KHURBN: HASIDISM AND THE HOLOCAUST
THE HEARTLAND OF HASIDISM—POLAND, western Soviet Union, Slovakia, and Hungary—was where the Germans inflicted some of their highest death tolls during the Holocaust, or what the Hasidim (together with other ultra-Orthodox Jews) call khurbn (Yiddish for destruction). Because they were more easily identified and therefore had more difficulty hiding, traditional Jews, including Hasidim, probably fell victim disproportionately more than their more secular co-religionists. Some were able to flee Nazi-occupied Europe either just before the genocide or while it was in progress. But many dozens of the Hasidic courts that had emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that persisted into the twentieth were wiped off the face of the map. For Hasidism, perhaps even more than for the Jewish people as a whole, the Holocaust meant decimation.
At the same time, because Hasidic groups constituted geographically dispersed networks, they could function, much like Zionist and other youth movements, as collective entities dedicated to saving their members. So, for example, the extraordinary tales of the survival of Aharon Rokeah, the Rebbe of Belz, demonstrate how his Hasidim mobilized to hide him from the German authorities. Shlomo Halberstam, the Rebbe of Bobov, also relied on a network of followers to avoid arrest and even made use of the services of those from his community who knew how to forge papers. Yehezkel Dovid Halberstam, brother of the rebbe, constructed a bunker in the Bochnia ghetto to save his family, while, later on, the rebbe himself, having fled to Hungary, even contemplated killing a guard in a Hungarian ghetto in order to escape. Far from passive reliance on divine intervention in the face of the Nazi onslaught, these dramatic stories reveal how rebbes and their Hasidim demonstrated both initiative and ingenuity in order to survive.
There is, however, little focused academic research on how Hasidim, as opposed to other Orthodox Jews, met the challenges of the Holocaust, apart from studies of the theological responses of some of their leaders. An additional problem in treating Hasidism and the Holocaust concerns the provenance of stories of martyrdom and survival. While some sources originated during the Holocaust itself, many of them come from the postwar period, when the demands of commemoration raise questions of veracity. Even stories that are based on real historical incidents may have been embellished and reshaped to fit the needs of a community trying to reconstruct itself after the destruction. The Holocaust was an event without precedent, but the Hasidim, not surprisingly, tried to fit it into older genres of miracles and martyrdom. This chapter will therefore treat both historical events and later commemoration, insofar as they can be separated.
In September 1939, the Germans and the Russians invaded Poland and divided it between them. Before launching their systematic campaign of murder with the invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941, the Nazis forced the Polish Jews into ghettos, the largest of which were in Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow. Since Hasidim had begun moving to the cities of Poland during and after World War I, they, too, were among the hundreds of thousands closed up in these urban prisons. But many also remained in small towns in the countryside, some of which were also turned into ghettos.
In the ghettos, Hasidim, like other Jews, made valiant efforts to carry on normal life, a particular challenge for religious Jews since the Nazis outlawed prayer gatherings, kosher slaughter, and so forth. Participating in such illegal activities became acts of resistance, although it is unlikely that Hasidim differed significantly from other religious Jews in this regard. Where Hasidism did play a role was in the self-help activities that Hasidim were able to organize because they had existing networks for doing so. For example, Kalonymos Kalman Shapiro (1889–1943), the Rebbe of Piasetshna, ran an underground synagogue in the Warsaw Ghetto, which was also the center for providing food and other aid to his Hasidim in the starvation conditions of the ghetto.
One of the leading Hasidim of this group, Shlomo Huberband (1909–1942), ran the religious department of the Jewish Self-Help Organization, which worked in parallel to—and sometimes against—the German-appointed Judenrat (Jewish Council). This social welfare agency was directed by Emanuel Ringelblum, the famed historian of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ringelblum also organized the underground Oyneg Shabbes group, which documented life in the ghetto. Huberband, who had published historical works before the war, was a key figure in this group as well and was chiefly responsible for documenting the experience of religious Jews in the ghetto; among his many contributions was to assemble and hide the sermons of his rebbe, Kalonymos Kalman Shapiro, which were recovered after the war and published under the title Esh Kodesh (see the following). But Huberband himself, having barely recovered from typhus, was deported to and murdered in Treblinka in August 1942.
A small contingent of Bratslav Hasidim was also imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. Emanuel Ringelblum recorded his visit to the Bratslav kloyz in the ghetto at a time when few remained alive:
At the place of “The Dead Hasidim” [the phrase used to refer to Bratslav] on Nowolipia Street there is a large banner: “Jews Do Not Despair.” The Jews there dance as they did before the war. A man whose daughter had died the day before danced the next day after prayers.1
The remarkable spirit of these Hasidim greatly moved the secular, left-wing Ringelblum in the dark days of the ghetto’s destruction.
In the east, the Jews who fell under Soviet rule were now subjected to the same antireligious ideology as their brethren living in the Soviet Union during the interwar period. Nevertheless, many Hasidim—like other Polish Jews—intuited that as bad as the Soviet regime was, at least it did not murder Jews. In the first days of the war, some risked life and limb to flee into the Soviet zone. There, the Communist authorities instituted a draconian regime that required every able-bodied male to have a job. Serving as a tsaddik hardly qualified, so the Hasidic courts had to find employment for their leaders and functionaries. Thus Shlomo Halberstam, who had escaped the German zone, worked as a night watchman, which provided an excellent opportunity for smuggling food. Those who could not find work risked deportation to Siberia, a fate that befell Halberstam’s brother Hayim. Something like 250,000 Jews in the eastern part of Poland were sent to Siberia, which ironically provided a surer means of survival than remaining in Poland. How many of these were Hasidim is impossible to know, but some—including Hayim Halberstam—could not withstand the rigors of the Siberian work camps and did not make it back alive.
The area that the Soviets occupied in 1939 was the first to fall victim to the killing squads that followed the German Army’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. Here, unlike farther west, the Jews had little warning of what was about to befall them. Hasidim living in the small towns of what had been eastern Poland were murdered in enormous numbers in the second half of 1941. As the German Army raced east, Jews who lived in Soviet Belorussia (White Russia) and Ukraine now came into the sights of the mobile killing units. Although this area had been under Soviet rule for more than two decades, it is reasonable to assume that it still contained many Hasidim who had gone underground in the face of religious repression (see chapter 22). The Jews of Bukovina, including its Hasidic population, fell victim in the same period to what has been called the “Romanian Holocaust,” the deportation of Jews by Germany’s Romanian ally to the eastern province of Transnistria, where vast numbers of them either died or were murdered.
In 1942, the Nazis opened the death camps, all of which were located in Poland, and it was in that year that they murdered most of the Hasidim of Poland and Slovakia, together with non-Hasidic Jews. The only major community of Hasidim left in Eastern Europe after that year was in Hungary, which in 1940 had annexed areas of Romania in Transylvania that were the home of the large Hasidic communities described in earlier chapters. Their turn would come only after March 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary (until then, the pro-German Hungarian government sent Jews to labor brigades).
