Map 27.1. Major Hasidic Centers in North America, 2015
AMERICA: HASIDISM’S GOLDENE MEDINAH
IN THE YEARS IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE SHOAH, as Hasidic survivors and refugees arrived on American shores, a dramatic shift occurred as what had previously been considered a treifene medinah (“unkosher state”) now became golden, even messianic. We have seen how the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn, upon his arrival in New York on March 18, 1940, declared that sinful American Jews were responsible for the Holocaust. But for that very reason, if they repented, the messianic redemption would start in America. And his successor and son-in-law, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, made this Jewish revival the hallmark of his leadership. What had once been a weak, albeit growing, outpost of Hasidism in a wilderness of nonobservance would become, after the Holocaust, the preeminent center of Hasidic life outside Israel; the land of promise became the locus of some of Hasidism’s Golden Age, eclipsing in numbers and quality anything in its past. In size, in the number of institutions, political influence, and reach, Hasidic life became firmly established in the very place no one had expected it to flourish.
In the years after the war, the aura of martyrdom and miraculous survival endowed these post-Holocaust Hasidim with charisma and sacred nostalgia that eclipsed their pioneering counterparts who had arrived earlier. With the influx of refugee rebbes and their followers, the Hasidic figures who had once been prominent in America—like the tsaddikim of Chernobyl—would begin to fade in celebrity and influence. In their place would arise courts, which in time would draw a new generation of followers, many from the ranks of Orthodox Jewry whose parents had abandoned or had never even been part of Hasidic life.
Among the first rebbes of note to establish themselves in America after the Holocaust was the Satmar Rebbe, Yoelish Teitelbaum, who arrived on the eve of the Jewish New Year of 1946, after having spent a year in Palestine. Teitelbaum came to the United States ostensibly to raise funds for his foundering institutions in Jerusalem but stayed in recognition of his inability to succeed in the Holy Land. His start in America was modest. His first residence was in a borrowed home on President Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. When he wanted to pray with a minyan, he had to call Jews “off the street” in order to assemble the minimum ten men. Only when he relocated to the Williamsburg neighborhood would the movement begin to grow into what would become the largest court in America.
Teitelbaum had long warned that contemporary culture could eradicate Judaism by making the Jews act like Gentiles. He therefore resolved to wage an unremitting struggle against Jews acting in even the most minor ways like the Gentiles around them, a conservatism soon embraced by all Hasidim in post-Holocaust America. Teitelbaum emphasized the importance of dressing differently, women in modest clothing and hair-covering and men with beards and side-locks as well as Hasidic garb. He stressed speaking Yiddish rather than the American vernacular or the Hebrew usurped and distorted by the Zionists. In order to ensure insularity, he also created his own schools and institutions. The challenge of remaining insulated from modern life in an urban neighborhood so close to “Sin City” was daunting, yet it was also a source of inspiration because it made the culture war immediate: “The very act of declaring separateness from the wicked strengthens the commitment of the righteous.”1 Teitelbaum therefore made a virtue out of living in the heart of an urban ghetto. He liked to quote the Rebbe of Belz, who reputedly said, “If a city had no wicked Jews, it would be worthwhile to pay some wicked Jews to come and live there so that the good Jews would have someone to separate from.”2 This oppositional stance became a core element of Satmar’s identity.
While his primary redoubt was Williamsburg, Teitelbaum also founded a suburban outpost in the 1970s in a village named for him in Monroe Township in Orange County, New York, about an hour’s drive north of the city. The impetus for this move out of the city was to provide housing for newly married couples, but also to better insulate his Hasidim from the seductions and corrosive influences of the urban center. The village of Kiryas Joel (pronounced Yoel and named for Teitelbaum already in his lifetime) was incorporated on 340 acres in 1976 and provided the perfect sanctuary, the rebbe hoped, for his brand of Hasidism. Indeed, he spent his closing years there.
By the twenty-first century, the need for yet another Satmar outpost was forced by the demographic explosion of the group. By 2014, Bloomingburg, a tiny village of 400 in the Catskill region, was bracing for an influx of an equal or greater number of Satmar Hasidim who were moving into the first of nearly 400 townhouses built by an Orthodox Jewish developer. Much to the chagrin and opposition of longtime residents, the Hasidim would soon dominate the political and social life of the place, which they were planning to call Kiryas Yetev Lev. The project became enmired in legal controversy, however, when the developers and a representative of Satmar were indicted for voter fraud in engineering approval of the development. The developers pleaded guilty.
The inspiration for Kiryas Joel came from the Skvirer Hasidim. The Rebbe of Skvira, Ya’akov Yosef Twersky, from the Chernobyl dynasty, arrived in 1947 from Romania, settling first in Borough Park and then in Williamsburg. Twersky had married the granddaughter of Yisakhar Dov Rokeah, the Rebbe of Belz, and lived in his court for a time, absorbing many of its strictly antimodern customs. Twersky had hoped that Brooklyn would be a place where he could rebuild the court that had once flourished in the Ukrainian town of Skvira. Despairing of doing so in the urban environment of New York City, he decided to create something that had never existed in Eastern Europe: a completely Hasidic town in a rural setting where Hasidim voluntarily chose to live. He purchased 130 acres of dairy farmland in 1954 in upstate Rockland County, New York. In 1956, he moved his court and followers to the new community, which was incorporated in 1961 with the Anglicized name of “New Square.”
An even earlier suburban Hasidic community was established in 1948 by the Rebbe of Nitra (Slovakia), Shalom Moshe Ungar, whose father had died of starvation during the Holocaust. Ungar created a small school and Hasidic settlement in Mount Kisco, about an hour north of Brooklyn in Westchester County. Compared to New Square and Kiryas Joel, Mount Kisco remained relatively tiny. The Vizhnits Hasidim would follow this suburban model in 1990, when they turned a small part of the Ramapo area into the Village of Kaser. By then, the surrounding Monsey area had the largest concentration of Hasidim outside Israel and Brooklyn. In this way, the Hasidim returned to the semirural environment that had characterized some of their communities in Eastern Europe, especially in the Carpathian Mountains. But the differences were much greater than the similarities, since these communities are within commuting distance of New York City.
These suburban or rural enclaves notwithstanding, Brooklyn remained the heartland of American Hasidic life. Schneersohn, Teitelbaum, Ungar, and Twersky would be followed by other Hasidic rebbes, who came to the place that would become home for more Hasidim than any other location in America. The arrival of these rebbes in Brooklyn after World War II represented a synergistic development. They came to the borough because during the 1920s and 1930s it had become increasingly Jewish, as people moved across the bridges from the Lower East Side and elsewhere in Manhattan. While at first, Jews with visibly Jewish appearances suffered from verbal expressions of antisemitism and even beatings, as the numbers of observant and Hasidic Jews increased (and the non-Orthodox and other whites began to look elsewhere to live), the refugee rebbes chose to move into these neighborhoods. As a result, by 1949, the Hasidic newcomers, led by charismatic rebbes, were becoming the dominant population.
Hasidim remained in the cities longer than other Jews both because the urban environment was better suited to walking to synagogue on Shabbat and the holidays and because these places offered cheaper housing for large Hasidic families. As certain neighborhoods became increasingly distressed, subject to redlining and blockbusting tactics that would turn them into what then were called “slums,” Hasidim were among the last to leave. Williamsburg, Borough Park, Crown Heights, and Flatbush became the bastions of Hasidic life in the borough. But most Jews who had inhabited Crown Heights moved elsewhere as a result of the racial ferment of the 1960s; only Chabad remained. Indeed, in an impassioned address in 1969, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, living on President Street in Crown Heights, enjoined his Hasidim from leaving. He saw significance in at last remaining in place, after the recent history of Lubavitcher flight from the Soviet Union, Latvia, and Poland. To be sure, he also created a network of thousands of emissaries, or shluchim, who would leave Crown Heights and go on missions of outreach to retrieve Jews throughout the world, thus creating a significant presence outside of Brooklyn. He could not foresee that this neighborhood would experience a renaissance and gentrification that would lead to its becoming a highly desirable place to live in the second decade of the twentyfirst century.
Hasidic Brooklyn was at the outset a series of neighborhoods, even after the large influx of Hasidim, where observant and nonobservant Jews lived side by side in relative peace. But gradually, the Hasidim created more and more monolithic neighborhoods, in part because others moved away when an area became Hasidic or otherwise ultra-Orthodox. These neighborhoods were socially constructed around shared values and worldview, a sense of kinship, powerful attachment to charismatic leadership and the ethos of Hasidism, and a sense of cultural superiority over Gentiles and non-Orthodox Jews alike.
By the turn of the millennium, the Orthodox numbered nearly 40 percent of the Jewish population in Brooklyn, concentrated primarily in the neighborhoods mentioned earlier. The sense of vulnerability that had marked Hasidic life in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and in the 1940s and 1950s when they were few in number now gave way to a sense of hegemony. But with growing self-confidence, the earlier need to maintain solidarity often gave way to competition for resources and prestige. And in addition to conflicts among different groups, there now emerged increasingly conflicts within groups, particularly over succession and leadership, as we will see later in this chapter.
As refugee rebbes established themselves in inner city neighborhoods, they discovered that in America they could manage their own schools and institutions with greater independence than had been the case in the old country. Moreover, in these distressed neighborhoods the Jews who remained in them no longer wanted their children to attend the public schools, and were receptive to sending them to Hasidic yeshivot. The reconstituted courts of Bobov (1945), Klausenburg (1947), and, to a lesser extent, Satmar (1947) were frequently populated by people who were the first in their families to be Hasidim.
