.2) established the Beis Ya’akov system of girls’ schools, which has survived to this day. In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, Orthodox girls were usually not educated in any formal institutions. They might be sent to public schools, as was the case in Galicia, and Orthodox rabbis, who were typically hostile to secular studies for boys, generally did not oppose such study for girls. On the other hand, teaching girls sacred texts was anathema, based on a dictum in the Babylonian Talmud (Sotah 21). The founding of the Beis Ya’akov school was therefore a striking accomplishment. It succeeded in attracting girls from Hasidic as well as non-Hasidic homes.
Figure 23.2. Sarah Schenirer (1883–1935), founder of Beis Ya’akov school for girls. Application for identification card. Courtesy of the National Archives in Krakow: StGKr 990, p. 675.
Schenirer was a singular figure in the Orthodox world. Born in Krakow to a family of Belz Hasidim, she worked as a seamstress to help support her family while, at the same time, attending public school and studying Jewish texts on her own; she went on to compose stories and plays in Yiddish. At the beginning of World War I, she escaped with her family to Vienna, where she was deeply moved by a sermon of Rabbi M. Flesch advocating a religious education for girls. Through her brother, she presented the idea to the Rebbe of Belz, Yisakhar Dov Rokeah, who responded with a “blessing for success.” Near the end of the war, she returned to Krakow and founded her school in a modest building with the support of the Rebbetsin Halberstam, the granddaughter of Hayim of Sandz.
After the school opened, the Rebbe of Ger also gave it his blessing, as did Yisrael Meir Kagan, the Hefetz Hayim, so that it enjoyed the support of the highest Hasidic and non-Hasidic authorities. The Hefetz Hayim, whose rulings were influential in the Hasidic world, argued that the Talmudic prohibition on teaching women Torah applied only to earlier periods:
It seems to me that all this [prohibition] applied particularly in times before us, when the tradition of the fathers was very strong, so that everyone went in the path trodden by his fathers.… At that [time] we could say that the girl would not study Torah and rely on the conduct she saw in her upright parents. [But] now, due to our many sins, the tradition of the fathers has loosened very much, and quite often the girl does not even live with her parents.
And this is even more pertinent to those who are accustomed to study the alphabet and language of the Gentiles; clearly, it is a great mitsvah to teach them the Pentateuch as well as the other parts of the [Hebrew] Bible, the ethics of the Sages, such as the tractate of Avot and the book Menorat ha-Maor, so as they become convinced by our holy Faith. Otherwise it might occur that they would altogether go astray off the path of the Lord and deviate from the fundamentals of religion, God forbid.6
By securing this across-the-board support, Schenirer was able to achieve a stunning breakthrough in what had been an entirely frozen landscape of female education. Shortly after the establishment of Beis Ya’akov, the Agudah gave it its imprimatur and within twenty years turned it into a network of hundreds of branches throughout Eastern Europe and the Land of Israel. Later it would be transplanted into North America.
The Hasidim thus played a central role in the pan-Orthodox endeavor to reinforce religious identity in interwar Poland. Now, possibly more than ever before, they attached great importance in the external aspects of that identity and to establishing group identity apart from the family. According to one chronicler:
It was not enough that until then the young men had worn side locks [peyes] behind the ear and a black Hasidic necktie with a white shirt. Now, it was necessary to wear peyes hanging down and a cravat.… Private life was almost communal. Every opportunity was used to eat together, both during the week and on Shabbat. In general, an effort was made that more time be spent together than at home, so that the influence of an undesirable home would be lessened.… The fathers of these young men, even Hasidim, also were not very pleased with the demeanor and clothing of their children.… [They] brought new customs with them to the house; they did not eat with any women at the table, even if it was their own sisters or mother.7
An exclusivist ethos, radically contrasting “our” world with “their” world, had already been present in nineteenth-century Hasidism, but in the charged atmosphere of interwar Poland, it became key for Hasidic identity. As in other religious communities with restrictive norms and a sect-like identity, the tightening of discipline became an essential part of Hasidism in the interwar period.
Ger and Aleksander
Post–World War I Poland brought the Hasidic communities of Congress Poland and Galicia with their many streams of Hasidism under a single umbrella. In Congress Poland, the Pshiskhe school with its several branches dominated while co-existing with many other courts, whereas in Galicia, Belz, Sandz, and the offshoots of Sadagora were the most important courts. As a rule, Hasidism in Poland was conservative and strict in its orthodoxy, as well as anti-Zionist and antimodernist. It did not develop moderate branches of the Ruzhin type, whose prominent rebbes were now in Vienna, but neither did it struggle against the secular ideologies with the extreme zeal of its Hungarian counterparts.
One exception to the rule was Rabbi Ya’akov Yitshak of Biala (1847–1905), greatgrandson of the Holy Jew of Pshiskhe, who was militantly opposed to modernity (but see figure 23.3). One of his grandsons, Barukh Yehoshua Rabinowicz (1914–1997), son of the Rebbe of Parczew in Poland, married the daughter of Hayim Elazar Shapira of Munkatsh, the Hungarian rebbe who was one of those leading the fight against modernity and Zionism (see chapter 24). Here is how the Biala rebbe stated his position:
Alas, how many casualties have these impure heretics [apikorsim] felled! How many precious souls in Israel and children at their teachers’ knees have they contaminated with their teachings, God forbid. Oh earth, do not cover over their blood! Let God look out and behold from heaven and remove from the earth the spirit of impurity and may they be cursed and castigated forever after.8
Figure 23.3. Alter Kacyczne (1885–1941), Portrait Study of the Daughter of the Byaler Rebbe, Avrom Yehoshua Rabinowicz, Biala Bielsko, 1927. Despite her modern dress and appearance, Perl Rabinowicz married Shalom Alter Perlov of the conservative Koidanov dynasty. Both Perl and her husband were murdered by the Nazis in 1941. Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, RG-1270-004. Copyright © The Forward.
This kind of extreme language was, however, generally not heard from Polish rebbes.