A highly controversial question surrounding Hasidism during the period of the Holocaust is whether the leaders should have fled or remained by the side of their Hasidim. In both their actions during the war as well as in later apologetics, Hasidim clearly believe that it was worth any sacrifice to save their rebbes. They mobilized whatever wealth they could to pay for ransoms and bribes. In the case of Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn, the sixth Rebbe of Lubavitch, allies in the United States were able to enlist the support of powerful politicians and government officials to win him safe passage out of Warsaw to Berlin, Riga, and then New York in March of 1940 (as we have seen in chapter 22, Schneersohn had already escaped from the Soviet Union, also with American assistance). The same year, Avraham Mordechai Alter, the Rebbe of Ger, succeeded in acquiring an entry permit to Palestine, even though immigration had been severely restricted by the British the previous year. As we will see, the rebbes of Belz, Bobov, Munkatsh, and Satmar all escaped as well, leaving their Hasidim—and sometimes even members of their own families—behind to their fate. In fact, remarkably, the leaders of many of the largest prewar branches of Hasidim managed to flee, with obvious implications for the ability of Hasidism to regenerate itself after the war. Of the major rebbes, Yekutiel Yehudah Halberstam, the Rebbe of Sandz-Klausenburg, was one of the few to survive internment in the camps themselves.
The survival of the rebbe and his progeny (the “holy seed” as the Hasidim call it) was obviously crucial for his Hasidim. But the presence of the rebbe also lifted the morale of the Hasidim whenever he appeared. So, for instance, when Benzion Halberstam and his son Shlomo and grandson Naftali of Bobov were on the run, Hasidim who hid them regarded their survival as a miracle that promised their own survival as well. And there were rebbes who refused to leave, even when they had the opportunity to do so. Kalonymos Kalman Shapiro is reported to have said: “A rebbe who is not willing to descend into hell in order to rescue his followers is not a rebbe.”2 Similarly, the Rebbe of Karlin was visiting Palestine in August 1939 when the winds of war were blowing, but insisted on returning to his family and his flock in Poland.
Two particularly controversial escapes were those of Aharon Rokeah (1880–1957), the leader of the Belz Hasidim, and Yoel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), Rebbe of Satmar. In a hair-raising set of adventures, Rokeah and his half-brother, Mordechai of Bilgoray, were smuggled out of Belz to Premishlan, where they hid, while Jews of the town, including Rokeah’s oldest son, Moshe, were burned to death in the synagogue. In response to his son’s death, Rokeah uttered a phrase that later became a leitmotif for his branch of Hasidism: “By the grace of God, I have contributed a sacrifice.” Rokeah and his brother, having shaved their beards, escaped to the Bochnia Ghetto, from there to the Krakow Ghetto, and back to Bochnia, protected in one episode by a Ukrainian Gestapo informant. In May 1943, a Hungarian counter-intelligence agent, whom the Belz Hasidim had bribed with an enormous sum, drove the brothers, disguised as Russian generals taken prisoners-of-war, over the border into Hungary (to disguise his escape, one of the Hasidim dressed up as the rebbe and acted his part in the ghetto). After a stay of some months in Budapest, they departed in January 1944 to Palestine, where Rokeah reestablished the court of Belz after the murder of most of his followers in Poland. Before leaving Budapest, Mordechai of Bilgoray delivered a sermon, clearly reflecting Aharon’s views, in which he assured his listeners—meaning at this stage, the Hungarian Jews—that they would be safe. This empty promise was deleted from the postwar edition of the speech.
The seeming miraculous nature of these escapes from the jaws of death caused the Belz Hasidim to see the hand of God at work, an interpretation that Rokeah certainly did not discourage. Thus the saving of the rebbe and his brother, rather than the murder of thousands of his followers, took center stage in the memory of the Holocaust for this particular group. However, it was not without controversy. In 1952, a notebook kept by a member of the Sonderkommando (the squad of prisoners that worked in the crematoria) in Auschwitz was found in the ruins of the crematoria containing, among other things, a bitter denunciation by Hayah Halberstam, the wife of Avraham Shalom Halberstam, the late Rebbe of Stropkov in Slovakia. Moments before her death in May, 1944, the rebbetsin denounced the Hasidic leaders—and especially the Rebbe of Belz through Mordechai of Bilgoray’s sermon—for assuring the Hungarian Jews that they would be spared, but then: “they ran away to the Land of Israel, saving their own skins while leaving the Jews to be taken like lambs to the slaughter.” She concluded: “Master of the Universe, in the last moments of my life, I beseech you: forgive them for their great desecration of the divine name.”3
Halberstam’s accusation, while understandable, was not entirely fair: Aharon and Mordechai, as foreigners on Hungarian soil, were in great danger at a time when no one could have imagined the Nazi takeover of Hungary and the genocide of the Hungarian Jews. But a number of writers—notably the historian Mendel Piekarz—after the war took up the same accusation, arguing that the rebbe should have warned the Hungarian Jews rather than reassure them. Interestingly, a defense of the rebbe by a Belzer Hasid inadvertently confirmed Piekarz’s critique: the rebbe, endowed with clairvoyant powers, already foresaw the Nazi invasion of Hungary and the fate of the Hungarian Jews. From this point of view, the rebbe should have warned the Hungarian Jews of what awaited them.
Satmar, where Yoilish Teitelbaum held his court, came under Hungarian rule in 1940 and was therefore subjected to deportations to Auschwitz only after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. Although Teitelbaum was virulently opposed to Zionism, he made a futile attempt to obtain an entry visa to Palestine in 1943, already fearful of what was to come. After the Nazis marched in, Teitelbaum escaped in the direction of Cluj (Klausenburg), on the Romanian border, in an ambulance with his beard concealed behind a kerchief. He was caught by the Gestapo and sent to the Cluj ghetto. There, he made the acquaintance of Josef Fischer, the father-in-law of Rudolf Kasztner, a Hungarian Zionist leader who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann for the rescue of some 1,680 Jews. Fischer, perhaps aided by a substantial payment, persuaded Kasztner to include the rebbe, together with a few members of his family and entourage on the famous Kasznter train that departed Budapest on June 30, 1944, first to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then to Switzerland.
That one of the most diehard critics of Zionism could accept rescue by the Zionists and never even express any gratitude to his rescuers has struck most observers as profoundly ironic, but from the Satmar point of view, there was not much difference between the Zionists and the Nazis: just as one might negotiate with the latter, so might one use the former. Nevertheless, Teitelbaum’s behavior before, during, and after the rescue still remains troubling. He failed to encourage his Hasidim to flee across the Romanian border, although he himself tried to do so. On the Kasztner train and in Bergen-Belsen, where the group was interned for nearly half a year, he remained aloof from the other members of the group. And after the war, in Switzerland, he did little to lead his Hasidim, including those who tried to reestablish the community in Satmar. Rather than returning to Hungary, he left for Palestine and then the United States.