Often, this growth occurred through the children of non-Hasidic parents who wanted a traditional education for their children. Graduates of schools run by Hasidim of a particular group often felt attached to the rebbe who headed the group and in time evolved into his Hasidim. For the Bobovers, in particular, educational institutions became a key cause of their tremendous growth, as they relocated from Manhattan to Crown Heights and finally to Borough Park. Apart from satisfying educational requirements (although seldom at a very high level) in English and certain basic arithmetic skills, evaluated by State Regents exams, and meeting health and fire codes, the rest of the curriculum rested exclusively in the hands of the Hasidim (and as would become clear by the twenty-first century, the state was not really looking too closely at the level of the non-Jewish curriculum). They eventually created their own minimalist version of secular studies and intensive Jewish studies grounded in their specific traditions, turning their schools into extensions of their insular communities. While some complained that the schools did not teach the basics of the state-mandated curriculum and produced woefully undereducated citizens whose general studies suffered, the population were generally committed to the idea of most of their time in school being spent on Jewish studies.
Hasidism and American Politics
While Hasidism had a complex—and at times negative—relationship to the East European states in which it lived (see chapter 19), the dramatic decline of antisemitism and the rise of multiculturalism in postwar America created a different relationship to the Gentile state. In addition, the secular nature of American government, its character as a welfare state, combined with the often underlying religious character of civil society made America hospitable to minority religions—and especially Judaism. The rise of multiculturalism as an alternative to the melting-pot ideal, especially in the late twentieth century added to this hospitability, all of which against the backdrop of American democracy presented Hasidim with opportunities to have an impact beyond their relatively small numbers in comparison to the rest of the population. A number of factors lay behind this development.
First was residential clustering, which created the conditions for bloc voting. The impact of these blocs was particularly powerful in metropolitan New York. And as the Hasidim extended their residence to small towns in the nearby suburban counties of Rockland and Orange, and even to Sullivan County in the Catskill Mountain region, their political influence outside New York City grew in both municipal and county government as well as school boards. In these rural regions, they could, at times, become a controlling majority, allowing them to determine local taxes, zoning and water, and budget allocations, among other functions of local government. Some ran as candidates, winning seats and even a judgeship.
In addition, candidates for state, local, and even federal office became accustomed to making pilgrimages to one or another rebbe to have a picture taken with them as visible icons of the Jewish community, thereby signaling their concern about issues important to Jews (rebbes would, however, never make pilgrimages to politicians). The rebbes in their exotic dress and appearance along with their obligatory retinue made picturesque campaign fodder for candidates, but also enhanced the public persona of the rebbe. In cases where there were competing contenders for a dynasty’s throne (a subject to be considered later in this chapter), each contender might back a competing candidate, in the hopes that the one who supported the winner could claim to be viewed as the genuine leader whose political clout mattered. So, for example, the two fraternal competitors for the role of Satmar Rebbe, Aharon and Zalman-Leib Teitelbaum, each endorsed different candidates for Congress in the Democratic primary of 2012: Aharon endorsed the incumbent, Nydia Velázquez, while Zalman endorsed her opponent, Councilman Erik Martin Dilan. Two days after Velázquez’s triumph, Aharon’s followers “issued a news release claiming that their ‘political muscle’ in marshaling 4,000 of her 16,000 votes spelled the difference” and accounted for her victory.3 This claim was meant not simply to demonstrate their power but also to signal other politicians and the community that they were the only authoritative voice of Satmar Hasidism. Similarly, if a Hasid held an elected office, such as the mayor of Kiryas Joel, he would remain subservient to his rebbe.
A number of American Hasidic groups have appointed official representatives—some of whom are insiders and some hired from elsewhere—to serve as intermediaries with politicians, a traditional role from earlier centuries in Jewish history. They have become increasingly sophisticated at lobbying for their interests. Perhaps no group has been better at this shtadlanut (to use the traditional term for lobbying) than Lubavitch. Not only at the local level but also at the national and international level, Lubavitch, spearheaded by the efforts of Avremel Shemtov, the emissary in Philadelphia, and other shluchim like him, have cultivated connections in Washington, D.C., and other capitals. Shemtov (and later his son Levi, who became the main emissary in Washington) began by lighting a Hanukkah menorah with President Carter in 1979, and the annual Hanukkah party in the White House has since been catered and largely controlled by Lubavitchers. In 1983, they arranged a kosher-catered party in the Reagan White House in honor of their late rebbe’s eighty-first birthday. Every American President since Carter has had his photo taken with Lubavitch Hasidim. House and Senate leaders, governors, and members of Congress open their doors to them, and Jewish members of the government have been known to study some Jewish or Hasidic text under the tutelage of a Lubavitch rabbi. Nor are these contacts limited to the United States. In Russia, the second-generation Lubavitcher emissary, Berel Lazar, is currently chief rabbi and member of the Public Chamber of Russia, and informally known as President Vladimir Putin’s “favorite rabbi.”
These connections confirm the belief among Lubavitch Hasidism in the dominance of their rebbe and his power to guide the destiny of the world. Menachem Mendel Schneerson once expressed this conviction as follows:
Everyone needs to find himself in a place where he can be most useful. Here in the United States one finds the key to global influence; here is the steering wheel of the world. Here there are historic changes that can affect the destiny of nations, among them Israel. Here we find possibilities of influencing matters for the benefit of Israel, and from here we can influence as well the situation of religion in the Land of Israel.4
In this statement from 1958, it becomes clear why he and his father-in-law Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn believed that America was the best base for their operations and as the springboard for the coming messianic redemption. America, Menahem Mendel reasoned, was a global power, and Lubavitch could benefit directly from and share this power.
Other rebbes have also established ties with politicians—for example, Satmar was known to have a close relationship with New York’s Governor George Pataki (both had Hungarian roots). The Governor even paid a condolence call during the time Aharon Teitelbaum was sitting shiva for his father, Moshe, the second Satmar Rebbe.
At the local level, Hasidim have generally supported liberal candidates—Democrats mostly—in great measure because of their advocacy of welfare benefits, poverty programs, aid to families with dependent children, housing subsidies, and the like, all necessary for the largely impoverished Hasidic communities (see the section “The Economics of Contemporary Hasidism,” in chapter 29). But drawing upon old Jewish traditions, they have also learned that they are best off if they maintain good relations with whomever is in power, and therefore switch easily from Democrats to Republicans as the need arises. At the national level, however, Hasidim—like other Orthodox Jews—have moved sharply to the right, reflecting conservative values. While Jews as a group have voted Democratic in every presidential election since at least Franklin D. Roosevelt and overwhelmingly support liberal candidates in Congressional contests, since the era of Ronald Reagan, the Orthodox generally and the Hasidim in particular have begun to vote in a contrary direction. For example, nearly 80 percent of Jews voted for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 election and 20 percent for Republican John McCain; among the Orthodox, however, the percentages were reversed, and this was no less true for Hasidim. In the 2016 elections, Donald Trump handily defeated Hillary Clinton in the Hasidic precincts, which were among the few precincts he won in New York.
This voting tendency, ostensibly contradicting the economic needs of the Hasidim, indicates a growing confidence that they will make out well whoever is in charge and can therefore vote for someone whose opposition to the liberal social agenda matches their own conservative worldview. This process has happened in Israel as well. A major realignment in America thus seems to be taking place in which Orthodox Jews—including Hasidim—vote more like evangelical Christians than they do like other Jews. Their turnout in elections is always very high.
The ability of American Hasidim to use the political system for their benefit came into the public eye in 1994 with a Supreme Court case about Kir yas Joel. The Satmar Hasidim set up a public school district for the town in order to obtain New York State assistance for disabled students. Only disabled students were enrolled in this school, while all other Hasidic pupils attended private schools. The boundaries of the district were drawn to include only Satmar families. The Supreme Court ruled that this arrangement unlawfully advanced the interests of one religious group, which is prohibited under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In this case, then, the Hasidim ran up against the underlying secularism of American government, but in general, especially since the 1970s, they profited from the rise of fundamentalist religion throughout American civil society as well as its growing multiculturalism.
Internal Hasidic Conflicts
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in order to signal their attachment to a rebbe, his Hasidim would take on the name of the locale in which he had established himself. So, for example, rather than being known as the Hasidim of Yitshak Meir Alter, his followers were known as Gerer Hasidim, or Hasidim of Ger, after the town of Ger (Gora Kawalria), where he established his court. Hasidic leaders could, and often did, move from place to place (especially if they also served as town rabbis), changing their locale identifier and expanding their pool of supporters with each move. Furthermore, if there were several claimants to a particular dynasty, one might decamp to another place and take on a new place name as he established followers there, as did Yoel Teitelbaum when he left Sighet, where his older brother, Hayim Tsvi, was the Sigheter Rebbe, and settled in Satmar, where he became the Satmar Rebbe.
After the Holocaust, these place names took on a kind of numinous character, a holiness that was enhanced by the destruction of the Hasidic communities during the war. As the surviving rebbes came to America or as new ones established themselves there, they no longer took on new places names to identify themselves. Those who took American place names—like the Buffalo Rebbe (1910), Bostoner Rebbe (1915), or the Pittsburgher Rebbe (1924)—did so long before the destruction of European Jewry. Once the Holocaust effectively endowed the Eastern European place names with a holy aura and sacred nostalgia, it became undesirable to take on a new name as had occurred in the past. The names were frozen in number and time like holy trademarks. With so few Hasidic titles available, the tension and competition for each one and the followers, history, institutions, and prestige that came with them became more intense than ever before. The struggle to forge distinct identities within this constraint became a key feature of American Hasidism in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, even those who tried to create a new court would typically resurrect an apparently extinct dynasty with its European place name. Occasionally, someone would take over another dynastic name to which he could claim some connection, even if it had fallen into disuse or its Hasidim had largely disappeared. For example, a grandson of the Rebbe of Munkatsh took on the name of Dinov, rather than continue to compete with his older brother, who became the Rebbe of Munkatsh. Similarly, Lipa, a son of Moshe Teitelbaum, the second Satmar Rebbe, became the Zenta Rebbe, taking the name of a position his father had held briefly, rather than compete with his brothers, two of whom were fighting over the Satmar title.