The two largest Hasidic branches in Poland between the World Wars were Ger and Aleksander, both of whose rebbes were part of mainstream Orthodoxy. From communal memorial books and newspapers, it is possible to deduce that at the beginning of the twentieth century, one out of every four prayer houses in Poland was affiliated with Ger, and one out of every six was affiliated with Aleksander. This was followed, at a much lower rate (approximately 6 percent), by the prayer houses of Kotzk and Vurke (Amshinov and Otwock), to which Ger and Aleksander were related. As we saw in section 2, Ger was the largest heir of the highly ascetic and severe Kotzk Hasidim, while Aleksander derived from the more joyous and warm Vurke branch.
In 1907, a conflict broke out between Ger and Aleksander that went on for thirty years. It started over a local rabbinic dispute in the town of Zduńska Wola, not far from Lodz. The rabbinic leadership of the town had been in the hands of Kotzk and Ger Hasidim, and when the Aleksander Hasidim put up their own candidate for town rabbi, the Ger Hasidim went after them with a vengeance, spending enormous resources on the struggle. While Warsaw was a base of Ger, Lodz was the bastion of Aleksander. Each of these groups tried to keep its hold in its home base, and at the same time tried to gain control in other, smaller, communities. These conflicts were mostly about positions of rabbis, ritual slaughterers, and other functionaries. Yeshaya Trunk describes the controversy in colorful detail:
Each would belittle the other and neither spared the other any barbs. Aleksander called Ger’s self-confidence insolent and behavior befitting adolescent Gentiles, but they were somewhat scared of their rival’s confidence and sense of authority. Ger followers always behaved everywhere they went with a confident arrogance and conceit while disparaging followers of other Hasidic factions. They conversed in their own rapid and erudite dialect, swallowing half-words, praying and speaking in a unique sing-song way, grimacing and making unusual bodily gestures of their own, and inclining their heads to one side, as if these were gestures of humility. But hidden within this meekness was a sense of contempt for everything and everyone.… All the most minor and insignificant rebbes in Poland talked about this in secret, with jealousy and bitterness, but still they felt themselves subjects of Ger and kept cover in their hiding places. Followers of Aleksander were too numerous to demote themselves to the rank of subjects of Ger, but they were too weak to be of similar stature as Ger or to be able to ever win them in battle. Followers of Aleksander always opposed Ger and they always lost. That’s why Aleksander followers always clenched their fists in front of followers of Ger, they snarled at them, they blamed them for being rude and once in a while they would quietly joke about the Rebbe of Ger, and his deafness. The people of Ger remained undefeated. The attitude of Ger followers toward those of Aleksander, as I noted, was most insulting. They considered Aleksander to be a bunch of loafers, Jews who loved alcohol but engaged in very little Torah learning.… Most of all the followers of Ger liked to poke fun at the weak spot of the Aleksander Hasidim, in other words, at the personality of their rebbe.9
The local conflict came to an end in 1915, but by now it had become a rivalry between the two courts on a national scale. The groups vied with each other for rabbinic and other communal positions in many towns, as well as in representation in the Polish Sejm. The conflict also spread to non-Hasidic Jewish politics, Polish politics, and even the international arena (in the conflict over funds collected for the Land of Israel). One of the outcomes of the conflict in the arena of general Jewish politics was Ger’s identification with Agudat Yisrael and Aleksander’s association with the religious Zionist movement (Mizrahi), which, however, did not last long. It seems therefore that what began as a split (which was not associated with dispute) between two of Simhah Bunem of Pshishke’s disciples in 1827—Vurke versus Kotzk—developed by the 1920s into a split that was visible to the entire Jewish society. Even the intervention of the widely admired Hafetz Hayim did not lead to reconciliation. Only in the 1930s did the fire of the conflict begin to die out, and was fully extinguished only by the Nazi invasion of Poland, an event that rendered earlier controversies trivial.
The large court of Aleksander was headed by three successive rebbes: Yerahmiel Israel Yitshak Danziger, author of Yismah Yisrael (1853—1910) from 1894 until his death; followed by his brother, Shmuel Tsvi Danziger, author of Tiferet Shmuel (1860–1924); and then his son, Yitshak Menahem Danziger, author of Akedat Yitshak (1880–1942), who was murdered in the Holocaust. The Aleksander branch school emphasized the values of simplicity, modesty, and love of ordinary folk, without placing stringent Pietistic restrictions on its adherents. Yerahmiel Israel spoke against those who sought to attain a level of holiness that did not fit their true character, a statement that appears aimed at the extreme ascetic practices of the Kotzker Rebbe and of his spiritual descendants in Ger. He saw these practices as manifestations of pride, the very thing that asceticism was supposed to squash. In his opinion, every Jew should “engulf himself into the entirety of Israel and thus have his personal wishes align and be fulfilled along with those of all Israel.”10 His brother and successor, Shmuel Tsvi taught further: “Let [each man] annul his self in joining the community as a whole.”11 This self-annulment, or extreme humility, he claimed was “the essence of Hasidism in our time.”12
The call for “unity and self-inclusion” of the tsaddik in God and in the entirety of Israel, seems to originate in early Hasidic works, even though there it refers to the mystical unity of God, the Torah, and Israel that one experiences in the state of mystical union (devekut) when the material world is obliterated. In contrast to this early conception, the Aleksander rebbes do not seek a mystical experience, but rather the feeling of togetherness of the Hasidic community. For interwar Aleksander, communal unity replaced mystical experience. Gathering at the rebbe’s table, meeting him face to face and hearing his preaching, along with singing and dancing, all create an intense spiritual experience, which, however, are far from the individual mystical union in the old sense. Aleksander thus replaced the mystical experience of earlier Hasidism with the emotionally moving experience of Hasidic fellowship. To be sure, the Kalisk Hasidim of the eighteenth century had a similar notion of dibbuk ha-haverim (“cleaving together of friends”) as the vehicle for a mystical experience, so it is impossible to say that the Aleksander Hasidim did not experience something like devekut in the company of their rebbe.