The question of whether or not to escape was connected to a theological dialectic for religious Jews—not only Hasidim—between kiddush ha-shem (martyrdom) and kiddush ha-hayim (sanctification of life). On the one hand, the Nazi genocide created the opportunity for Hasidim to fulfill the commandment of dying for God’s name and, indeed, Hasidic leaders often addressed their followers in such language when they faced death. On the other hand, the Jewish tradition also values life to the point of elevating it over performance of the commandments. To survive was therefore as much a religious imperative as to be martyred. The behavior of Hasidic leaders, as well as their Hasidim, must therefore be understood in these contradictory terms.
Nothing illustrates this tension better than the stories of Ben Zion Halberstam, the Rebbe of Bobov, and his son and successor, Shlomo. Ben Zion and some of his sons and sons-in-law were able to flee to Lwow when World War II began and were thus in the Soviet Zone. When the Germans launched their war against Russia, they quickly seized the city. On July 25, 1941, they arrested the rebbe and the male family members. He evidently understood that his death was near, so he dressed in his finest Hasidic garments and, with a shtreimel on his head, marched with the other prisoners through the streets, suffering horrible beatings at the hands of his persecutors. Three days later, he and the others were shot in the Yanover forest, among the first victims of what would become the genocide of the Jews. Here was a case where the rebbe saw his death as a martyrdom to be embraced with spiritual devotion.
Shlomo Halberstam, on the other hand, did everything possible to avoid this fate. He shaved his beard, cut off his side-locks, dressed in modern clothes including a Tyrolian hat, and escaped deportation from the Bochnia ghetto by presenting the Germans with a false Hungarian passport, thus claiming to be a protected foreigner. He was smuggled out of Poland to Hungary in a false compartment of a coal truck and later escaped from Hungary to Romania. The story includes numerous arrests and extraordinary escapes. For Bobov Hasidim, their rebbe’s salvation was clearly a divine miracle. Halberstam, like his father, was of course prepared for martyrdom: when he and his son were arrested on one occasion, he prepared the boy for death with a sermon about kiddush ha-shem. Here is what he said according to a postwar Bobov source, which may reflect retrospective commemoration more than historical fact:
Naftali, my delight, “know that a Jew’s body is dust of the earth, and it is subject to death, but his soul remains eternal and no murderer or evildoer in the world can shoot at it. Today, Naftali, I am your father and you my son, and you can still perform the commandment of honoring thy father, one of the most solemn commandments in our Torah. Tomorrow, it seems, we shall be two souls together in the holiness of heaven. Do you know what an extraordinary merit it is for a Jewish soul to perform the commandment of sanctifying God, kiddush ha-shem? Tomorrow, if that be the will of the Holy One, Blessed be He, we two shall merit the fulfillment of that great commandment. In this final moment of our lives, I make of you my son one request.… In a few hours, the only mitzvah remaining for us to perform together will be that of kiddush ha-shem, which we must carry out with the same profound gladness. The murderers will torture me because they want to learn who are those who have been smuggling Jews out and who have been forging the stamps and documents for them. But I will call out only the Shema until my soul leaves my body. When you see my suffering, my son, pay it no heed. Recite the Shema too, and fear nothing else in this world. Be strong and do not weep, for your tears will only bewilder me in that awesome and holy moment. Naftali, this is my last request of you, will you obey?”
“Father,” he replied, “I will ask the murderers to kill me first, for I shall surely not be able to watch your torture.”4
In this Bobov tradition, survival and martyrdom were equally valued and not mutually exclusive.
A similar story of survival concerns Barukh Yehoshua Yerahmiel Rabinowicz (1914–1997), who succeeded Hayim Elazar Shapira in 1937 as the leader of Munkatsh. Rabinowicz, although a rebbe in what was then Hungary, was a Polish citizen and was consequently expelled with his oldest son to Kamenets Podolsky in August 1941 along with some fourteen to sixteen thousand other Polish Jews living in Hungary. These Jews were all massacred in one of the earliest mass murders of the Holocaust. But Rabinowicz, showing impressive initiative and good luck, escaped with his son and eventually returned to Budapest, where he played a major role in rescue efforts. In March of 1944, he arranged to leave Hungary for Palestine. Just before his departure, he addressed a crowd that packed the Great Synagogue of Budapest, sharing with them his pessimism over the Jewish future in Europe and imploring them to follow him to the Land of Israel. His message, which violated the anti-Zionism of his late father-in-law, fell on deaf ears. So, too, did a call he later issued for arming the Hungarian Jews to resist the Nazis. While Rabinowicz’s proposals departed radically from the Hasidic mainstream, they are vivid testimony to the way the Holocaust sometimes shattered old ways of thinking.
Hasidic Theology during the Holocaust
The experience of the Holocaust clearly shook Rabinowicz’s faith, as he related in a memoir published many years later. Though still a religious believer convinced that the Almighty had helped save him, his experiences also awakened many questions. Addressing God, he wrote: “Remember what wonderful Jews You had when Your people fell into the hands of the enemy; so many Jews who endangered their lives to help their brothers when they were subject to a vicious enemy; why did You send them to slaughter?!”5 As will be described in the next chapter, Rabinowicz not only broke with the virulent anti-Zionism of Munkatsh, but he also abdicated his throne.
Although much of the Hasidic response to the Holocaust came after the event—as will be discussed in the next section of this chapter—even during the war, Hasidic thinkers tried to formulate ways of reflecting about what was happening. There was a range of such responses both during and after the event. Some fell back on silence in the face of the inability of human beings to know the reason for God’s actions, a stance first articulated in the Bible by the Book of Job. Some found recourse in the idea of hester panim (the hiding of God’s face, based on a common interpretation of Deuteronomy 31:17–18), according to which there are times in history in which God withdraws His providence from the world, so that evil reigns supreme. However, most thinkers embraced the traditional idea that God’s hand must be present in the Holocaust. In its most simplistic form, this tradition led to a search for the sin (or sins) for which the Holocaust was a punishment or, alternatively, to see the suffering as a goad to repentance. The most common sin identified was assimilation or secularization, although some targeted Zionism. One might also relate martyrdom to the rabbinic idea that the messianic age would be preceded by violent “birth pangs” (hevlei mashiah), thus asserting that the Holocaust was linked tightly with the advent of the Messiah. Finally, one might portray the Holocaust in extra-human or mythic terms as the result of a process solely within God himself or as a struggle between God and the forces of Evil. Since most Hasidic thinkers combined variants of these ideas, it is not possible to distill a pure typology of Hasidic responses to the Holocaust and certainly not a singular Hasidic theology.