The inability to form new courts with new place names had a major impact on the question of succession. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a tsaddik was succeeded either by a son, a son-in-law, or rarely a favorite disciple. After the Holocaust, bloodlines became virtually the sole criterion for succession as a way of preserving the name of the dynasty. Since a second son could not move elsewhere to establish a new court, battles over succession raged with new ferocity. Even such large and established courts as Bobov and Satmar would find themselves internally divided over who was the legitimate rebbe. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were two competing Bobov and Satmar rebbes in their Brooklyn neighborhoods, and other courts, like Vizhnits, had multiple rabbis calling themselves by the same name, albeit not in the same location. To be sure, even earlier there had been competition over who could claim a title, as for example in Chabad, after the death of the third Rebbe when claimants were found in Lubavitch, Liady, Kopust, and Bobruisk. But the battles over names now took on greater ferocity, since they had become a zero-sum competition.
The concentration of courts in a limited area had several additional consequences. In Europe, the distances between courts and the time it took to travel from place to place mitigated the competition for followers and influence. In Brooklyn, one could easily sample a variety of rebbes and congregations without having to travel very far. Moreover, since many new Hasidim had no history of particular attachments, it now became easier to switch from one court to another. If, therefore, a new rebbe took over from his father and the Hasidim were not pleased with his leadership or even if a sitting rebbe lost some of his luster because of illness, aging, or some ideological or political transgression, there was always another nearby court to which one might transfer allegiance. In America, where immigrants learned to reinvent themselves, even Hasidim, who thought they were totally insulated from American culture, embraced a similar ethos.
After the initial period of rebuilding, the courts tried to limit switching, although the physical ease of movement remained, even if discouraged by norm and social pressure. Yet the zeal of Lubavitch emissaries and their conviction that spreading the message of their rebbe, which both the sixth and seventh rebbes had made cornerstones of their ministry, violated the “antipoaching” norms that were crucial if each Hasidic group was to maintain its identity. Satmar especially reacted against the teaching among its Hasidim of the Tanya, the core text of Chabad, as the vehicle for proselytizing, with skirmishes breaking out over successes by Chabad in attracting followers of Satmar.
In this atmosphere of fierce competition, there were winners and losers. Satmar under Yoel Teitelbaum and Bobov under Shlomo Halberstam became the two largest American courts. By contrast, Stolin, led by Yohanan Perlow, the surviving son of a family decimated by the Nazis, who arrived in Williamsburg from Israel in 1948, nearly vanished. Perlow evidently lacked the charisma to build his court in Brooklyn and he died only eight years after his arrival with no plausible heir. After he died, some of the members of his small court moved to other rebbes. His grandson took on the mantle of leadership eight years later at the age of nine, but after legal infighting over Stolin properties and institutions, he was able to resurrect his court only in Israel, where he moved in 1991.
A second consequence of the geographic concentration of American Hasidism was the blurring of distinctions between Hasidim and other Orthodox Jews, a process that already started in Eastern Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century. The head of a non-Hasidic yeshivah is often revered in ways that made him seem like a rebbe or tsaddik and his sons or sons-in-law might inherit his power. This transformed a role that was once achieved by scholarly merit into one at times transmitted by birth. On the other hand, Hasidic rebbes increasingly sought to have their male followers go through the socialization and education of a yeshivah, albeit one that added Hasidism and the rebbe’s own writings to its Torah curriculum. The distinctions within haredi or ultra-Orthodox Judaism became increasingly blurred.
We now turn to a closer examination of a number of the Hasidic groups that have become particularly prominent in America, because of their numbers, theology, or cultural and political influence. Even among these prominent courts, as we shall see, problems of internal conflict and succession have emerged.
Satmar
Satmar Hasidim stand out for their huge numbers. They are the largest group in North America and maybe in the world: in 2010, there were approximately seventy thousand in Williamsburg and twenty-one thousand in Kiryas Joel; some in Borough Park, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the United States; as well as thousands in Israel, Canada, and Europe. Their cultural and religious influence is correspondingly high as well. Motivated in part by extreme anti-Zionism, Teitelbaum as earlier noted had come to America in 1946 ostensibly to raise funds for his foundering efforts to reestablish his court in Palestine. Deciding to remain there, he would become known for his stubborn opposition to acculturation as well as theological creativity, grounded in a vast erudition in rabbinic literature, qualities already in evidence before the Holocaust. But his reputation was founded mostly on his uncompromising animosity toward Zionism and the Israeli state, seeing it as a heresy conceived in sin. He opposed and harassed anyone in the Jewish community suspected of taking part in any sort of Zionist activity.
Teitelbaum was already active in Hungarian intra-Jewish politics in the interwar period when, like Hayim Elazar Shapira, the Rebbe of Munkatsh, he organized rabbinical opposition to Zionism. In this period, his stance on Zionism was already extreme. He appears to have begun his anti-Zionist magnum opus, Va-Yoel Moshe, in the 1930s, but he published the work in three volumes only between 1958 and 1961, possibly because by then the success of the Zionist movement in creating a secular state and in gathering in hundreds of thousands of survivors—including many religious Jews—seemed to require a published response. The Holocaust and the establishment of the Jewish state intensified his earlier ideology rather than provoking a rethinking.
Adopting the most extreme form of theodicy, the belief that suffering must be a punishment for sin, he argued that the mass immigration of Jews to the Holy Land and the aspiration to attain political sovereignty before the advent of the Messiah were violations of a cardinal divine commandment. The Shoah, he argued, was divine punishment of the Zionists, who had violated two of the three oaths mentioned in tractate Ketubot 110b–111a of the Babylonian Talmud as well as in the rabbinic midrash on the Song of Songs 8:11 (which presents the oaths with small variations). According to these texts, the Jews had sworn two oaths to God when they went into exile: not to hasten the messianic age and not to immigrate en masse to the Land of Israel. The nations of the world then swore a third oath: not to persecute the Jews too much. While the tradition of the three oaths played only a minor role in post-Talmudic Jewish thought and certainly did not have any specific legal standing, Teitelbaum turned the oaths into the centerpiece of his theology. Because the Zionists had seized the initiative to return the Jews to their ancestral land, the nations of the world—meaning here the Nazis—were released from their oath and the result was the Shoah. Following an old prophetic trope, the Nazis here are mere instruments in God’s punishment of the Jews.
Writing of Israel’s Independence Day, he called it “the day that the members of the conspiracy against God and His Messiah established their Kingdom of atheism over the Jewish people, by uprooting the Holy Torah and the Faith. At that time [that is, May 14, 1948], the shedding of blood of myriads upon myriads of Jews began.”5 The Zionists were therefore responsible for the deaths of the many Jews who fell during the Israel’s War of Independence. As this quotation demonstrates, Teitelbaum’s anti-Zionism was shot through with messianic urgency. The Zionist usurpation of God’s role is particularly egregious precisely because the world is on the very cusp of redemption. Zionism is a kind of anti-Christ whose crime is all the greater because of its proximity to the eschaton. For this reason, the Holocaust is more backdrop than foreground to the book. And for his Hasidim, there was really no contradiction between their rebbe’s position and the fact that it was the Zionists who saved him: as with all Jewish theodicies going back to the biblical prophets, God will use the most evil people for his purposes, whether they be Zionists or Nazis. Moreover, in the State of Israel, some of the Satmar Hasidim have even equated the two.
While most treatments of Va-Yoel Moshe focus on the doctrine of the three oaths, which informs the first volume of his book, the other two volumes are equally important. Volume II deals with the commandment to live in the Land of Israel, which appears just before the three oaths in tractate Ketubot. Teitelbaum shows that most medieval authorities did not consider this a commandment, and he also detaches a personal decision to settle in the Land from any messianic context. Volume III deals with the revival of the Hebrew language, which Teitelbaum recognized as one of the great achievements of Zionism. But he distinguishes sharply between leshon kodesh (the Holy Tongue) and ivrit (modern Hebrew). The latter is a thoroughly secular, even heretical invention, with no genuine connection to the former.
Teitelbaum’s scholarship and charisma seemed to outshine the Sighet dynasty from which he had come. While there were more important and larger courts in Europe, more of the Satmar Hasidim managed to survive the Holocaust, in part because Hungarian Jewry was among the last to be rounded up by the Nazis and their allies. He was also enormously successful in recruiting non-Hasidic or non-Satmar Orthodox Jews to his court in the years after coming to America. As a result, Satmar became the largest Hasidic group in North America. Teitelbaum traveled to Israel frequently to attend to the needs of his Hasidim there, but these visits did nothing to moderate his anti-Zionism. On the contrary, he took an uncompromising stance against any involvement with the Israeli state and waged bitter wars against other Hasidic groups that took part in haredi political parties that ran for the Knesset.