Ger was presided over in the interwar period by Avraham Mordechai Alter of Ger (1866–1948), the third Rebbe in the dynasty, also known as the Imrei Emet for his book of that name. Avraham Mordechai was a new type of Hasidic leader, a predominantly political one, very much anchored in daily reality and free of any mystical aspirations or spiritual pretensions. As a leader, he was capable of being both firm and principle-oriented as well as flexible and pragmatic. Immediately upon his ascension to leadership, he instructed his followers to hold the morning prayers at the halakhically determined time, which he declared to be 7:30 am. Delaying prayer and basing its timing on more spontaneous inspiration had been one of the hallmarks of earlier Hasidism. This practice was understood to reflect the individual Hasid’s need for proper spiritual preparation before the encounter with God. Stories relate that some from the older generation of Ger Hasidim questioned this new ruling before the young rebbe, but he rejected their arguments on the grounds that the demands of the halakhah trumped spiritual elevation. This stance reflects the legalistic and antispiritual orientation of some versions of late Hasidism, of which Ger Hasidism under Avraham Mordechai was perhaps the most striking example.
Avraham Mordechai did not hesitate to deviate from the path of his father, Yehudah Aryeh Leib. While the father opposed buying land in the Holy Land, the son supported it. As opposed to other non-Zionist Hasidic groups, he permitted, and according to some testimonies, even encouraged his Hasidim to go to the Land of Israel and establish Ger institutions there. When in the early twentieth century there was an initiative to build an Orthodox settlement in the center of the country—later to be named Bnei Brak—he gave it his blessing, although no material support. On the other hand, he enthusiastically supported establishing a Ger yeshivah in Jerusalem in 1925, to be named after his father later (see chapter 25).
Although he opposed Zionism, including religious Zionism, and also toppled the merger between the Agudah and the Mizrahi parties (the so-called Paris Agreement of 1938), Alter collaborated with the Zionists on pragmatic matters and did not object to the creation of a Jewish state after World War II. Furthermore, he did not exclude from the ranks of Ger Hasidim those members who expressed support for religious Zionism. In the end, he settled in the Land of Israel in 1940, fleeing there from the Nazis.
Another arena in which the third Rebbe of Ger deviated from his father was in embracing modern media. Unlike his father, he favored establishing Orthodox newspapers and encouraged his followers to purchase subscriptions for such publications, although he instructed the youth to abstain from reading newspaper in order to avoid losing time from the study of Torah. This was, in fact, a real tension in his worldview, since he endorsed political involvement for the Orthodox as a matter of necessity, while at the same time decreeing that yeshivah students should not stoop to such worldly activity.
As perhaps the most political of all Polish tsaddikim, Alter gave his blessing to Kenesset Yisrael, a political organization that preceded Agudat Yisrael. And once the Agudah itself was formed, he gave it both moral and practical support. He also favored the creation of the Agudah’s workers movement, Po’alei Agudat Yisrael, and its sister youth movement, Tse’irei Agudat Yisrael. As already noted, as a result of the conflict between Aleksander and Ger Hasidim, Shmuel Tsvi Danziger, the leader of Aleksander supported the Religious Zionists, Agudat Yisrael’s main opponents, even though he never actually favored Zionism. Meanwhile, the rebbes of Belz also shunned the Agudah, favoring the Mahzikei ha-Dat that they had founded in the nineteenth century. Now totally identified only with Belz, this party lost most of its earlier influence. The Polish branch of Agudat Yisrael thus towed the line set by the Rebbe of Ger. His control of the party grew even greater when his son-in-law, Rabbi Yitshak Meir Levin (1891–1971), gradually ascended to a position of preeminence in the party.
Thanks to Alter’s energetic activities, Ger’s adherents numbered in the many thousands (there are widely varied estimates about their numbers). The massive scale of Ger led to a less personal relationship between the rebbe and his Hasidim, who arrived at his court infrequently, despite the convenience of the suburban light rail that connected Ger with Warsaw. If they ever saw him for a private audience, it was very brief. The rebbe was known as someone who considered his time precious and who spoke and moved in a quick, efficient manner. “The clock is the best ethical teacher,” he was wont to say.13 His Hasidim were said to pass by him nearly at a trot for the traditional farewell greeting at the end of Shabbat prayers. Needless to say, only those in the rebbe’s inner circle had any kind of intimate contact with him, and even they got it rarely. The rebbe nurtured three main elite groups who were the only ones who enjoyed frequent access: the most brilliant among the rabbinic scholars, political operatives, and wealthy supporters.
Rabbi Alter was not a deep thinker and certainly not an intellectual innovator. The writings we have from him emphasize “self-renewal” in the worship of God. But, as was the case for most of the history of Hasidism, it is a renewal only in the internal experience of the worshipper, not in the external practice of the halakhah. In a few places, he calls for “holy audacity” (azut di-kedushah), a concept apparently originating with Bratslav, with which he challenged his Hasidim in terms of their personal conduct rather than political struggles or, certainly, the demands of the law. Nevertheless, the rebbe’s focus on the practical and political should not lead us to conclude that he was just a crass politician. His letters reveal deep engagement with traditional rabbinical sources and intellectual acumen, even if lacking in new ideas. He encouraged his Hasidim to pursue the study of these sources, including classic musar books. On the other hand, philosophical and Kabbalistic books held no attraction for him, nor even did Hasidic works except for the most foundational ones for Hasidism as a whole and Polish Hasidism in particular, such as Kol Simhah, by Simhah Bunem of Pshiskhe.
The earthly nature of Ger came in for criticism by those such as Hillel Zeitlin who sought spiritual experiences and pined romantically for the days of early Hasidism. It also appears that on the fringes of the Ger camp too, there were young followers who were dissatisfied spiritually and sought alternatives in other branches of Hasidism such as Bratslav which, as we shall see, gained a certain cachet in interwar Poland.