It is also challenging to distinguish Hasidic from other, ultra-Orthodox but non-Hasidic responses, although one scholar has argued that Hasidic thinkers tended to be more optimistic than Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox. Non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox thinkers were also just as likely as Hasidic to see the Holocaust as a necessary—if horrific—corrective to the sin of assimilation. Interestingly, even though Hasidic and non-Hasidic thinkers had Kabbalistic symbols at their disposal, it is striking how little they used them, preferring instead more conventional tropes. What distinguishes Hasidic responses is less a particular theology than the social context in which the rebbes addressed their followers. The sermons they gave and other writings that they produced were intended for popular audiences rather than for themselves or a limited readership. They aimed to strengthen the spirits of their Hasidim by providing a framework of meaning with which to understand the Nazi war against the Jews. In some cases, the followers whom they addressed were those whom they left behind in Nazi-occupied Europe.
A number of Hasidic thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—notably Hayim Elazar Shapira of Munkatsh—had developed theologies of exile that, based on the writings of the sixteenth-century Maharal of Prague, saw the very abnormality of a nation in exile as a sign of divine providence. Attempts, like Zionism and modernity generally, to end this state and return the Jews to the normal laws of nature violated God’s plan for the world. The sufferings of exile were the evidence that God continued to choose the Jews. Although nothing could prepare Hasidic thinkers for genocide, certain ideas were already in place as a result of the challenge of modernity.
The foundation for Hasidic responses to the Holocaust may have been laid in the interwar period, especially in Poland. In reaction to both the persecutions and assimilation of this period, some used the Hebrew term for catastrophic destruction—shoah—that would later become the Hebrew term for the Holocaust. The Rebbe of Aleksander, Yitshak Menahem Danziger (1880–1943), who was murdered in Treblinka along with many of the Aleksander Hasidim, anticipated the ferocity of the Holocaust in his response to the persecution of the Jews in Poland in the late 1930s. Light, he argued, is not possible without corresponding darkness, and the deeper the darkness, the brighter the redemptive light. God is the source of evil, which he uses to bring human beings closer to him. The inner light of each Jew is linked to a higher, divine light, and it is through this connection that darkness can be overcome. This process is connected to the coming of the messianic age, since only the light of redemption could come out of the darkness that Danziger believed surrounded his contemporary world.
By calling the Holocaust Hurban (in Hebrew) or Khurbn (in Yiddish), the Hasidim implicitly embedded the catastrophe in recurring patterns in Jewish history. Yet, even if they used such traditional language, they recognized in various ways that something radically new was afoot. For Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn, for example, the Shoah was the result of the assimilation and secularism of the American Jews. When Jews become secular, God goes into eclipse (hester panim), paving the way for Haman, the biblical villain whom Schneersohn saw as the archetype for Hitler. The Holocaust is not so much punishment, as it is the indirect result of God’s absence. The leaders of the American Jews had failed to perform the necessary atonement that would have caused God to save their brethren in Europe. Schneersohn issued a public statement claiming that the messianic age was around the corner, a “third front” (the first two being the western and the eastern fronts) in the war against the Nazis, but it would require a dramatic return to halakhic observance by the American Jews, which he saw himself as leading. If they did not respond to his call, the non-Orthodox Jews would be killed on a “day of fire” (brennenden tog). The ferocity of this message may also conceal some deep ambivalence, if not guilt, at leaving many of his Hasidim behind while he found refuge in the New World.
Unlike Schneersohn, who was now safe in America, Kalonymos Kalman Shapiro found himself trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. Although he did not lead a numerically large group of Hasidim, as we saw in chapter 23, Shapiro’s pedagogical and mystical innovations made him an important Hasidic thinker in prewar Poland. Shapiro lost his son, daughter-in-law, and sister-in-law in the bombing of Warsaw in September 1939. In the Warsaw Ghetto, he gave weekly sermons to a clandestine congregation of his Hasidim, the last of which dates from just four days before the beginning of the massive deportations to Treblinka on July 22, 1942. Shapiro survived the deportation and the liquidation of the ghetto in the spring of 1943. He was taken to the Trawniki concentration camp and was murdered in Majdanak when Trawniki was liquidated in November 1943. Partly because the sermons were recovered after the war and partly for their theological originality, Shapiro has become one of the most studied Hasidic thinkers from the period of the Shoah.
Shapiro initially linked the sufferings of the Jews with past persecutions. But in December 1942, after the Great Deportation of July to September 1942, which annihilated the vast majority of the ghetto inhabitants, he appended a note to the written version of a sermon from a year earlier to acknowledge that something fundamentally new was taking place. Like other Hasidic thinkers between the wars, Shapiro connected persecution to modernity, but he tied modernity to a long history of decline that preceded it by millennia. The world had been in a state of decline from spirituality to materialism since the time of the prophets. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, was, in his view, even greater than the rabbis of the Talmud, since he revealed the path to true Enlightenment exactly at the time that the world was entering the false European Enlightenment. Like Danziger before the war, Shapiro’s message was that the spiritual dawn (shahar) could come only in a time of darkness (shahor), inverting the modernizers’ belief that theirs was a doctrine of light. Thus Hasidism provided the appropriate response to modernity. Although he formulated this view before the Holocaust, he could quickly adapt it to the Nazi onslaught. Only the messianic age would reverse this decline and, therefore, the sufferings of the Jews had to be linked to the coming of the Messiah. In a sermon from July 1941, he stated: “The Holy Blessed One is laboring to give birth through the Jewish people, and so the Jewish people suffer the birth pangs, losing their power as part of them dies, for this is how they give birth to the light of one Messiah.”6
Shapiro’s sermons testify to the spiritual challenges posed by the horrific suffering of the Holocaust. As opposed to some postwar celebrations of ultra-Orthodox Holocaust heroism, Shapiro was unflinching in confronting the moral and spiritual collapse that many experienced. And he did so while confessing his own weakness and doubts. In his account, suffering does not lead to spiritual grandeur, but on the contrary, it prevents one from worshipping God in joy, the Hasidic ideal. Physical suffering induces spiritual suffering, but it is ultimately this latter suffering that becomes the vehicle for overcoming the body’s suffering.
In the ghetto sermons, Shapiro occasionally invokes the traditional rationales of the unknowable ways of God and punishment for sins. However, the dominant arguments in the sermons are much more unusual. Building on the Talmudic trope of the exile of the shekhinah (God’s presence in the world), Shapiro argues that God himself suffers with his people: “Our sacred literature tells us that when an Israelite is afflicted, God, blessed be he, suffers, as it were, much more than the person does.”7 The suffering of the world is so great that the world cannot withstand it and thus God must shoulder the lion’s share of it. In response to the enormous suffering of the Shoah, God’s own suffering is infinite. When an angel asks permission to weep in place of God, God answers that because he is atoning for Israel’s sins and the time has not yet come for redemption, he will go to a secret place, where even an angel cannot enter, and weep. Thus the traditional concept of hester panim takes on a new meaning: if God wept in full view, his weeping would destroy the world.