Teitelbaum’s extreme hostility to Zionism had its corollary in Satmar’s opposition to acculturation, which, in Teitelbaum’s case found expression in his powerful endorsement of Hasidim wearing their traditional garb in public and speaking in Yiddish even in America of the melting-pot as well as with his obsession with purity. This obsession may have had its roots in his own personality. According to his biographer:
Three-year-old Joel Teitelbaum repeatedly engaged for long periods of time in rinsing his mouth, washing his hands, and sitting on the toilet, often interrupting his own prayers to return to the outhouse. The explanation offered for this behavior, which was a source of great concern to his mother, is that the saintly child could not appear before his Creator in prayer without having completely purified his holy body of all forms of uncleanness.6
This fear of impurity may explain why he reportedly refused to even touch Israeli currency. For Teitelbaum, the Zionist state was the very essence of pollution.
As Teitelbaum aged, the question of who would succeed him loomed large. When he died in 1979 at age 92, after a stroke and prolonged illness, he left no obvious heirs. His first wife, Havah, who had borne him three daughters, died young, and his second wife, Alte Feige, although much younger than he, remained childless. By the time Teitelbaum himself died, all his daughters had predeceased him without bearing children. A legendary leader and a powerful personality, his charisma was owing not only to his office but also to his life experiences, his concern for his Hasidism, his learning and his will, as well as his refusal to bend under the suffering of the Holocaust and his constant migrations. At last in America, he had created the largest and most formidable group of Hasidim in America, yet without an agreed-upon successor.
The Satmar Hasidim turned to his sixty-six-year-old nephew Moshe Teitelbaum, until then the Rebbe of Sighet, the court from which Satmar itself had derived, but which had become demographically quite insignificant. Since Sighet Hasidism had fallen on hard times, Moshe Teitelbaum, living in nearby Borough Park, spent most of his time as a businessman rather than as a full-time tsaddik. Yet, as a blood relative and therefore “holy seed” in Hasidic thinking, as well as someone who had lived in the Satmar Rebbe’s household as a child, Moshe could claim the leadership of Satmar. And as a Holocaust survivor, he also was surrounded by a kind of halo of holiness that the postwar Hasidic community bestowed on such leaders. Like many other survivors, he had lost his first wife and their children to the Nazis, but had remarried after the war and built a new family. He had six children, among them sons who might serve as possible heirs of the Satmar throne.
Nevertheless, a dispute broke out over succession. Yoilish’s widow, Alte Feige, wielded enormous power amassed during her husband’s later years, when his infirmity and physical decline loomed large. During those years, she controlled the disbursement of funds and blessings, serving as a kind of living embodiment of her husband. Feige, as she was known, was as close as a woman could get to functioning as a rebbe, even on occasion speaking from the men’s section of the synagogue and handing out funds or taking supplicatory notes (kvitlekh) directly from Hasidim, both acts unheard of in the strictly gender-segregated society of contemporary Hasidism. The staff that had surrounded the late rebbe had gradually attached itself to her, knowing that if the crown went to Moshe, he would bring in his own people as functionaries of the court. Since, as a woman, Feige could never assume the post of rebbe, she threw her support behind a the idea of running the court through a number of Satmar rabbis and dayanim (adjudicators) hoping to remain the power behind the throne by receiving instruction from her late husband at his gravesite (we will pick up the story of women and contemporary Hasidism in chapter 29).
After the death of Yoel Teitelbaum and before the universal acceptance of his successor and nephew, Moshe Teitelbaum—a particularly delicate moment of transition for Satmar—some Satmar Hasidim gravitated to Lubavitch and its increasingly prominent rebbe, who was now among the senior Hasidic leaders in America. This was the same year that his politically influential followers lit a giant Hanukkah menorah in front of the White House with President Jimmy Carter, thus demonstrating Chabad’s growing clout. Rabbi Mendel Wechter, one of Satmar’s elite scholars from a distinguished family had gradually been attracted to Chabad. He increasingly taught its texts to the students in his yeshivah. Although he claimed he taught them only for their spiritual value and that he did not see himself as a Lubavitcher, other Satmar Hasidim considered Wechter’s actions as a mortal threat to their group.
Heated debates among students in his class, stimulated by study of Yoel Teitelbaum’s writings, led to strong words against the Lubavitcher Rebbe, whose ideas and movement Satmar saw as too infected by the modern world. Rabbi Wechter’s private views were quickly characterized as heretical. Satmar Hasidim demanded that he declare his allegiance to the Satmar Rebbe and attack Lubavitch. When he refused, the struggles between the two groups moved into the streets, parents removed their sons from his school, Wechter’s wife was dismissed from her job, and ultimately after twelve years of operation, his yeshivah closed its doors. The Wechters moved from Williamsburg to the more pluralist neighborhood in Borough Park.
But this victory led to further radicalization, with some of his students moving to Lubavitch and others becoming militantly Satmar. Families were torn asunder, and community pressure increased on both sides for people to choose their allegiances. Several more students began visiting Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway and attached themselves to some of the teachers there. One of them, Pinchas Korf, came to Williamsburg to teach Tanya. At a certain point, he was physically attacked, and his beard was cut. The assault became infamous, presented by Satmar as a defense against poaching and by Lubavitch as an attack on a scholar. This in turn led to mutual bans by both groups on the kashrut of products supervised by the authority of the other, an attack on an important source of income for each group. The matter of changing allegiances had other economic consequences, since each Hasidic family could be counted upon to give pidyon or financial support to their rebbe.
Each side found ways to slander the other. Satmar attacked the practice of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in handing items, like his dollar bills, directly to women, an act that some considered immodest and promiscuous, although conveniently ignoring similar actions by the Satmar rebbetsin. Suits were even filed in city courts, which is outside the network of Hasidic courts, actions usually condemned by the ultra-Orthodox. In the course of the ongoing war, both sides appeared to suffer and lose prestige. Gradually, the battles subsided, as Lubavitch turned increasing attention toward Jews at large and the new Satmar Rebbe, Moshe Teitelbaum, consolidated his leadership.
Teitelbaum and his oldest son, Aharon, who headed the community in Kiryas Joel where the widow Feige now lived, would in due course strip her and her followers of their power. But the dowager rebbetsin held on to the late rebbe’s residence and supported a coterie of Hasidim who resisted Moshe’s leadership. These Hasidim became known as Bnei Yoel (sons of Yoel), “the rebbetsin’s Hasidim,” or Mitnaggdim (opponents, but also, as we have seen throughout this book, the name for the opponents of Hasidism starting in the eighteenth century). The fact that all these people continued to live side by side or at most a short train or bus ride away from one another exacerbated the hostility. However, the opponents of Moshe gradually declined in number, although they would return in another guise in the years ahead. Moshe became generally recognized as the Satmar Rebbe, albeit lacking the charisma of his predecessor, he succeeded in growing the court.
Moshe oversaw a great population explosion of Satmar Hasidim and built up its institutions, providing a needed stability during the early years of his reign. As the United States became a more multicultural society, Moshe Teitelbaum presided over a relatively easy time for his Hasidim to grow in number. They were able to take advantage of a wide array of government services that enhanced their economic and social conditions. The ability to tap these resources and to live in relative peace for much of his reign allowed the Satmar Hasidim to grow to unprecedented numbers and political strength. Moshe consolidated his strength and placed his sons in positions of authority in the court and its institutions. He named his oldest son Aharon as the rabbi and yeshivah head in Kiryas Joel, presumably making him the crown prince, even though he was married to the daughter of Moshe Hager, the Rebbe of Vizhnits, who was considered not as anti-Zionist as Satmar. A second son, Zalman, was named the Rebbe of Sighet. Other children were given positions in the growing Satmar institutions. Moshe undoubtedly believed he had found a way to situate both his sons in the family business. Soon, however, Zalman was “exiled” from Brooklyn to Jerusalem to head the relatively small Satmar community there. Some suggested that this was at his older brother’s Aharon suggestion in order to position himself as the only crown prince: he did not need his more personable brother stealing any of the attention in Brooklyn.
In June of 1999, the future of Satmar suddenly became confused. What had seemed to be Aharon’s inexorable march toward a succession was unexpectedly thrown into question when Zalman Leib was recalled from Jerusalem and installed as the Av Bet Din (chief judge in the Satmar court) and head of the yeshivah in the Yetev Lev congregation in Williamsburg. This sudden move was engineered by Satmar court functionaries who feared Aharon’s autocratic style and wanted to preserve their positions; they also argued that the court was now too large to be headed by only a single leader. Some argued that he was too moderate. They struck just as Moshe Teitelbaum began a slow descent into dementia, a condition that undermined the orderly functioning of the huge court. Zalman Leib became the controlling authority in Williamsburg, the core community, while Aharon remained based in Kiryas Joel.
The Satmar Hasidim split between the champions of Aharon and those of his younger brother Zalman Leib. In the closing years of their father’s life, as his active role diminished, each side jockeyed for position. Had this sort of situation existed in an earlier time, Aharon, whose community in Kiryas Joel had grown exponentially since its founding in 1974, might have been content to remain there and take the name of this hamlet as his own. But that was not possible in the Hasidic world of the postwar period. Kiryas Joel had to remain a satellite of Williamsburg.
In April 2006, when Moshe Teitelbaum died, the succession struggle erupted anew. The immediate cause was the discovery of the late rebbe’s will. In Hasidic tradition, the will ought to have been determinative. At first, citing a verbal will dated from 1996, Aharon’s supporters claimed that Moshe had declared that his eldest son alone would be the new Rebbe of Satmar. More and more Hasidim were called upon to corroborate this fact, even though no document was produced. The supporters of Zalman Leib, for their part, arranged for a public reading of a subsequent will, really a letter signed in 2002 that declared Zalman Leib as successor. This text began: “Insofar as I have appointed my dear son, the scholar and tsaddik, Yekutiel Yehudah [Zalman], as Rav and Av Beit Din (judge) of our congregation, Yetev Lev here in Williamsburg.” It concluded that Zalman Leib was “to stand at the helm of our holy institutions here” in Williamsburg. But Aharon’s supporters responded that this “will” was signed after the late rebbe was afflicted with dementia. They further claimed that the rebbe himself adhered to a custom that wills written after one was eighty could not be considered valid.