Belz
In Galicia, it was Belz that dominated the Hasidic scene. As we saw in section 2, this branch, characterized by a rabbinic orientation, was among the most conservative. As opposed to other Hasidic dynasties, Belz experienced very few splits and one dynasty maintained centralized, tight control of the community. Two of the early rebbes of the dynasty, Yehoshua (1825–1894) and his son Yisakhar Dov (1854–1926), opposed any deviation from the customary practice, even when there was no halakhic reason against it. They took a militant position against the Haskalah and all subsequent modern Jewish movements, including especially Zionism on the part of Yisakhar Dov.
At the outbreak of World War I, Yisakhar Dov escaped to the hamlet of Ratzfert in Hungary. When conditions there deteriorated at the end of the war and with the short lived Communist Revolution of Béla Kun, he left Hungary. Unable to return to Belz, where fighting between Polish and Russian forces was still in progress, he went to Munkatsh, then a town in Czechoslovakia. Here, a particularly vehement territorial conflict erupted between him and Hayim Elazar Shapira, the local rebbe, to whom we will return in the next chapter. In 1922, Yisakhar Dov, exhausted by Shapira’s attacks on him, returned to Galicia, giving Shapira a territorial victory, and settled temporarily in Holoshitz. In 1924, when Polish control of the town of Belz stabilized, he restored his court to its original home. Ill and weak in the last years of his life, he died in 1926; his funeral in Belz was attended by thousands.
His son, Aharon Rokeah (1880–1957), succeeded him. Aharon was a completely different type of leader than his predecessors. He was much less engaged in public life. He was known as an ascetic who ate and slept as little as possible and spent most of his time in prayer and Torah study. At age sixteen, he married his niece Malkah and evidently wanted to forgo sexual relations with her until his father ordered him to fulfill the commandment of procreation; the couple subsequently had nine children, all murdered in the Holocaust (the story of Aharon of Belz during the Holocaust will be told in chapter 26).
Immediately upon becoming the rebbe, Rokeah cut back severely the customary hours of receiving the Hasidim and also reduced the number of kvitlekh he was willing to accept. One oral tradition holds that he explained this because of the suffering caused to him from hearing the troubles of people. He was said to have announced: “It is easier to chop wood in the forest than to read the kvitl of one Jew.”14 Another account holds that he justified curtailing the audiences since he needed to reserve his time for prayer for the sake of the entire Jewish people. This prayer was necessary since he could see in front of his eyes a “severe decree” (gezerah) about to befall Israel, and under these circumstances he could not set aside time to pray on behalf of individuals.15
This story, tying Rabbi Aharon’s actions to the struggle against forces of evil that were to eventually bring about the Holocaust, is part of a later tradition that ascribed to him prophecy of the impending catastrophe and interpreted his actions as attempts to forestall it. Be that as it may, the change he instituted led to very long lines of Hasidim congregating in front of his house as well as to a drop in the court’s income from pidyonot. Subsequently, under pressure from his family members and his Hasidim alike, Rokeah extended the daily times of receiving kvitlekh, but, nevertheless, until his death, coming to see him with a kvitl involved a wait of several days.
Despite his very different temperament, from the beginning of his leadership until the onset of World War II, Aharon Rokeah seemed to imitate his predecessors’ public personae, although it is doubtful whether he had any genuine interest in public life. In 1928, he took part in a broad-based gathering of Galician rabbis held in Lwow, aimed at reinforcing the principles of Mahzikei ha-Dat: Orthodox isolationism, opposition to changes in the Jewish way of life, and struggle against modernizing “evildoers.” By this time, this organization was so completely identified with Belz that it had lost its political influence in other sectors of the Jewish community. After some internal debates over the possibility of splitting the organization in two, one for Western and the other for Eastern Galicia, keeping a unified, single organization carried the day. While Rokeah’s faithful followers described him as leading the assembly with a firm hand, a newspaper reporter present in the audience described the scene totally differently:
The Belz dynasty known by the name Rokeah, which began exerting its influence under the leadership of Rabbi Shalom and reached the zenith of its power with his grandson, Rabbi Yisakhar Dov Rokeah (who died last year), is now in a state of decline and collapse.… The current Belzer Rebbe completely abstains from political involvement and had been brought to the last assembly of rabbis in Lwow by his Hasidim under duress.… He went through the motions of participating in that assembly merely for the sake of appearances.16
A correspondent of the Hebrew newspaper Davar who arrived in Belz at the end of the 1920s and met Rabbi Aharon describes him in similar terms: “[The Rebbe] seemed naïve and reticent, deeply engrossed in prayer and Torah study. He seemed averse to the politics in which the minds of the ‘ministers of the court’ were engaged, and derived no pleasure from the anti-Zionism to which he had been dragged.”17 He initially refused to join a delegation to meet the Prime Minister of Poland in order to avert the new restrictions on the education and training of rabbis. Only after the Hafetz Hayim, who had organized the delegation, insisted on his participation did he agree. Because of his benign temperament and unusual religious practices, some people argued plausibly that Hasidic operatives manipulated him so that he would carry on his father’s legacy.
Unlike his predecessors, Rabbi Aharon was not inclined to attack the Zionists and other modernizers, and his view of Agudat Yisrael was also much more tolerant than his father’s. One report holds that in 1924, even before he ascended to his father’s seat, he said:
I don’t know what was said to you [but] I say that Agudat Yisrael is a holy union [agudah kedoshah]. Without it, the lot of the Orthodox would be quite bad. You must not listen to rumors and aspersions. Do your work in faith and with enthusiasm because the Agudah is a holy undertaking.18
This statement was reported by Rabbi Yitshak Meir Levin, one of the leaders of Agudat Yisr’ael and the son-in-law of the Rebbe of Ger. It is hard to know whether this source is reliable since Aharon never joined the party during his whole tenure in Poland.