The suffering of the Jews is not atonement for sin but rather a way of performing kiddush ha-shem. Shapiro enlists this concept of martyrdom in a new way. In the Middle Ages—and especially in response to the Crusader massacres of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries—the blood of the martyrs was viewed as a vehicle for arousing God’s wrath to avenge the deaths of his people. For Shapiro, on the other hand, kiddush ha-shem becomes a kind of imitatio dei: the Jews imitate God’s suffering and thus participate in it. It is, in fact, God himself who is the target of the antisemites and, in this context, Shapiro quotes the suffering servant passage from the biblical prophet Isaiah. Now the suffering servant is not a messianic figure but God himself.
There is a striking dialectic in Shapiro’s thought between passive acceptance and active protest. While his sermons contain Job-like questioning of God, they also encourage his audience to acquiesce to God’s judgment by imitating his suffering. Only when one realizes how great is God’s weeping, then one’s own suffering will seem proportionately less. In the Hasidic terms that Shapiro employs, one achieves personal self-annihilation (bittul) by embracing God’s suffering. And, in line with other Hasidic thinkers of the Shoah, he explicitly connected this suffering to the birth pangs of the Messiah, although his text is, on the whole, less messianic than it is nostalgic for the world that was being destroyed.
Invoking the messianic age necessarily brought one in confrontation with Zionism, which seemed to offer a secular version of the Messiah. In Mordechai of Bilgoray’s sermon from just before his and Aharon Rokeah’s immigration to Palestine, he needed to make clear that their aliyah had nothing to do with Zionist settlement in the land. Instead, it was part of the process of repentance necessary for the coming of the Messiah, an “awakening from below.” This Kabbalistic term refers to human action that influences the divine spheres and demonstrates how Kabbalistic language continued to infuse some Hasidic thinking in the twentieth century, even if far less than in the eighteenth century. One might call this a kind of “ultra-Orthodox Zionism,” an alternative both to religious and secular Zionism. Haredi settlement in the land of Israel was a necessary prelude to messianic redemption, but not in the political sense meant by the Zionists.
In offering an alternative to religious Zionism, Mordechai of Bilgoray may have been responding to a very unusual treatise published the previous summer, also in Budapest, by Yisakhar Shlomo Teichthal (1885–1945), a Hungarian rabbi who, from 1921, was the head of an important yeshivah in Slovakia and was also a close follower of Hayim Elazar Shapira, the Rebbe of Munkatsh. Before the war, Teichthal was one of the organizers of a 1936 rabbinical denunciation of Zionism and was also adamant in his opposition to the Agudat Yisrael for not being sufficiently anti-Zionist. In 1942, as the Nazis began to deport the Slovakian Jews to the Polish death camps, Teichthal escaped to Budapest, but later returned to Slovakia, from which he was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in early 1945 during the evacuation of the camp.
After his flight from Slovakia, Teichthal underwent a remarkable ideological transformation as a result of what he now knew of the actions of the Nazis. Abandoning his previous anti-Zionism, he now became a passionate advocate of a Jewish state, even one led by secular Jews. In August 1943, he published Em ha-Banim Semehah (The Mother of the Children Rejoices, based on Psalms 113:9, referring to the rejoicing of the Land of Israel at the return of her children) in which he laid out his response to the Khurbn. The generation of the Holocaust was not worthy of divine intervention in the form of miracles, but that did not lead Teichthal to a position of passivity. Instead, he argued that such a generation would have to use its own means, of which there were two, to achieve redemption. One was kiddush ha-shem. The martyrdom of the victims of the Holocaust weakened the kelippot (the husks of evil materiality—that is, the cosmic forces that conceal and entrap the divine) and caused the gates of the Land of Israel to open. Thus the Shoah was directly linked to the secular settlement of the land. The second was the actions of the secular Zionists who, according to Teichthal, God employs to achieve redemption (this last argument is close to that of Avraham Yitshak Kook, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine from 1921 to 1935, a mystic but not a Hasid).
Human initiative in bringing about redemption has deep roots in the earlier Kabbalah as well as Hasidic thought. The raising up of divine sparks to their source in God, according to Hasidic doctrine, requires human activity, just as, in earlier Kabbalah, the harmony between the sefirot (the divine emanations) is dependent on human actions. The Lurianic doctrine of the sixteenth century prepared the theological ground for seventeenth-century Sabbatianism, the boldest and most widespread messianic movement of the early modern period. But none of these ideas were responses primarily to historical catastrophe, or, if they were, it was indirect.
Teichthal explicitly blamed the rabbis—by which he meant the group of rabbis to which he originally belonged—for preventing European Jews from participating in Zionism. The result, he suggests, was the Holocaust, which would have been prevented had all Jews joined in the redemptive process, but which was a consequence of the failure to do so: “Who shall accept the responsibility for the innocent blood shed in our days … but the leaders who prevented Jews from participating with the builders of [the Land of Israel]. They will not be able to atone [for their mistakes] and claim: ‘Our hands did not spill this blood.’”8 In an indirect way, the Jews themselves, or at least their rabbis, were responsible for the catastrophe, although this must be seen as a pragmatic rather than a theological argument. Given this harsh judgment, it is no surprise that Teichthal’s revisionist position found little resonance among Hasidim and that there were even efforts to censor parts of his book. His message gained more sympathy among non-Hasidic religious Zionists whose worldview he seemed to confirm.
Postwar Commemoration
After the war, most Hasidic leaders refused to respond directly to the catastrophe that they had escaped. But there were exceptions. A mythic theology of the Holocaust can be found in the postwar writings of Yekutiel Yehudah Halberstam (1905–1994), the Rebbe of Sandz-Klausenburg, who was in Hungary at the time of the Nazi invasion. Halberstam was deported to Auschwitz, served in 1944 on a labor brigade in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, and, following a death march into Germany, was liberated by American soldiers at the end of the war. Legends of miraculous survival and of insistence on keeping the commandments even in the camps circulated around him after the war. Thus, unlike most of the other leaders surveyed in these pages, Halberstam survived in the very heart of the Nazis’ genocidal machine.
Somewhat exceptionally, Halberstam borrowed heavily from mythic tropes in the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah to account for the unique evil of the Holocaust. The predominant image was of the primordial snake that, although a product of processes within the divine, nevertheless became the autonomous force of evil. The struggle between the forces of sanctity and the forces of impurity goes back to the creation of the world. In this account, neither the Jews nor the Nazis are ultimately responsible for evil, since it is the result of mythic powers. At the same time, the Jews, by succumbing to the temptations of assimilation and secularism, have awoken the snake and given it the opening to attack the powers of good. God is as much a victim of evil as are his people. However, the seeming victory of evil has an ulterior purpose, which is to clear the way for the messianic redemption. And, as with Shapiro’s theology of the weeping God, Halberstam argued that God accompanies his suffering people through their travail, even if he is incapable of saving all of them. Halberstam’s Manichean worldview extended to the nations of the world, which, in his account, are the earthly embodiments of the evil snake. This sweeping hostility to the Gentiles may explain why Halberstam, like the Rebbe of Belz, embraced a kind of ultra-Orthodox Zionism, leading to the establishment of the settlement of Kiryat Sandz in Israel after the war (see chapter 28).