The middle brother, Lipa, dramatically threw his support to Zalman Leib, as did much of Williamsburg, while Kiryas Joel stayed with Aharon, already their local leader. Some of Zalman’s supporters came from among the Bnei Yoel and other supporters of the late rebbetsin Alte Feige, who had opposed Aharon before her death. And so it was that Satmar split into two groups of Hasidim: those who view Aharon as their rebbe, informally called “Aaronis,” or “Aharonim,” and those who are followers of his brother, the “Zalis” or “Zaloinim.” They have built two sets of parallel institutions, at enormous expense, while the Williamsburg synagogue that was being built to hold all of them stands unfinished, a rusting reminder of their divisions. At the same time, the ongoing contest between the Aaronis and Zalis has added a vitality to Satmar, as each side has garnered intense loyalty among its members while trying to outdo the other. Each side has tried to create institutions to sustain their leadership. For example, Aaron broke his yeshivot, an important source for any rebbe’s court’s growth, into four units, so if someone was dissatisfied with one, as opposed to leaving his group, he could transfer a child to another.
Although conflicts between Hasidic groups go back at least to the nineteenth century, Satmar under Yoel Teitelbaum was especially provocative, often as a result of its fanatical anti-Zionism. As we will see in chapter 28, Teitelbaum viciously attacked the Rebbe of Klausenburg for moving to Israel and for creating a town there. He also declared war on Belz, a conflict that lasted nearly fifty years. The two dynasties—Teitelbaum in Hungary and Rokeah in Galicia—were considered close in terms of worldviews before the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, the two rebbes rebuilt their ravaged communities, each in the place of his choosing: Yoel Teitelbaum in Brooklyn, and Aharon Rokeah on Ahad Ha’am Street in Tel Aviv. In 1955, the Rebbe of Belz advocated taking part in general elections in Israel, even though he still considered himself part of the anti-Zionist Edah Haredit (an organization highly identified with Satmar). During a visit to Israel, Teitelbaum tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to stay out of Zionist politics. In a sermon he delivered not long afterward, Teitelbaum said that he would not have believed it, “if it were not written explicitly that Aharon committed the act of the [golden] calf.” His listeners construed this to mean that the “calf” was the State of Israel and that “Aharon” was none other than Aharon Rokeah.
This battle continued on and off for years, even after Aharon’s nephew, Yisakhar Dov Rokeah became the Rebbe of Belz and long after both Yoel Teitelbaum and his successor Moshe were dead. Yisakhar Dov Rokeah has become an ever more prominent player in the political life of Hasidism in the Jewish state, thus exacerbating the casus belli. But in recent years, as we have just seen, Satmar had to do battle while hobbled by a divided court.
Ideological disagreements over Zionism may have masked more material conflicts and jockeying for influence in the ultra-Orthodox world. The Rebbe of Belz had established a growing number of institutions that enhanced his position. These included a rabbinical court, a ritual-slaughter and kashrut system, and a marriage-registration bureau. Until then, these services had been provided for the Belz Hasidim by the Edah Haredit, Satmar’s proxy organization. By initiating his own such services, the Belzer Rebbe was not only throwing down a symbolic gauntlet to the Edah Haredit, he was also undermining an important source of its income, prestige, and influence. Satmar responded by boycotting products with the kashrut supervision of Belz, and vice versa. According to a joke that circulated in Hasidic circles, an old Belz Hasid asked in his will to be interred in the Satmar burial plot at the cemetery. “There of all places?” his family asked him with astonishment. But the old man explained: “Satmar worms do not eat Belz.”
In January of 2012, the Rebbe of Belz attempted a reconciliation that had its roots in family ties: the Rebbe of Belz and Aharon Teitelbaum, one of the claimants to the Satmar crown, are both married to the daughters of the Vizhnits Rebbe, Moshe Hager, and are thus brothers-in-law. Indeed, the two sisters, Sarah Rokeah and Sasha Teitelbaum, were critical in bringing about conciliation. The leader of Belz sent a delegation of ten dayanim (rabbinic judges), headed by his personal assistant, to the graves of the Satmar Rebbes, Yoel and Moshe Teitelbaum, in the Kiryas Yoel cemetery in New York City. There they recited a chapter of Psalms in the name of their rebbe, asking for forgiveness if the dignity of the dead rebbes had been harmed. However, by appealing to the dead rather than the living leaders, they were subtly displaying contempt for the latter’s authority.
Bobov
Bobov, perhaps the fastest growing Hasidic group in Brooklyn over the last twentyfive years, is the second largest in America after Satmar. The Bobov Hasidim are relatively modern: their women are known for their fashionable dress and their men for their astute understanding of business, leading to a relatively affluent population in comparison with other groups. As we have related in chapter 26 on the Holocaust, Shlomo Halberstam, the third Rebbe of Bobov, lost his father, first wife, Bluma, and several children in the Nazi firestorm. He came in 1945 to Manhattan’s West Side as a refugee. His oldest surviving son, Naftali, who had been with him throughout the war and ended up in Palestine, was reunited with him in New York. By the time he arrived in America, Shlomo was a broken man, whose faith was deeply shaken by what he had experienced, and with barely three hundred Hasidim who had managed to make it to America, he found himself facing the seemingly impossible task of rebuilding a decimated family and court.
At the urging of his surviving Hasidim, Halberstam married Frieda, with whom he had a son, Ben Zion Aryeh Leib, and five daughters, and was able to resurrect his faith. Moving to Crown Heights in Brooklyn (and later, when that neighborhood underwent decline, to Borough Park), he gradually attracted a new generation of Hasidim, many of them graduates of his yeshivot. His warm personality, radiant smile, and love of Hasidic song and dance, as well as a school that reflected this nurturing and accepting approach, attracted many who were not necessarily from a Bobov background. Unlike Yoilish Teitelbaum, Halberstam avoided controversy and conflict whenever possible, which may have been the result of a combination of personality and his wartime experiences.
The rebbe’s ability to reaffirm his faith and to build a new court made him seem larger than life, a holy relic of a world that was destroyed but now reborn. His reputation of good works during the Holocaust also burnished his image. By the time of his death in August 2000, Halberstam had more followers than his father had in prewar Poland, most with no connection to the historical Bobov. In some measure, reconstituted Bobov is an American creation, with all the enthusiasms and invention that Hasidic converts are likely to display. In the Hasidic marketplace, where the choice was the severity of Satmar and its allies or the outreach activity of Lubavitch to Jews who were neither Hasidic nor Orthodox, Shlomo Halberstam’s Bobov became an inviting option. Under Halberstam’s leadership, Bobov came to number 120,000 followers worldwide, a number that rivals Satmar.
When Shlomo died at age ninety-two in 2000, Naftali, his oldest son from his first family who had survived the Holocaust with his father, became the new rebbe at the age of sixty-nine. Ill with Parkinson disease, he was dead by 2005, too early to have established who would follow him. Naftali’s half-brother, Ben Zion Aryeh Leib, was the only son of the new family Shlomo Halberstam had created in America after the Holocaust. To many in Bobov, Ben Zion seemed to be the logical choice as fifth Rebbe. He had sat at Naftali’s side and before that at his father’s at all the gatherings of the Bobovers, a position that marked him as a crown prince and “rebbe-in-waiting.” Like his half-brother, he was the next generation after the third Rebbe.
But Naftali had two daughters, and some Hasidim regarded the husband of one of them, Mordechai Dovid Unger, son of the Rebbe of Dombrov, as a legitimate claimant to the Bobov crown. They reasoned that once the crown had passed to Naftali Halberstam, Bobov became his to pass on. Following Naftali’s death, therefore, Bobov split, with some Hasidim following Unger, who set up a rival headquarters and bet midrash a few blocks away from the Bobov main building in Brooklyn’s Borough Park. Others remained with Ben Zion Aryeh Leib Halberstam. Both considered themselves the rightful rebbe, and both maintained the traditions and customs of the group. The split divided families and caused great anguish in a movement that had been known for its harmony.
Around the time of the Jewish New Year in 2007, the Bobov Hasidim tried to resolve the dispute by acceding to a rabbinic court that demanded a survey, which seemed something like an election, to see which of the leaders had the most followers. After several years, the court, finding that Ben Zion’s Hasidim outnumbered his rival’s, decreed that only the group affiliated with Ben Zion and headquartered at the main Bobov synagogue on Brooklyn’s 48th Street would be called “Bobov.” The other would be known as “Bobov45,” since it had been founded and briefly headquartered on 45th Street. Under no circumstances could this second group call itself “Bobov” without the additional identifier.
Like the various Satmar sects, it is very difficult to differentiate one Bobov group from the other. For example, on the interim days of the Sukkot holiday, when the Bobov Hasidim traditionally play violins at their rebbe’s table, an observer would find two identical gatherings, along with the requisite fiddlers playing the same tunes, gathered in two remarkably similar sukkot, simultaneously singing and eating with their rebbes, both of whom maintain many of the same customs and traditions.