Piasetshna
The Piasetshna Rebbe, Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro (1889–1943), was a highly original leader. He was the son of Elimelekh of Grodzisk and a direct descendant of the Kozhenits dynasty and Elimelekh of Lizhensk but was exposed from a young age to secular studies. Like Shimon Engel Horowitz, he too wanted to bring about a spiritual revival of Polish Hasidism. His brother, Rabbi Yeshayahu Shapiro, was a Zionist who immigrated to the Land of Israel, where he became known as Ha-Admor he-Haluts (The Pioneer Rebbe; more will be said about him in chapter 25). Kalonymus Kalman himself became an object of fascination posthumously, when in 1960 a collection of the passionate sermons he delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto was serendipitously discovered and published under the title Esh Kodesh (Holy Fire). Today, his writings garner arguably more interest than any other interwar Polish rebbe both in scholarly circles and among Jewish groups seeking neo-Hasidic spiritual renewal (see chapter 26).
Kalonymus Kalman agreed with many of the critiques of Hasidism as a movement that had lost its original spirit and animating mysticism, becoming instead a rigid social framework devoid of any vitality. He believed that this spiritual impoverishment was one of the main reasons why young people were leaving the movement for alternative ideologies. He therefore argued for intellectual and educational reforms. The new way was to return to Hasidism some of its original spirit but also adapt to the contemporary needs of the Jewish people. One might say that Shapiro saw his role as a fusion of prophet and pedagogue. In order to bring his vision to fruition, he established a yeshivah in Warsaw, serving hundreds of students while also promoting his views in several books. Only one of his books, Hovat ha-Talmidim, a call for a new Hasidic pedagogy, was published during his lifetime. Here, Shapiro advocated reinvigorating the teaching of Hasidism based on belief in the potential of youth to achieve great spiritual heights. Instead of waiting until they grew up, young boys should already be exposed to Kabbalistic and Hasidic teaching at a young age. For older children, he advocated, in addition to textual study, the value of music and dance. As an educational reformer, Shapiro was a kind of Hasidic counterpart to the secular Polish Jewish educator Janusz Korczak. Both treated young people with infinite respect, and both were martyred in the Holocaust.
Shapiro proposed that there are two main paths in Hasidism: the way of Chabad, which seeks to reach devekut to the rebbe through study of Hasidic teachings, and that of Karlin, which pursued the same goal through intense prayer. He himself favored the Karlin path, but tried to integrate it with more intellectual elements. In several places in his writing, he emphasizes the idea that Hasidism is something one comprehends not only with the intellect but also with emotion and direct spiritual experience. The latter sublime experience is something he describes as close to the state of prophecy.
There is a debate in the scholarship as to what extent Kalonymus Kalman saw mystical experience as a realistic goal for the Hasid in this age. He certainly aspired to it himself and he often alludes in his writing, explicitly or obliquely, to his frustration at his failure to attain it. While such experience might be possible for the spiritual elect, however, the masses of Hasidim ought only to seek spiritual “arousal” (hit’orerut) and “enthusiasm” (hitlahavut) but not true ecstasis. Beyond such goals, he also offered his followers well-known general Orthodox values: humility, truthfulness, proper kavvanah (intention) in prayer, and devotion to Torah study.
However, alongside these rather conventional sentiments, Shapiro called for the formation of a Hasidic elite of those seeking to commune more deeply and intensely with the divine presence. This elite would consist of a close-knit spiritual fellowship (havurah or hevraya) of mostly young Hasidim. As opposed to some early Hasidic teachings, he believed that mystical experience should not be sought in isolation—at least, not in the modern age. Nor should it involve severe ascetic practices. The havurah was to be an egalitarian group, without any honorific titles or practices, singularly engaged in the worship of God and with no political or communal involvement. Meeting at least three times a week, it was to engage in study of Torah as well as drinking ceremonial wine—but not to the point of inebriation—and in singing and dancing. The members were to focus their conversation on matters of worship only, never on mundane things.
Kalonymus Kalman wrote a guide booklet for this kind of havurah, a short treatise named Bnei Mahshavah Tovah (“men of good thought”), in which he explained his concept of “worship through thought” (avodat ha-mahshavah):
This is the purpose of our holy havurah: To make you into a man of spirit and thought, but not of thought alone, but of pure and powerful thought. So will you be able to overcome your everyday senses and discover in yourself a new sense.… Your eyes will be opened wide, of their own accord, and you will see the King of the Universe who embraces the entire world and you will perceive that God fills the entire world and He is right in front of you, … and you will relish it and delight in it.19
This kind of thought is dream-like and is close to prophecy. Only then could one experience the divine presence in the material world and also repair one’s own defective qualities. Achieving these goals is what makes one a true Hasid, bringing him to devekut and, ideally, even to prophecy.
Shapiro recommended other techniques for achieving pure thought, some of which seem very similar to practices of meditation using a biblical verse as a mantra. This practice of concentration was designed to remove ordinary thoughts from the mind and fill it instead with pure thoughts of God. He also controversially suggested imaginative techniques for visualizing God. In all of these ideas, Shapiro departed from the more normative and conservative teachings of his fellow rebbes. In fact, it has been suggested that Hillel Zeitlin, who tried to develop a Hasidic spirituality for a non-Hasidic world, was very close to the Rebbe of Piasetshna both in terms of spiritual teaching and in his ideas for developing an elect community.
Stolin (Karlin)
In addition to the original Polish-based Hasidic dynasties, several rebbes from neighboring countries found themselves within the boundaries of the new Polish state. Among them were the rebbes of the age-old Karlin and Slonim dynasties, who were considered Lithuanian even though their towns were now parts of the reborn Poland. Stolin, which was a direct continuation of the Karlin dynasty, faced a painful rift after the death of its rebbe, Yisrael Perlov (known as “the Frankfurter”), in 1922. Perlov left two wills, one for his family and a second for his Hasidim, in which he articulated the qualities of his intended successor:
This will be the sign verifying who among my sons [should be my heir], who has all the following qualities: He would not belong to the company of the evildoers, nor of the hypocrites, he would keep himself away from lies and not mingle with good-for-nothings, especially the Zionists and Mizrahi members. But rather, he would join the company of God’s faithful. He won’t send his children to [public] school, even if it is a Jewish one. He will make no efforts to gain the leadership. He is the one who should be your head and leader.20
This demanding list of requirements was not specific enough, so that following Perlov’s death, a controversy arose among his Hasidim about his successor. Perlov had ten children, six of them male, who all, it appeared, could vie for the position.