An almost diametrically opposite theology was proposed by Shalom Noah Berezovsky (1911–2000), the leader of the Jerusalem branch of Slonim Hasidim who was already in Palestine before the war. After the war, he was instrumental in reviving the group, whose European adherents were almost totally wiped out, and became its rebbe in 1981. Berezovsky addressed the Shoah in a number of his sermons over the decades before and after he became the Rebbe of Slonim. In his account, the Holocaust was unnatural, meaning that it was the result of a divine decree that had nothing to do with human action or sin.
The Holocaust was not punishment for sin but instead a catastrophic martyrdom constituting the “birth pangs” of the Messiah. But, as opposed to Schneersohn and others, Berezovsky did not expect the Messiah to come imminently. The Holocaust’s massive scope obviated the need for any future birth pangs, but the phase that followed was not messianic. The catastrophe was needed to inaugurate a new era of history, the resettlement of the Jews in America and Israel. Berezovsky was particularly excited by what he viewed as widespread return to religion and the flourishing of Torah study. In perhaps the most original part of his doctrine, he believed that the souls of the martyrs of the Holocaust were reincarnated in the ba’alei teshuvah, those who returned to halakhic observance. Their martyrdom released enormous sacred energies into the world. Thus the dead served a profound function in the future course of Jewish history, even if it was not messianic.
A third postwar Hasidic thinker was Yoel Teitelbaum, whose book, Va-Yoel Moshe, published in 1958, blamed the Holocaust on the Zionists. Teitelbaum had built his community out of a small core of Satmar Hasidim but with far greater numbers of non-Satmar Holocaust survivors from Hungary and Slovakia. His treatise therefore had such survivors as its audience. Since Teitelbaum’s main subject was Zionism rather than the Holocaust, we will treat this controversial work more extensively in chapter 27.
Rituals of Commemoration
In the years immediately after the Holocaust, a number of religious leaders from the Reform, Conservative, and modern Orthodox movements advocated adopting the traditional fast day of the 10th of Tevet (the day the Babylonians were said to have begun their siege of Jerusalem in the sixth century BC) as a memorial day for all the victims the Holocaust. The official Israeli date of commemoration—Yom ha-Shoah—largely superseded this date, except for many modern Orthodox Jews who recognized both. Ultra-Orthodox Jews find it hard to accept Yom ha-Shoah, since the date has no relationship to the traditional Jewish calendar and was created by the secular State of Israel. In fact, the haredi world, led by Avraham Karelitz, known as the Hazon Ish, rejected any specific commemorative date. Since Karelitz was revered by the Hasidic world as well as the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox, his position became dominant and was endorsed by both Lithuanian authorities and Hasidic rebbes such as Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Lubavitch and Yekutiel Yehudah Halberstam of Sandz-Klausenburg. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews, including at least two rebbes (the Rebbe of Kaliv, Menahem Mendel Taub, himself an Auschwitz survivor, and the Rebbe of Bobov, Shlomo Halberstam), created memorial prayers (kinot) for the victims of the Holocaust, but most authorities, Hasidic and otherwise, refused to include such prayers in printed liturgies.
Why were most Hasidic leaders opposed to public commemoration of the Holocaust, especially since there was a long tradition of writing and reciting kinot for historical catastrophes as part of the standard liturgy? The most obvious explanation is probably the fact that the secular State of Israel promoted a powerful culture of commemoration and the ultra-Orthodox leaders did not want to seem to partake in this culture, even if on a different date. And while innovations—such as adding kinot—were permissible in the past, because modernity celebrates innovations, ultra-Orthodox Jews are much more reluctant to embrace any kind of change, since it might signify implied authority to legislate new halakhah.
But even if few Hasidic communities created public rituals of commemoration like Yom ha-Shoah, their postwar culture is permeated with the memory of the communities that were destroyed. In the words of Shalom Noah Berezovsky, the Rebbe of Slonim, who was one of the few Hasidic leaders to discuss Holocaust commemoration explicitly:
You must remember what Amalek did to you, what we lost. The fact that we lost in our generation a complete link in the chain of generations, a complete generation lost, an especially great generation, with outstanding people and spiritual giants. The meaning of remembering includes an aspect of study, to follow in their footsteps and learn in their ways.9
For Berezovsky, what needed to be remembered was the world that was destroyed rather than the process of destruction.
To transplant the sacred geography of Hasidic Eastern Europe to Israel or America was therefore the best way to concretize memory. The culture of Holocaust memory in the Hasidic world and the haredi world in general focused not only on remembering the victims but perhaps even more on intensified revival of the world that was destroyed—or at least their version of that world. As already mentioned, Yekutiel Halberstam inspired the establishment of Kiryat Sandz in Netanya, Israel in 1960, naming this community after the Polish town from which the dynasty originally hailed. The printing of Hasidic books also became a form of commemoration. Aharon Israel Bornstein the grandson of Avraham Bornstein, founder of the Polish Sokhachev dynasty, decided to publish the work of his grandfather that the latter had forbidden his heirs to publish; he believed that the Holocaust had canceled the prohibition.
Similarly, Yehudah Moshe Tiberg, who became Rebbe of Aleksander in Israel in 1947, ordered his Hasidim to collect the talks of his predecessor, Yitshak Menahem Danziger, who was murdered in Treblinka and none of his many handwritten works survived. The book was given the symbolic title Akedat Yitshak (“The Binding of Isaac”). Since the Danziger family had been totally destroyed—as were most of their Hasidim—Tiberg changed his last name to Danziger, but this very large Polish branch now numbered a few hundred at most.
Dates connected to the history of particular Hasidic groups in the Shoah have become temporal sites of commemoration. Slonim Hasidim regard the date when their rebbe in Poland, Shlomo David Weinberg (1912–1943), was murdered as the time when they mourn all the martyrs of Slonim as well the victims of the Holocaust generally. Similarly, the Spinka Hasidim in both America and Israel commemorate the Holocaust on the date of the murder of their rebbe, Yitshak Ayzik Weiss. Conversely, for those such as Belz, Vizhnits, and Satmar, the dates when their rebbes were rescued became holidays. In this way, celebration of survival rather than mourning for death became the object of commemoration. However, all of these dates of commemoration, with a few isolated exceptions, are focused on the history of particular courts rather than the Holocaust tout court.
An additional type of commemoration became possible after the fall of Communism with pilgrimages to the graves of tsaddikim in Poland and Russia. By returning to their ancestral homeland, the Hasidim were able to remember not only their centuriesold roots but also the martyrs of the Holocaust.