Chabad’s sixth Rebbe, Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn, settled in America in March of 1940. By the end of the war, most of his Hasidim were either murdered or marooned in the Soviet Union. All alternative claimants to the Chabad name were no longer operational. Those few Hasidim who had made it to America were in crisis: having believed their rebbe’s assurances that the redemption was near, they now faced a future with no clear direction and no Messiah. Messianic belief had venerable roots in Chabad, as we have seen. Yosef Yitshak was convinced that the terrible suffering of the Jewish people was the “birth pangs of the Messiah.” He preached that the Jews themselves had the power to hasten their redemption by arousing themselves and the other Jews to repentance. In a campaign to capture the attention of American Jewry, his motto was le-altar li-tshuvah, le-altar li-geulah (repentance immediately, redemption immediately), and in the years after his arrival in America in 1940, his Hasidim posted stickers with this slogan around their New York neighborhoods. Few, other than the Lubavitchers, paid much attention.
When Yosef Yitshak died in 1950, these messianic expectations remained unfulfilled. Instead of redemption, the future now appeared increasingly unsettled. American Jews seemed even less religious and more intent on assimilating than when the rebbe had arrived. The Stalinist Soviet Union, his archenemy, was stronger than ever. Secular Zionism, which he and his father had demonized, had successfully created the State of Israel, had fought off all the Arab armies, and had welcomed millions of Jewish immigrants. And there was no sign of the Messiah or redemption. “A feeling of unease,” as one Hasid wrote in his journal at the time, began “gnawing at us” because “our unshakable faith that the Rebbe would lead us to meet the [‘Messiah’]” had been undermined by his death and by events in the world.7
Moreover, there was no clear sign of a successor. Shmaryahu Gourary (1898–1989) was the husband of the rebbe’s oldest daughter and was his right-hand man. He had lived with him for years and was the father of his only living heir, the twenty-sevenyear-old bachelor grandson, Dov Ber (1923–2005) now known as Barry, whom the rebbe had once blessed, asking that God “grant that he tread the same path that was boldly trodden by my holy forebears, for in his veins flows holy blood that is bequeathed from a father to his son, to his grandson, and to his great-grandson.”8 The sixth Rebbe’s second surviving son-in-law, Menachem Mendel, had spent most of the previous years far from the court, studying to be an engineer in Berlin and Paris, but he was now living a few streets away in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and was heading the educational and publishing arm of the Lubavitcher organization, Merkos L’inyonei Chinuch. To the surprise of many and in the face of opposition from Yosef Yitshak’s wife and members of the family, Menachem Mendel staged a swift and successful campaign to ascend to the throne of Chabad. Because he had made his father-in-law’s messianic doctrine his own, many in Lubavitch came to see him as the dynasty’s natural successor.
Figure 27.1. Menachem Mendel Schneerson of Chabad at a farbrengen (gathering) on the 19th of Kislev, 1974, photograph. The 19th of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar is the day Shneur Zalman of Liady was freed from Russian prison and is the occasion of a yearly Chabad celebration. Courtesy of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, RG-120-US-F668.
From the moment of his initial address on January 17, 1951, as the new rebbe and throughout his tenure, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994; see figure 27.1) made messianism the core of his ministry: “We are now very near the approaching footsteps of Messiah,” he announced, “indeed, we are at the conclusion of this period, and our spiritual task is to complete the process of drawing down the shekhinah—moreover, the essence of the shekhinah—precisely within our lowly world.”
When he became the seventh Rebbe, Schneerson and his wife were in their late forties and childless: succession was thus already an issue. Their nephew, Barry, who would become a management consultant in New Jersey, was moving out of the Lubavitch orbit, and his two adopted daughters also did not identify with the movement. No other Schneerson relatives were left as possible successors. But in the course of the rebbe’s forty-three-year reign, he became larger than life and succession seemed increasingly unthinkable. As time went on, the answer to the question of succession increasingly took the form of belief in the Messiah’s imminent arrival: the seventh Rebbe would be the last.
Schneerson also found a way to deny death. As he said in the days after the funeral of his father-in-law: “But we do have a rebbe. What difference does it make where he is, in this world or the other world?”9 The previous rebbe was still leading the Hasidim, and he, Menachem Mendel, was only a temporary replacement (memaleh mekomo). Although in the eyes of his Hasidim, Menachem Mendel may have eclipsed his predecessor, he himself regarded Yosef Yitshak in messianic terms. Long after the seventh Rebbe stopped going anywhere outside his Brooklyn neighborhood, he would still travel to the cemetery to his predecessor’s ohel (mausoleum) in Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, New York, bring the pidyonot, notes and requests of the Hasidim to his father-in-law’s grave, and claim to receive replies from him. These cemetery visits derived from the belief that Yosef Yitshak had not really died in the usual sense of the word, he had simply gone into “occultation,” a belief that some Chabad Hasidim would come to apply to Menachem Mendel himself after his own death.
But Menachem Mendel was hardly a passive successor to his father-in-law. It was left to this seventh generation of Lubavitcher rebbes, like the seven generations between the patriarch Abraham and Moses, who redeemed the Jews, to bring about redemption. Indeed, some regarded Menachem Mendel as a new Moses. Despite his avowed subordination to his deceased father-in-law, Menachem Mendel handled messianic activity differently. It was not sufficient to wait for repentance by secular Jews; Chabad needed to organize a campaign to bring about that repentance. They could be made to abandon their assimilationist aspirations, escape the seductions of contemporary culture and turn back to a traditional Jewish identity. He knew that being religious in America and Israel, and indeed wherever modern Jewry found itself, could be acceptable, even laudable. This was especially true in America, as it embraced multiculturalism and as fundamentalist religion became a mass movement among Christians. A Jew could now choose to be publicly religious even in a secular environment.
While the sixth Rebbe had warned that a failure to follow the commandments would lead to a fiery end for Jewry, his successor outlined a more benign path to redemption based on “devotion to the cause of spreading kindness and goodness” and “awakening in everyone the potential that he has.”10 Redemption did not require any further death and suffering, no more birth pangs. His was not a messianism requiring pain and catastrophe. The converted sinner could change the cosmic balance and bring the redemption, a Messiah whose footsteps (ikveta di-meshiha) could now be seen.11 As a poster Chabad published put it: “Moshiach is here, just add in goodness and kindness.” This was a more attractive recipe for repentance and religion, especially in the modern world.
Earlier rebbes—and especially from Chabad—had used emissaries in the past to minister to their Hasidim and collect pidyonot, but Schneerson transformed these shluchim into a cadre of outreach workers whose mission was to transform world Jewry. He labeled their work “campaigns” or “operations” (mivtsoim), a term resonant with military imagery and implicitly in competition with the Israeli army. If Israel drafted young Jews to fight, Lubavitch would mobilize Tzivos ha-Shem (the armies of God) to perform Jewish commandments. If the Israeli army had tanks, Lubavitch had “mitzvah tanks,” caravans that were like synagogues on wheels in which legions of shluchim throughout the world spread the rebbe’s ideas. This use of military metaphors came as Lubavitch pivoted from its tradition of fierce anti-Zionism to imagining that its rebbe was determining what happens in Israel, especially after the 1967 Six Day War.
As Menachem Mendel described his outreach campaign to world Jewry in March of 1961, it sounded uncannily like a message President John Kennedy had used several days earlier about the Peace Corps:
Don’t convince yourselves that you can live off the fat of the land and reside in these few blocks … [in Brooklyn, where you have] fresh milk every day and you can shower twice a day and there is no shortage of kosher milk and kosher bread and you can serve God and remain here. Listen! There is a “desolate land” which is thus far undeveloped spiritually. There are Jews there who don’t even know that they lack anything. You had the unearned privilege to be brought up with Torah and the commandments.12
He urged them to go forth from their land of material and spiritual plenty, and stay in those desolate places “for a day, a week, a month, a year, ten years. You won’t have nice clothes and a comfortable home? The Jews in the place to which you are going also manage without them. Why should you be better?” The shluchim would be a kind of Jewish Peace Corps, pioneers sent out by the rebbe into the harshest conditions. For aspiring young Chabadniks, the more difficult and remote the assignment, the greater the rewards. Two of the earliest of these emissaries were Zalman Schachter and Shlomo Carlebach, both of whom, as we will see in chapter 31, ultimately departed from Chabad to spread a more cosmopolitan Hasidic message in the context of New Age religion.
As they went on the mission, he told the shluchim that wherever they were they would “be living examples of how it is possible” to be observant Jews.13 This was a radically new view: that observant Jews could be surrounded by unbelievers but still change the environment rather than assimilating into it. He believed this possible based on his own experience as a young man distant from the heart of Jewish life as a student in Berlin and Paris, and yet still tied to his Hasidic roots. And he was convinced that it was possible because there was a new cultural atmosphere in the modern world that was willing to accept Orthodox Jews in its midst. The Lubavitch Hasidim would leave the cloistered environment of their Hasidic enclave and enter into the modern world in order to redeem Jews from it. And doing so would hasten the day of redemption. This sort of activity was unprecedented in Hasidic life of the twentieth century, but it did hark back to the origins of the movement. Just as the founder of Chabad, Shneur Zalman, actively recruited new followers to his brand of Hasidism, so now the seventh Rebbe turned his greatest attention and efforts to those who were new to its ways.