It appears that the eldest, Asher, was seen as too modern, since he married Mirl Twersky, the daughter of the Rebbe of Shpikov, and she herself was close to modernist circles. With her encouragement, and to the great dismay of his family, he went to study music in the Conservatory in Berlin. The second brother, Aharon, did not want the crown. Another son, Ya’akov Hayim (Reb Yankeleh, 1888–1946), waited for the family to decide, and the youngest, Yohanan (Reb Yoyhentche, 1900–1955), was at that time still too young to reign. The main candidates were Avraham Elimelekh (Reb Meylekhkeh, 1891–1942) and Moshe (known as Moyshele, 1889–1942).
A royal battle broke out over succession between these two, with the major bone of contention being which conformed more closely to their father’s will. The Hasidic elders, who were a powerful faction in Karlin, agreed that Avraham Elimelekh, the fifth son, was the best suited to inherit Rabbi Israel’s position, basing themselves, among other things, on an anti-Zionist clause in the will. He was also supported by the Karlin Hasidim in the Land of Israel. A letter sent from the court less than a month after his father’s passing declared him rebbe by the consent of all the family and the elders of the community, but it seems that the situation was more complex.
The fourth son, Moshe, took the leadership upon himself and settled in Stolin, where his father had resided. A significant portion of the Hasidim accepted him as the group’s leader in Palestine as well, and he had quite a following there, especially in Tel Aviv (which had a significant Hasidic community in the interwar period—see chapter 25). Moshe had both rabbinical ordination as well as a secular education and was known as an open-minded person with pro-Zionist leanings. The memoir literature depicts him as a rebbe who was not remote from his followers and tended, even more than his father, to have a direct, comradely relationship with ordinary people. The youngest son, Yohanan, once he married, established his own court in Lutsk, far away from both Karlin and Stolin.
The distance did not matter. Controversy and division soon broke out between the three courts that remained in Poland. There were even reports of fistfights in the synagogue on Shabbat. One reason for these bruising battles was that the Hasidim did not necessarily affiliate with courts on a geographical basis. There were followers of Avraham Elimelekh in Stolin and adherents of Reb Moshe in Karlin. Less than a year after the first letter, the family and Hasidim convened once again in Stolin on the holiday of Shavuot 1922 and decided that all six brothers would be rebbes. Shortly thereafter, Yohanan opened his court in Lutzk, and Yankeleh—a warm-hearted and caring person—immigrated to the United States, to become the rebbe of the Stolin Hasidim in the New World. Some hostility remained between the groups, but at least one report claims that the parties did overcome their differences when necessary, offer hospitality to each other, and welcome the rival rebbe when he came to town.
Thus, at this difficult time between the two World Wars, when young people were leaving Hasidism in droves, the Karlin dynasty was riven by the most significant split in its history. There is little doubt that the fight over succession further weakened the group. Nearly all the Karlin descendants were murdered in the Holocaust, with only two survivors: Reb Yankeleh, who settled in Williamsburg, died childless in 1946, and Reb Yohanan, who escaped to the Soviet Union, where his wife and one of his two daughters died from food poisoning.
Other Polish Courts
As we saw in the last chapter, Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn of Lubavitch, the sixth Chabad Rebbe (1880–1950), fled the Soviet Union in 1927, spent several years in Riga, Latvia, and in 1933 finally settled very briefly in Warsaw and later in the nearby resort town Otwock. A branch of the Tomkhei Temimim yeshivah was already in operation in Warsaw in 1921, and Schneersohn developed it further, attracting students from among traditional Polish Jews, including other Hasidic courts. Even though he was considered one of the important rebbes in his generation, he was not able during his short stay in Warsaw to restore Chabad to the influence it had prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, nor was he able to win a significant following among Polish Jews beyond the students who enrolled in his yeshivah. However, those Polish Chabad Hasidim who survived the Holocaust played an important part after the war in rebuilding Chabad in the United States. Schneersohn himself remained in Poland until shortly after the Nazi occupation of Poland, from which he was rescued in 1940 with the help of American Jewry and the U.S. State Department.
Most of the Hasidic branches in Poland in the interwar period remained true to their Polish traditions that harked back to their nineteenth-century origins in Congress Poland. However, Kotzk, which now had several offshoots, lost the romantic halo surrounding it from the days of its founder, Menahem Mendel Morgenstern. Yitshak Zelig Morgenstern of Sokolov (1866–1939), probably the most prominent figure of this dynasty, served as tsaddik from 1905 until 1939, and was a very different type of rebbe than his illustrious grandfather. Even though he, too, was distinguished by his sharpness and his emphasis on the inner aspects of the worship of God, he was not a reclusive person at all. On the contrary, he mingled with people, devoted much of his time to public undertakings, and acquired substantial medical knowledge. According to the testimonies of his Hasidim, he would write prescriptions that were recognized and filled by local pharmacies. He was active in several Orthodox organizations, and after the founding of Agudat Yisrael became one of its preeminent Hasidic leaders. Even though he was firmly opposed to the Zionist movement, he did support immigration to the Land of Israel and even tried to organize a Hasidic settlement there (see chapter 25).
However, this initiative failed even though his two visits to the country left a great impression on him and he returned from each visit full of enthusiasm. He stood out within the Agudah leadership as one of the strongest supporters of strengthening the yishuv (Jewish settlement) in the Land of Israel through Orthodox institutions. According to the testimony of one of his Hasidim who moved to the Holy Land in 1935, the rebbe told him, in a statement that sounds similar to the dialectical approach of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935, and the chief rabbi of Palestine from 1921–1935) to secular Zionism:
It appears that Heaven sidetracked the great leaders of Israel in the matter of the Land of Israel, and this was one of the Creator’s concealments. It seems that this time it was God’s will for the rebellious ones [porkei ‘ol] to build the Land.