The resistance of rabbis, Hasidic and otherwise, to public commemoration hardly ended the matter. Ordinary Hasidim undertook various types of commemorative activities, even without their leaders. In fact, this may be one of the most striking instances where Hasidism, a movement built on a hierarchical relationship between rebbe and Hasid, was propelled by the Hasidim rather than by the rebbes. For instance, despite the refusal of the rebbes to include kinot or other memorial prayers for the martyrs of the Holocaust in printed liturgies for the 9th of Av, there is evidence of the distribution of mimeographed prayers in Hasidic shtiblekh for recitation that day.
It was not only in the realm of prayer that Hasidim memorialized their destroyed communities, however, but even more in the stories they told and the polemics and histories they wrote. The Hasidic writer and activist, Moshe Prager, who was involved in the rescue of rebbes and other Hasidim during the war, later wrote a series of hagiographical martyrologies to document the fate of important Hasidic figures. The dominant narrative in Prager’s work, as well as other such accounts, was spiritual resistance and kiddush ha-shem. This emphasis on spiritual resistance served several functions. It gave meaning to the murder of these religious Jews in terms drawn from the historical tradition and it countered the claim that the Hasidim—and other Orthodox Jews—went passively to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter.” The subtext here was to pose an alternative to the acts of armed resistance of more secular Jews and especially the Zionists. While there were some ultra-Orthodox writers, like Hillel Seidman, who argued that Orthodox Jews participated in the ghetto underground movements, the dominant position was that spiritual resistance was superior to political and military actions.
The Hasidic tale might be adapted to these arguments, thus providing continuity with earlier literary and oral traditions. Yaffa Eliach, a historian of Hasidism and herself a survivor, collected a number of these stories from Hasidim in America and Israel. Some were told by rebbes and some by ordinary Hasidim. They were not, however, published after the fashion of Hasidic tales from the latter part of the nineteenth century, but instead appeared to circulate in oral form before Eliach wrote them down. How public these tales were remains unclear; many may have been limited to the immediate family circles of the tellers. Some of these stories provide their chain of transmission, a device that would seem to give them historical veracity, but, in fact, places them squarely within the folkloric traditions of earlier Hasidic stories like Shivhei ha-Besht.
Like traditional Hasidic tales, these stories feature coincidences and acts of clairvoyance that imply both divine intervention and the supernatural powers of rebbes. At the same time, though, since surviving the Holocaust almost necessarily required remarkable good luck, coincidences and improbable interventions, stories of survival, even told by secular survivors, often sound miraculous. Here was an event in which even the most secular survivor might be tempted to attribute his or her survival to a higher power.
A typical tale opens Eliach’s book. It concerns Israel Spira, the Rebbe of Bluzhov (he and his wife are the sources for many of Eliach’s tales in the first part of the book). Imprisoned in the Plezskow labor camp next to Krakow, he and his fellow inmates were forced to jump over a wide pit. Those who fell in the pit were shot to death. Although the pit was too wide for any normal human being to jump over, the rebbe, together with his Hasid, landed safely on the other side. The Hasid asks the rebbe how it was that they accomplished this seemingly supernatural feat. The rebbe answers that he clung to the coattails of his rabbinical ancestors and it was their merit that gave him miraculous strength. The Hasid responds that he himself made it to the other side by clinging to his own rebbe’s coattails. In this tale, it is the merit of the Hasidic dynasty that provides access to the supernatural and the rebbe himself conveys this power to his loyal Hasid, a classic function of the tsaddik as intercessor with God.
A similar tale concerns Aharon Rokeah and his brother during their escape from Poland to Hungary, discussed earlier. When they reach the Hungarian border, disguised as Russian generals, the border guards refuse to let them through. Suddenly, three Hungarian generals in full uniform arrive on horseback and order the guards to let the rebbes into Hungary. According to the tale, these mysterious generals turn out to be the rebbe’s deceased father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, all “top ranking generals in God’s army.” Here, once again, the dynastic principle provides supernatural intervention and the army of the spirit supersedes the army of the flesh.
A particularly paradoxical story concerns Moshe Silber, scion of the Sandz dynasty and a follower of Belz Hasidism. Belz and Munkatsh were engaged, as we have seen, in a long and bitter conflict. At one point, the Rebbe of Munkatsh, Hayim Elazar Shapira, said to Silber: “you will die with your tallit katan on.” Later, imprisoned in Auschwitz, Silber did not wear his tallit katan and survived. He interpreted the curse of the Munkatsh Rebbe to be an unintended blessing that saved his life.
Rebbes are not the only subjects of these tales, and this is one way that these Hasidic stories differ from the hagiographies of the earlier genre. For example, when the Nazis rounded up the Hungarian Jews and confined them in ghettos before shipping them to Auschwitz, they came upon a Satmar Hasid, Rabbi Feivish Ashkenazi, whom they evidently mistook for Yoel Teitelbaum, the Rebbe of Satmar (this is implicit rather than explicit in the story). One SS man shoots at the Hasid, the bullet misses and hits a Bible, lodging at the verse “so they and their children had the oversight of the gates of the house of the Lord.” Teitelbaum subsequently kept this Bible in his library in Brooklyn as a sacred object.
More strikingly, the tales in Eliach’s collection frequently feature women as heroines, perhaps in part owing to the fact that Eliach interviewed both female and male survivors. Bronia, the wife of Israel Spira, emerges as a central figure in these female hagiographies. Born in Berlin and with blond hair and Gentile features, Bronia is able to travel on trains in occupied Poland and elude detection. At one point, a German officer confides in her about the massacre of Jews in which he participated in the Russian city of Zhitomir. Later, when other Polish Jews (men, it appears) assure her that such things could not happen in Poland, she is the only one who foresees the coming genocide there. Of course, this kind of knowledge does not represent supernatural clairvoyance, such as one finds in Shivhei ha-Besht. But other stories do. Thus Bronia is able to intuit that her husband (this is her first husband, who was murdered) pried open the bars in a railway car and threw their young son out the window. Bronia sends someone to find the child and rescues him.
Another story in which a female Hasid takes the leading role concerns the Sandz dynasty. The dynasty’s founder, Hayim Halberstam, had a Kiddush cup that was passed down from one generation to the next. During the Shoah, it was in the possession of Mendel Halberstam, who gave it to his daughter Rivka. She hid the cup in the wall of the house. After surviving the war, she returned to her town, discovered that all the Jewish houses were occupied by Poles, except for her family house, which had been damaged in a bombing. But the wall containing the Kiddush cup still stood. She found the cup and brought it to Brooklyn. The miraculous survival of the cup, mediated by a female member of the dynasty, thus becomes the symbol of continuity between the Old World and the New and endows this ritual object with additional meaning. Stories such as these may be indications of inclusion of women into the Hasidic fellowship in the postwar period.