The young emissaries, who commonly went as a married couple or in teams, would ultimately lead a series of campaigns, such as “the Mitsvah [Commandment] Campaign” and later “the Moshiach [Messiah] Campaign.” Menachem Mendel followed the first Rebbe of the dynasty, Shneur Zalman, in the radical view that the deed itself is what counts, not the motivation. He also followed the Mittler Rebbe, Dov Ber (1773–1827), Shneur Zalman’s son, in the belief in the messianic power of mitsvot. Menachem Mendel added to this doctrine of mitsvot that these “physical, mundane actions directed towards G-d [sic] represent the acme of religious endeavor.”14 He would therefore try to get the Jews of his day to enhance their spiritual lives by performing simple, physical commandments such as, for male Jews, putting on tefillin and, for female Jews, lighting Sabbath candles. Instead of demanding that Jews observe 613 commandments along with their myriad details, he focused on ten concrete acts, a kind of echo of the Ten Commandments of which everyone had heard. It was a kind of “Judaism lite.” He intuitively understood the power of marketing in America by using simple slogans and concrete actions.
Beginning in the late 1960s, and particularly after the Six Day War in 1967, this campaign sought to insert traditional Jewish practices into the public square, such as lighting Hanukkah menorahs in prominent places, much as Christians erected crèches or decorated Christmas trees in public. This represented an assertive form of Orthodox Judaism never before seen where Jews lived as minorities. Not only in America, but soon throughout the world wherever Jews could be found, from trekkers in Katmandu to secular Israelis on the streets of Tel Aviv, from malls to airports, and on university campuses where Chabad Houses were built as Jewish drop-in and outreach centers, these campaigns took the same form: they were public and aimed at every Jew, saint or sinner. A particularly successful target was the former Soviet Union, which had driven Yosef Yitshak into exile, but now became the site for a revival of Lubavitch. As mentioned, the Chabad emissary, Berel Lazar, became the Chief Rabbi in Moscow. Menorahs were lit in Red Square, with the former Red Army Band playing Hasidic melodies, while Jews celebrated their religion in the shadow of the Kremlin.
As the rebbe’s campaign succeeded far beyond anything his father-in-law imagined, his reputation grew throughout the world. This ability to bring Lubavitch, its message, and various campaigns to the world stage not only gave him confidence—even more importantly, it also convinced him that the currents of history were leading toward the fulfillment of the messianic promise. He was so caught up by this idea that his wife on more than one occasion said of him, perhaps with a certain veiled irony: “He thinks everybody cares about the Moshiach as much as him.”15 The fevered enthusiasms of both the rebbe and his followers led to an intensified campaign, the central message of which was, “We Want Moshiach Now.”
The older the rebbe became, the more intense the efforts to hasten the redemption via the Moshiach Campaign. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, a New York Times reporter, who had managed to secure a private audience just before dawn, raised the issue of the rebbe’s childlessness by asking, “Who is to be the eighth Lubavitcher rabbi?” The rebbe replied: “The Messiah will come and he will take all these troubles and doubts,” and then added with a smile, “He could come while I am here. Why postpone his coming?” He concluded: “My intention is to live many years more, and the Messiah can come tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.”16
The image of the rebbe, prominently displayed on posters, and slogans promoting the Moshiach campaign on everything from T-shirts to billboards, became the public face of the Lubavitch. But the rebbe was not simply the trademark or symbol of the campaign. He gradually became, in the minds of many of his Hasidim, the Messiah himself. They began to urge him to reveal himself, singing a song that celebrated him as such; they carried beepers that were supposed to go off the moment his revelation occurred. They even tried to crown him as Messiah after his near-fatal stroke that had felled him at the gravesite of his predecessor in March 1992 and silenced his ability to speak forever. Even after his death two years later, some continued their campaign, reasoning that until they had brought about the redemption and returned their Messiah, their mission was incomplete. They did not replace the rebbe who continues to serve as their virtual leader, while emissaries and the organization continue to promote his ideas. Twenty-two years after his passing, as these words are written, a poll of Lubavitchers found 52 percent still convinced that Menachem Mendel Schneerson is the Messiah.
Following Schneerson’s death, the Chabad movement split into two camps, one “actively messianist” and the other “passively messianist.” It was this conflict that took the place of the succession battles we have described in Satmar and Bobov. The first camp holds that the rebbe was, in fact, the Messiah and that he will return to lead the final redemption at the appropriate moment. Some even believe that he did not really die, but, like the twelfth Imam of Shi’a Islam, is in a state of “occultation” (that is, in hiding but still alive) and, in the most radical formulations, that the rebbe is actually divine. Since the messianic idea in Judaism includes belief in resurrection of the dead, the return of Schneerson as a full-fledged Messiah is not entirely inconsistent. And the term that has traditionally been used about deceased tsaddikim is histalkut, meaning “departure,” which implies the possibility of return. But critics of Chabad, notably the Orthodox historian David Berger, have taken the post-Schneerson movement to task for embracing a belief in a resurrected, divine Messiah similar to Christianity. Berger himself, although not a Chabadnik, had earlier been quite attracted to Schneerson’s charisma, but now he accused the movement of heresy.
The active messianists captured some key Chabad institutions such as the bet midrash at 770 Eastern Parkway, the headquarters of the movement. But the outreach network of shluchim remained largely in the hands of the passive messianists, who, while believing that Schneerson could well have been the Messiah during his lifetime, admitted that with his death, the trajectory of redemption was less clear. Just as Maimonides held that the Messiah need not perform miracles but could be judged on the basis of his success (a doctrine that Chabad embraced during the rebbe’s life), the fact of his death could not be ignored. The passive messianists were sufficiently determined in this view that, in certain synagogues, when the messianists tried to proclaim the slogan “Long live our lord and teacher, the king Messiah,” the passive messianists unceremoniously booted them out and forced them to create their own prayer minyanim elsewhere. Similarly, the active messianists excluded those who did not agree with them from the bet midrash.
Since Schneerson made outreach the core of his movement, the passive messianic stance of the shluchim put its stamp on Chabad after his death. Using the Talmudic principle of Jewish law (Nedarim 72b) that shluho shel adam k’moto (one’s emissary is the incarnation of the one who sent him), they argued that as long as they were on their rebbe’s mission, he remained alive through them. These far-flung evangelists became, in effect, “a piece of the rebbe” (shtikel rebbes). Just as Schneerson had claimed to channel his father-in-law when he became rebbe, so these emissaries believed that they continued his messianic mission in his absence. In this way, Chabad has been able to persist and even expand as a court without a rebbe, similar, in many ways, to Bratslav, the so-called toyte Hasidim (“dead Hasidim”). But while Bratslav for nearly two centuries after its rebbe’s death remained a marginal and persecuted sect, Chabad began its career as a leaderless movement with a worldwide network, and ubiquitous images of their rebbe.
Munkatsh
If Satmar and Bobov represent Hasidic groups with too many claimants and Lubavitch with none, Munkatsh demonstrates what happens when the successor abdicates. Munkatsh was perhaps the most prominent Hungarian Hasidic court whose leader, up until his death in 1937, was Hayim Elazar Shapira. He was succeeded by his son-in-law, Barukh Rabinowicz, the scion of a Polish Hasidic dynasty. As we saw in chapter 26, Barukh was deported in the summer of 1941 to Ukraine but he managed to escape the massacre there, was allowed to return to Budapest, and made his way to Palestine in 1944.
In Palestine, Rabinowicz hoped to reestablish his court and yeshivah in Jerusalem. But gone were the crowds who had listened to him in a Budapest synagogue, as were the three hundred yeshivah students he had left in Munkatsh. His wife, who had been in frail health, died at age thirty in April 1945. He now underwent a serious crisis of identity. In 1946, the erstwhile heir of an anti-Zionist Hasidic court submitted his candidacy for the position of Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv. But the Zionists associated him with the virulent anti-Zionism of his father-in-law, while for the remaining Hasidim of Munkatsh his abortive effort was too Zionist. Upon his failure to be selected for the post, Rabinowicz made a drastic move: together with his children and young second wife, the former Yehudit Wallhaus, who had neither Hasidic background nor understanding of what it meant to be a rebbe’s wife, he moved to São Paulo, Brazil, to take up a rabbinic post, ultimately abdicating his position as Rebbe of Munkatsh.
Why Rabinowicz took this unprecedented course of action is a matter of debate. The evidence suggests that even when he became rebbe, he was already harboring doubts about his role. And the Holocaust, as well as the death of his young wife and the failure of his Hasidim to support him, clearly shook him to the core. Nor could he reconcile the anti-Zionism of Munkatsh with his belief that the Jews needed to defend themselves. Finally, he was said to entertain the hope that he could somehow become the Chief Hasidic Rabbi of Israel, a post that did not and still does not exist. To be this sort of meta-rebbe meant he could no longer be limited by his Munkatsh identity. Despairing of this possibility, he took up the position as Chief Rabbi of Brazil.
In Brazil, Rabinowicz became transformed. His family lived a relatively modern life style. He drove and even learned to fix his own car. He helped his wife with the dishes and, as a rabbi, tried to salvage Jewish life in São Paulo, serving also as a mohel (ritual circumciser). His children studied in primary schools where there was a crucifix on the wall, acquiring their Jewish education privately from him. And when he needed ideas or materials to inspire Brazilian Jewry, he wrote not to the Hasidim but to Rabbi Leo Jung, the German Jewish spiritual leader of the Jewish Center in New York, a flagship modern Orthodox synagogue, asking for material that he could have translated into Portuguese.
When Eliezer Sorotzkin, then collecting funds for the Lithuanian Telz Yeshivah newly reestablished in 1941 outside Cleveland, Ohio, arrived in Brazil, he approached Rabinowicz to help him gather money from Brazilian Jewry. Staying in his house, he was stunned by what he considered the rabbi’s children’s abysmally low level of Torah knowledge. He persuaded his host to send his sons Hayim Elazar and Moshe Leib to the Telz Yeshivah, where their Jewish knowledge could be raised. The fourth son Ya’akov Yitshak went a year later. Just as Torah Voda’as, a Lithuanian-style yeshivah in New York, had become a Judaic training ground for children of Hasidic heritage in America, and where the oldest Rabinowicz son, Duchu, and the sixth Lubavicher Rebbe’s grandson Barry had been enrolled, so too Telz in Cleveland would be for others, among them the future Rebbe of Munkatsh.