The rebbe then added that were he not ill, he would himself immigrate to the Holy Land immediately, “because it is self evident there is no future for the Jews here [in Poland].”21
If Morgenstern saw some hidden virtue in Zionism, his view of Communism was scathing. He compared it to the rabbis’ description of the mitat sedom (The Bed of Sodom, or procrustean bed):
The Talmud in Sanhedrin (109b) refers to the story about the people of Sodom who, when a stranger came into their town, placed him on a bed: if the person was too long for the bed—they would chop off his legs; if he was too short for it—they would have his limbs stretched by force until he fit the bed. This is puzzling. However, we should interpret it as follows: The verse says, “And all the substance that was at their feet” [Deuteronomy 11:6], and the rabbis commented: “This refers to a man’s wealth, which puts him on his feet.” This is the law of Sodom that everyone is equal in their money [assets]. This is what is alluded to here: they would “chop off his feet,” i.e., [remove] his money, so that everyone would be exactly equal.22
Like many of the rebbes of his time, Yitshak Zelig established his own yeshivah in his town of Sokolov, but it did not survive for long. He died of natural causes after the German occupation of Poland in 1939.
Another tsaddik who stood out for his public activities was Aharon Menahem Mendel Gutterman of Radzimin (1860–1943). He specialized in helping Jews, especially young men, who found themselves in circumstances that made it difficult to follow halakhah, such as those serving in the Polish army, university students, and even prisoners. He devoted a lot of his energy to education and founded a yeshivah in Radzimin. He was also famous for his campaign to promote Shabbat observance. He was known to go out to the streets of Warsaw on Fridays and encourage merchants to close their shops ahead of the start of the holy day. He had good contacts with Polish government officials and was said to have met with the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski. He was also active in promoting issues related to the Land of Israel and visited the country, where he met with both secular Zionist leaders and the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. In 1928, during that visit, he initiated an effort to erect a mehitsah (partition) at the Wailing Wall to separate men and women, a move that was met by protests from the Arab residents and the intervention of the British Mandate authorities to remove it. This event is considered as one of the causes for the 1929 Palestine riots, a tragic milestone in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The Radomsk dynasty, founded by Shlomo of Radomsk (ca. 1803–1866) was particularly successful in establishing yeshivot. One of his descendants, Shlomo Heinikh Rabinovich, acquired significant wealth at a young age from his business dealings and then became a rebbe at age twenty-nine. His wealth made it possible for him to open a whole network of Keter Torah yeshivot throughout Poland. These schools burnished the reputation of his court but also of Hasidism generally in Poland. When World War II broke out, Rabinovitch was on vacation in the Carpathian Mountains, but he returned and refused to leave Poland in order to remain with his Hasidim. He was murdered by the Germans in 1942.
Other notable dynasties were Radzin (the continuation of the Izhbits dynasty), whose rebbes showed no trace of the alleged antinomian teachings of its founder, Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbits; the Sokhachev dynasty, distinguished by its scholarly emphasis and supportive attitude toward settling the Land of Israel; the veteran Kozhenits and Lelov dynasties, both of which split into many small branches; and Bobov, which sprang from Sandz and Ropshits and whose yeshivah had tens of branches in Poland. Similar fragmentation befell dynasties of Ropshits, Sandz, Bobov, Vurke, and Radoshits (Radoszyce).
The Kuzmir dynasty split as well, and one of its branches, Modzits, was known as the “musical Hasidim,” some of whose niggunim were widely adopted in Hasidic music as well as more general Jewish music (see chapter 8). Yisrael Taub of Modzits (1849–1920) even drew an analogy between the divine attributes and musical notes saying: “There is nothing material in the world that does not have a spiritual source, as is well established, and this is especially true of music which is clearly rooted in the divine and a very, very elevated level.”23 His son, Shaul Yedidyah Taub (1886–1947) was a moderate rebbe who was also one of the most important Hasidic composers of his generation. During the war, he managed to escape from Poland to Lithuania and from there to the United States, but he ended up settling in Tel Aviv.
Perhaps in response to the assault on religion in interwar Poland, some Hasidic youths in search of spirituality gravitated to Bratslav, as ever, the most antiestablishment of Hasidic groups. In the new Poland, Bratslav was known for its impoverished and ascetic Hasidim, who were faithful to their dead rebbe, Rabbi Nahman. Their connection to him was through constant immersion in his writing and fulfilling the rituals he prescribed: frequent seclusions (hitbodedut), mikveh immersions, reciting the ten chapters of Psalms known as the tikkun ha-klali, and pilgrimage to his grave in Uman, Ukraine, although, as we saw in the last chapter, the pilgrimage became increasingly difficult as the Soviet regime persecuted religion.
The Bratslav Hasidim in Poland (as well as those in the Land of Israel) were therefore increasingly cut off from their spiritual center and had to find substitutes. Those in Poland were concentrated in Warsaw, Lodz, and Lublin. In 1927, they made Lublin their alternative locus for the “holy gathering.” The hundreds of Hasidim who arrived for the Rosh Hashanah celebration every year were invited to stay in the all-Hasidic Hakhmei Lublin yeshivah by the head of the yeshivah, Meir Shapiro. Choosing Lublin was probably related to its central location in the new Polish republic as well as memories of the Seer of Lublin’s positive attitude toward Rabbi Nahman during Nahman’s life. Indeed, the Bratslav Hasidim were accustomed to holding their prayers next to the grave of the Seer.
