POSTWAR PHOENIX: HASIDISM AFTER THE HOLOCAUST
THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF THE HOLOCAUST found Hasidism shattered and scattered. As we have seen, some leaders managed to escape the Nazis either immediately before or even during the war. And in most cases, they did so while leaving their many followers behind where they were slaughtered by the Nazis. The courts that we will discuss here had to rebuild their communities, often starting with no more than a handful of Hasidim. They typically drew their support from the survivor communities in New York and Israel, which were composed in part of those who had been Hasidim before the war but even more of observant Jews without any prior affiliation with Hasidism.
For such communities with large numbers of survivors, the courts of Satmar, Bobov, Belz, Ger, and Chabad—to name the largest—provided solidarity, spiritual sustenance, and a link with the past. It cannot be overstated how important the rebbes from Eastern Europe were in constructing a framework of meaning for those who had lost everything, often including whole families. Thus, in trying to understand the attraction of Hasidism after the war and to account for its seemingly miraculous rebirth, it is essential to see it in the context of survivorship. The ethos of postwar Hasidism—meaning its ideas, cultural practices, and communal institutions—must all be framed in this light. The charisma of many of these rebbes was enhanced by their status as living memorials to a murdered world.
Not all of the rebbes of postwar Hasidism were original thinkers, but those who were, like the leaders of Slonim, Satmar, and Chabad, must be understood as constructing a post-Holocaust Hasidic thought, even where the Holocaust did not always play a prominent role in their writings. They also had to account for the rise of the secular State of Israel and for what it meant to live in a country like the United States characterized in the postwar period by low levels of antisemitism and high levels of assimilation. The attraction of these thinkers lay in their efforts to put these developments into a framework of religious meaning, even where they framed that meaning as rejection of the secular world. Hasidism of the post-Shoah period provided a living alternative to modernity as it took shape in pluralistic America and secular Israel.
For example, the concept of kedushah (“sanctity” or “holiness”), as one finds it in the teachings of the Yisrael Alter of Ger, is infused with a powerful sexual asceticism that has its roots in earlier Hasidism, particularly the Polish school of Kotzk from which Ger descends. But in the context of late twentieth-century Israel, this uncompromising demand to overcome sexual desire challenges the culture of sexual libertinism these Hasidim perceive around them. So, too, Satmar’s extreme rejection of the State of Israel, although it has its roots in the prewar period, is not only negative but seeks in addition to construct an alternative to secular Jewish sovereignty. And Chabad, under the leadership of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, offered a different kind of alternative to both American culture and the State of Israel in the form of an urgent messianism.
The ethos of Hasidism in this period combined such ideas with cultural practices and powerful communal institutions. The phenomenal growth of the movement from, at best, a few thousand survivors to roughly three-quarters of a million was the result of a combination of factors: the charisma of the survivor rebbes, their ideologies and theologies, and the communal customs and structures that they created. They benefited from the general phenomenon of religious revival since the 1970s in terms of recruiting non-Orthodox Jews to their ranks, but their growth owed much more to a high rate of fertility, the ability of each court to define its own identity, and elaborate mechanisms of segregation from the secular world.
The new ethos of post-Shoah Hasidism took root in a new geography that replaced the prewar communities. For the first time, most Hasidim lived cheek by jowl, rather than separated by significant distances, one court from the other. Satmar may have been in Williamsburg and Bobov in Borough Park, but the distance between these Brooklyn neighborhoods was tiny compared with the scattered shtetlekh of interwar Poland. Similarly, Meah She’arim and Bnei Brak, the two main communities in which Hasidim settled in Israel, are but a short bus ride from each other. Of course, earlier in the twentieth century, some courts moved to Warsaw and Vienna and therefore competed with each other in an urban environment, but never before had the majority of Hasidic communities resided so close to each other, leading to increased competition for followers and resources. And never before had such a high proportion of Hasidim lived so close to the courts of their rebbes, so that, for many, pilgrimage no longer meant a long journey.
On the other hand, despite this proximity, many Hasidic groups like Satmar, Belz, Vizhnits, and Chabad were now also divided by vast oceans, split between New York and Israel, as well as smaller outposts in Europe, Australia, and Canada. Pilgrimages to rebbes that used to be undertaken on foot, horse-drawn carriage, or railroad now required long airplane flights. And while many Hasidic groups frown on the use of the Internet, they nevertheless resort to the use of modern communications technology in order to maintain group solidarity over long distances. In general, the challenge of technology is one that distinguishes postwar Hasidism from its predecessors.
Although Hasidim had some experience with democratic politics in interwar Poland, now they lived in fully democratic states in which antisemitism no longer played a significant role. They needed to decide how to take part in American or Israeli politics both to benefit their own groups and to shape these societies in their images. A new Hasidic politics emerged in this period, often highly assertive and unafraid of what others might think.
Thus, despite its roots in the prewar world and its proclamation of itself as the custodian of old traditions, Hasidism after the Shoah developed its own, often new character. To be sure, there were major differences between the courts in terms of ethos—teachings, practices, and institutions—but the common problems they faced and their general resistance to modernity defined this new period in Hasidic history. Having barely survived extinction at the hands of the Nazis, Hasidism resurrected itself in new forms and in new places.
The resurrection of Hasidism in the postwar period—and especially since the 1970s—happened at the same time that different fundamentalisms appeared on the world stage. As the plural suggests, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish movements of religious orthodoxy each have different characteristics and causes for their appearance. The very word “fundamentalism,” originating with evangelical Christianity, refers to a literalist reading of scripture. Judaism, including its most conservative varieties, has never taken the Bible literally, so, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Jewish fundamentalism. Yet, if we define what is common to these movements as rigid traditionalism—that is, the adherence to what they believe to be the original and authentic form of their religion—then Hasidism has much in common with evangelical Christianity and salafi Islam. Of course, Hasidism understands itself as a movement originating with the Ba’al Shem Tov and thus no more than two hundred and fifty years old. But it also believes that its way of life is utterly faithful to the way Jews lived before the onslaught of the modern world.
As we have argued through this book, Hasidism is itself a product of modernity—that is, it has repeatedly defined itself over and against the modern world, but often in terms and using techniques that are modern. We might want to distinguish “traditional” from “traditionalist,” the second being an ideological stance taken within a modern context. In the period after World War II, as secularism—and particularly secular nationalism—seemed to be an unstoppable force throughout the world, traditional religions struck back, countering secularism with a “traditionalist” defense, although the traditions they defended might themselves be new. This is how we should understand Hasidism in a comparative context, since its remarkable success in rebuilding itself owed a great deal to offering a traditionalist alternative to Reform Judaism and secular Zionism. Far from just a vestige of its past glory, it took on new life by opposing the dominant forces of the contemporary world.