Another sign of the surprising role of women in the Hasidic commemoration of the Holocaust is the important place of the martyrological tale of the ninety-three Beis Ya’akov girls in Krakow. How many of the girls in the school came from Hasidic families is unknown, although, as we saw in chapter 23, Hasidim from a number of movements did send their daughters there. While no historian considers the tale authentic, its extraordinary resonance transcends the question of historical veracity: it is a kind of “pious fiction” that embodies cultural memory. The story was prompted by a letter, supposedly written in July 1942 and smuggled out of the Krakow ghetto. The letter, full of pathos and written in Yiddish but, oddly, in Roman script, describes how ninetythree pupils were about to be prostituted to German soldiers when they took poison and committed suicide. It was published in the New York Times in early 1943 and circulated widely during the war and for years afterward, becoming part of the ecumenical canon of Holocaust memory of Reform and Conservative, as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews. Within the Hasidic world, a Yiddish song celebrating the martyrdom is taught to young girls, but the song elides the sexual overtones of the story, thus making what might have seemed radical or subversive chaste and modest.
The most interesting aspect of this legend is the status of the young women as martyrs. In the Hebrew chronicles of the Crusades, women play an important role as martyrs, but they are typically married women. The Beis Ya’akov legend gestures back a thousand years to the Rhineland massacres, but because Beis Ya’akov was a modern educational movement, these young girls were detached from their families. They form a society of their own, with older girls as teachers preparing the younger ones for martyrdom. Their “rebbe” is clearly Sarah Schenirer, the founder of Beis Ya’akov, who had died in 1935 but was still the inspirational figure of the school. Thus, in a variety of ways, it was a female experience—or at least the legend of a female experience—that became a focus for Hasidic (as well as other Orthodox) memory of the Holocaust.
Pedagogy and scholarship on the Holocaust have, in fact, been largely relegated to women in the ultra-Orthodox world. Yad Vashem in Israel has organized special seminars for ultra-Orthodox teachers to train them in Holocaust education, and this initiative has met in recent years with great enthusiasm. Since it falls mainly to female educators in this world to teach the subject, their audience is almost exclusively girls. In the realm of scholarship, Esther Farbstein, the great-granddaughter of the first Rebbe of Ger and wife of the head of the non-Hasidic Hebron yeshivah, has assembled an enormous body of material on religious life during the Holocaust. She argues, with some justification, that how Orthodox Jews responded to the Nazis has been inadequately studied. Against those who have accused important rebbes—like Aharon Rokeah—of abandoning their flocks, her massive work, Be-Seter Ra’am (Hidden in Thunder) gives a more sympathetic account of their behavior. She also focuses on the preservation of religious life in the ghettos and camps as acts of resistance, a kind of spiritual heroism that might compete with the Zionist emphasis on armed resistance.
Another way in which Hasidim have commemorated the Holocaust is through their traditional niggunim (songs). Perhaps the most famous song to have emerged from the Holocaust is “Ani Ma’amin,” based on the twelfth of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles. According to two related stories, the song was composed by a Hasid of the Modzits dynasty (the two rebbes of Modzits—father and son—were in Brooklyn and Palestine during the Holocaust), a dynasty famous for its niggunim. Both of the stories claim that the song was composed on a train to a death camp (one story says Treblinka, the other Majdanek). In one version, its composer wrote the notes on a piece of paper that a Hasid took with him when he jumped from the train, finally bringing it to either Brooklyn or Bnei Brak. In the other, more elaborated version, the survival of the song is the result of miracles and angelic interventions, thus taking the place of the miraculous survival of the rebbe. These stories have all the earmarks of a folktale similar to those collected by Eliach. Like the story of the ninety-three Beis Ya’akov girls, the niggun spread rapidly in the ultra-Orthodox world and became a signature song for Holocaust commemoration among Jewish communities of all religious (or nonreligious) persuasions.
In fact, the rescue of musical traditions was an important component in the reestablishment of Hasidic communities after the war. Not only Modzits, which was particularly known for its songs, but also Vizhnits, Bratslav, and Lubavitch made major efforts to reconstruct their niggunim by mobilizing those few survivors who knew them and could teach them to others. At the same time, rebbes and others who had musical ability composed new songs to take the place of those that had been lost. Those who have studied these melodies argue that significant shifts can be identified, at times toward more sorrowful than joyful niggunim and also toward greater simplicity of style.
The line between history and hagiography when it comes to a historical catastrophe like the Holocaust is not easy to draw. A final story makes this point. According to an account published in 1947, Israel Shapira of Grodzisk addressed his followers in Treblinka before their murder: “If it has been decreed in this age that we should be the martyrs of the birth pangs of the Messiah, we should rejoice that we have merited to do so. We … need to rejoice because we have merited that our ashes will purify all of the nation of Israel.” The rebbe commanded that the inmates of the camp “should not hesitate and weep in going to the furnaces, but rather should go in joy and with the song “Ani Ma’amin” and like Rabbi Akiva in his time go to their deaths reciting together Shema Yisrael.”10 How could this story have survived when so few of the inmates of Treblinka made it out alive? And was the “Ani Ma’amin” chant already in circulation when the story supposedly took place? These questions of historicity may be the wrong questions: stories like this, true or invented, are central to understanding how the Hasidim after the Khurbn tie their identities to their martyred forebears.
1 Emanuel Ringelblum, Ksovim fun Geto: Togbukh fun Varshever Geto (Warsaw, 1961), vol. 1, 215.
2 Maier Orian, Madregot be-Olamah shel Hasidut (Ramat Gan, 1975), 128–129.
3 Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut Polin: Megamot Ra’ayoniyot bein Shtei ha-Milhamot u-Gezerot Tash ve-Tashe (ha-Shoah) (Tel Aviv, 1990), 413.
4 Quoted in Mayer Amsel, “Eleh Toldos Admorei Bobov,” in Ha-Ma’or (Brooklyn, 1974), 133.
5 Binat Nevonim (Petah Tivkah, 1995), 6 (punctuation in the original).
6 Kalonymos Kalman Shapiro, Esh Kodesh (Jerusalem, 1959/1960), par. Massa’ei, 5701; idem, par. Yitro, 5702; par. Parah, 5702.
7 Ibid., par. Mishpatim (shekalim), 5702.
8 Issacher Teichthal, Em ha-Banim Semehah (Budapest, 1943), 14–15.
9 Shalom Noah Berezovsky, “Remember What Amalek Did to You,” Kuntres ha-Haruga Aleikhah (Jerusalem, 1988), 7–8; quoted in Arye Edrei, “Holocaust Memorial: A Paradigm of Competing Memories in the Religious and Secular Societies of Israel,” in On Memory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Doron Mendels (Oxford and Bern, 2007), 57.
10 Piekarz, Hasidut Polin, 359 n. 23; Israel Shapiro of Grodzisk, Emunat Yisrael (Jerusalem, 1947/1948), introduction.