The most prominent leader of Bratslav in Poland was Yitshak Breiter (1886–1943). He was a disciple of Tsadok of Lublin, but in 1905, a few years after his teacher’s death, he discovered the allure of Bratslav (Rabbi Tsadok himself was one of the very few Polish rebbes who admired Nahman of Bratslav). For many years, Breiter went to Uman, where he absorbed Bratslav teachings, returning to Lublin to become one of the first Bratslav rabbis in Congress Poland and its great promulgator in the interwar period. He founded the Bratslav Bet Midrash in Warsaw and, together with Aharon Leib Zeigelman, who owned a print shop dedicated to producing and marketing Bratslav books in Poland, he oversaw the transfer of “the holy gathering” from Uman to Lublin.
In some of the Lithuanian territories annexed to Poland, the Hasidim represented a minority within the Jewish communities, with the Lithuanian Mitnaggdim dominating the scene. The latter received reinforcement from rabbis and students of the Lithuanian-style yeshivot in the Soviet Union who escaped to Poland. We might have expected renewed conflicts between Hasidim and Mitnaggdim, but, in fact, this did not occur. On the contrary, key figures of the Lithuanian musar movement, Yosef Leib Bloch, Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, and Moshe Rosenstein, were influenced by Hasidism and integrated some of its concepts into their teachings. As was the case before World War I in Russia, Lithuanian-style yeshivot in interwar Poland, such as the Lomza yeshivah, absorbed many sons of Hasidic families into their student bodies, while there were a few Hasidic yeshivot, whose heads were Lithuanian trained. The battles of the eighteenth century were long past, and in many ways Hasidism now had a more conservative and insular spirit than what prevailed in the Lithuanian yeshivot. As Orthodoxy as a whole suffered painful losses, the old adversaries understood that fratricidal strife was a luxury they could no longer afford.
But unity remained elusive. The Hasidic world itself continued to split and splinter, sometimes through ugly fights that damaged its already degraded image. The power of the rebbes was in decline and gradually there were more and more of them, each with only a handful of followers, some even with none. There were more and more claimants to dynasties, some mere pretenders to be einiklekh, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of this rebbe or that tsaddik from days of yore. They competed against each other for adherents while many, not much more than itinerant beggars, were only “in the business” in order to raise funds on the strength of their purported forefathers. This situation naturally aroused many barbs of sharp criticism from secular circles and from the Hasidic world itself. Certainly, it was this reality that led to Hillel Zeitlin’s bleak portrait of Polish Hasidism with which this chapter began.
It is therefore commonplace to say that Hasidism in interwar Poland was in a state of degeneration and decline. There is much truth to this observation, and certainly one should not expect a movement that was nearly two centuries old to exhibit signs of youthful vigor. But there were also sparks of renewal that did not have time to fully ignite. The Nazi executioners brought about the violent demise of Polish Hasidism, but who can say how, absent the Shoah, the last chapter of this extraordinary history would have been written?
1 Hillel Zeitlin, Di Teyvah (Warsaw, 1924), 7; trans. in Arthur Green, Hasidic Spirituality for a New Era: The Religious Writings of Hillel Zeitlin (New York, 2012), 39–40.
2 Yehiel Yeshaia Trunk, Poyln: Zikhrones un Bilder (New York, 1944), vol. 6, 12.
3 See for example, Menahem Baynvol, “Batey-medresh, Khsidim Shtiblekh un Politishe Organizatsye,” in Kehilat Sherpts: Sefer Zikaron, ed. Efraim Talmi (Wloka) (Tel Aviv, 1959), 168.
4 Żydowska mozaika polityczna w Polsce 1917–1929 (wybór dokumentów), ed. Czesław Brzoza (Krakow, 2003), 22.
5 Mossad ha-Yeshiva ha-Gedolah ve-ha-Mefo’arah Metivta (Warsaw, 1922), no. 7, 5.
6 R. Yisrael Meir Kagan, Likkutei Halakhot on Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 21b.
7 Yosef Lehman, “Hasidim, Shtiblekh, Minyonim,” in Yizkor le-Kehilat Radomsk, ed. L. Losh (Tel Aviv, 1967), 118–119 [Yiddish].
8 Rabbi Ya’akov Yitzhak Rabinowitz of Biala, Divrei Binah (Lublin, 1911); par. Mishpatim.
9 Trunk, Poyln, vol. 3, ch. 3.
10 Yismah Yisrael, Part I (Lodz, 1911), par. Bereshit.
11 Rabbi Shmu’el Zvi Danziger of Alexander, Tif’eret Shmu’el (Lodz, 1925), par. Kedoshim.
12 Ibid.
13 Aharon Sorski and Avraham Mordechai Segal, Rosh Golat Ariel (Jerusalem, 1990), part I, 262.
14 Bi-Kedushato shel Aharon (Jerusalem, 2007), part I, 47.
15 Dov Berish Ortner, Devar Hen: Sefer Zikaron le-Dov Berish Ortner (Tel Aviv, 1963), 248 (cited in the name of Rabbi Aharon’s personal assistant, Shmu’el Porges).
16 Yosef Kliner, “The Courts of the Galician Rebbes” [Hebrew], Ha-Tsefira (February 1, 1928), 3.
17 M. Gross Zimmerman, “In the Court of Belz” [Hebrew], Davar (August 23, 1957), 2.
18 Bi-Kedushato shel Aharon, part I, 147 [in the memoir of Rabbi Yitzhak Meir Levin printed in Nahaliel 1 (Jerusalem) 1972, 45].
19 Bnei Mahshavah Tovah (Jerusalem, 1970), 32.
20 Cited in Akiva Ben Ezra, Ha-Yenuka mi-Stolin (New York, 1951), 19–24. Ben Ezra titles the first will “The Family’s Will” and the second “The Hasidim’s Will.” See also Aharon Hoyzman, Yalkut Divrei Aharon (Jerusalem, 1963), 122.
21 Aharon Sorasky, “Toldot ha-Mehaber,” in Yitshak Zelig Morgenstern of Sokolov-Kotzk, She’erit Yitshak (Tel Aviv, 1989), 257.
22 Ibid., 214.
23 Yisrael Taub of Modzits, Tif’eret Yisrael (Lublin, 1901); par. Mi-kets, 131.