In 1963, Rabinowicz returned to Israel, where he became Chief Rabbi of the city of Holon, south of Tel Aviv, a post that confirmed his attachment to the Zionist state. Here too he failed to make many religious inroads, for Holon was a working-class city not known for its piety. He eventually retired to Petah Tikva, where he died in 1997.
After 1945, Munkatsh had been without a leader and was losing Hasidim. Determined to rebuild their group, the survivors resolved to turn to Rabinowicz’s sons. In the absence of a functioning court, the Hasidim themselves undertook to choose one of the four, a highly unusual procedure. The oldest son, who had been on the run with his father during the war, was traumatized by his wartime saga. The next son, Hayim Elazar, would study at Bar Ilan University, get an MBA in the United States, and live for many years in Vienna as a businessman; he was not interested in becoming a rebbe. The Hasidim then turned to the third son, Moshe Leib, who had studied at both the Telz Yeshivah and the non-Hasidic yeshivah Bet Medrash Elyon in Monsey, New York. The fact that he had been educated in institutions that were not particularly associated with Hasidism exemplifies how these distinctions, once so important, were now subordinated to promoting Orthodoxy in America.
In 1962, after making a half-hearted abortive effort to get Barukh to return from his exile, the Hasidim anointed the twenty-two-year-old Moshe Leib as Rebbe of Munkatsh in Brooklyn. But Munkatsh was not the court it once had been, and in the intervening years many of its Hasidim found their way to Satmar, whose anti-Zionism and charismatic rebbe suited them. The new Munkatsh Rebbe would have to draw new followers and bring back old ones, all the while, in a kind of Oedipal drama, disavowing or even disowning his father. And he had to do so in a Brooklyn where the competition among Hasidic courts was already fierce.
Although much of Moshe Leib’s upbringing was not Hasidic, his blood ties qualified him above all else. Even though he had never seen his grandfather, he was presumed to have inherited his charisma as the “holy seed” of the dynasty. However, his grandfather’s directions for how to function as rebbe, contained in his book, Minhat Elazar, were largely irrelevant to the challenge Moshe Leib faced in Brooklyn. When he moved his court to Borough Park in 1969, he became known not as a leader of multitudes but, as one New York newspaper described him, “the ultra-Orthodox community’s most influential rabbi in governmental affairs in New York.”17 In the succeeding years, however, his court suffered losses as his followers began to decline in number, some say to as few as forty families, many defecting to Satmar. The Munkatsh schools that had once been a pipeline for new followers largely collapsed in the twenty-first century.
When Yitshak Ya’akov, the younger brother of Moshe Leib, sought to establish himself as a rebbe as well, he tried to share the name Munkatsh from his base in Kensington, Brooklyn. That effort failed. Instead, moving to Williamsburg, he called himself the Rebbe of Dinov, an option that was possible because, as we described in section 2, the founder of the Munkatsh dynasty, Tsvi Elimelekh Shapira had been a leader both in Munkatsh and in Dinov in Galicia. Even though there had been no other Dinov Rebbe since the middle of the nineteenth century, the younger Rabinowicz was able to resurrect this title and make it his own, drawing from those Satmar Hasidim who wanted to escape the feud between the two Satmar rebbes. So, in the strange story of Munkatsh, we find the antidote to succession warfare: the resurrection of a defunct dynasty and a safe haven for those caught between dueling rebbes elsewhere.
Kopitshinits and Boyan
While Munkatsh was partially resurrected after losing its rebbe for some two decades, the trajectories of Kopitshinits and Boyan seemed to lead to dead ends. Both Kopitshinits and Boyan trace their origins to a dynasty founded by Israel Friedman of Ruzhin. Both were originally located in the eastern end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Rebbe of Boyan, Mordechai Shlomo Friedman, was first to come to America in 1927, as we have seen earlier. The Rebbe of Kopitshinits, Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, fled with his family in 1939, a year following the Anschluss, the union of Austria with Nazi Germany. Heschel, who traced his ancestry to the Rebbe of Apt, his namesake and great-grandfather, was the second to take this name.
Both rebbes settled first on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, very near to each other. Not only were they related through intermarriage over the generations, something that would occur in the next generations as well, but both also shared spheres of influence. In 1965, Heschel moved his court to Borough Park. While Friedman kept his place on the Lower East Side, his Hasidim would also build larger premises in Borough Park. Some members of Friedman’s and Heschel’s families had left the inner orbit of Hasidism, the most prominent being the brother of the Kopitshinits Rebbe’s wife, Abraham Joshua Heschel (also the rebbe’s cousin), who taught at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary, winning fame as a theologian and activist for social justice. This desertion of the Hasidic lifestyle was not particularly unusual in America, even among the immediate relatives of rebbes, although as the century wore on and Hasidism began to flourish, it would become less common. While the Kopitshinits court was not large, especially after moving to Borough Park, the rebbe was able to maintain a following until his death at seventy-nine in 1967.
The Rebbe of Kopitshinits had three sons: Israel, Moshe, and Meshulam Zusya; his daughter Hava was married to a Lubavitcher Hasid. Upon the death of the rebbe, the Hasidim turned to his children. But as became clear very soon, the question of continuity was not going to be easily answered. The oldest son, Israel, who was not married at the time (a status he would need to change if he were to be their leader), never wanted to become a rebbe and refused repeated entreaties to take on the position, preferring to keep his job in an accounting firm and marry much later. The son-in-law, who did live a Hasidic life, preferred to retain his affiliations in Lubavitch, where he worked in a yeshivah. Other sons-in-law had predeceased him.
After a period of mourning, the Hasidim turned to the second son, Moshe Mordechai, seventeen years Israel’s junior. He too refused, viewing himself as neither a scholar nor particularly charismatic. On the first anniversary of his father’s passing, however, he acceded to their requests. Having grown up in America, where he studied in the non-Hasidic Mesivta Tiferet Jerusalem yeshivah, headed by Moshe Feinstein from whom he later received rabbinic ordination, he was fluent in English, which was not common for all Hasidim born in the New World. He had succeeded in the diamond trade in Manhattan’s 47th Street district. When he became rebbe, he provided a new kind of leadership. He was especially adept at marital counseling that seemed well-suited to the changing situation of modern Hasidim, and as a result, he seemed to attract a new type of Hasid to his court, many of whom came from non-Hasidic backgrounds. Uncharacteristically for a rebbe, he would call his Hasidim and supporters on the telephone, asking about their welfare.
Legendary stories about Moshe Mordechai transformed him into a traditional rebbe. Here is one example: his father once made the arduous journey from Vienna to visit the Holy Land in the late 1920s and “on the 15th of Sivan he traveled to Me’aras Eliyahu, a cave high on Mount Carmel, where it is believed Eliyahu Hanavi [Elijah, the prophet] had hidden.” He prayed there “for another son,” a prayer answered when “one year later to the day his wife gave birth to a baby boy,” Moshe Mordechai.18 There were also stories about how he would draw people into Judaism even when he worked in the diamond trade: he was, the stories implied, already a “hidden” tsaddik. These narratives often stressed his warmth and people skills. While the Kopitshinits shtibl never attracted more than about two hundred Hasidim, Moshe Mordechai’s reputation made him more popular than these numbers suggest.
But the new rebbe suffered from health problems ever since contracting rheumatic fever as a youngster. In March of 1975, on the eve of Passover, only seven years after he became rebbe, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died three days later at the age of forty-eight. Once again, the Kopitshinits Hasidim were in search of a leader. Now they turned to Zusya, the youngest son. He had received rabbinic ordination from Torah Voda’as, but he had never seen himself heading either to the rabbinate or to a rebbe’s throne. Instead, he wished to go to college, and for a time attended until dropping out and going into office work. Now, suddenly, the future of the line depended on his agreeing to take the post. After his brother’s funeral, Zusya listened as Yerahmiel Yehudah Meir Kalish, the Rebbe of Amshinov, tried to persuade him that he should be rebbe:
You say you’re not a Rebbe? None of us are [sic] Rebbes today. None of us are like the rabbeim of old times. I’m not like my father and I imagine you’re not like your father. But the role of a Rebbe has changed today. A Rebbe is just somebody who binds his people together. He has to strive to keep them together and give them spiritual strength.… And that’s what I do, and that is what you can do.”19
But Zusya could not accept the task. He became a computer programmer, and later died in a car accident. While subsequent efforts would be made to turn to the children of Moshe after they grew up, Kopitshinits essentially continued as a minor court without a rebbe after Moshe’s death.
Boyan, on the other hand, followed a different path when it too found itself facing a dead end. In 1969, Mordechai Shlomo suffered a massive stroke and ceased to function as a rebbe. For a while, his wife served as a mediator between him and his Hasidim, but then she too suffered the same fate. By March 1971, he was dead. The question of succession now faced the Hasidim. The late rebbe’s oldest son, Israel Friedman, had trained in social work administration. For the Hasidim, the fact that he was not serving in some sort of rabbinic role was troubling. When he returned from his father’s funeral, attended by more than twenty-five thousand in Israel, none of the Hasidim came to meet him at the airport, which upset him as a potential successor. In spite of their misgivings, the Boyan Hasidim decided to convince Israel Friedman to take over his father’s position.
By this time, though, Hasidism was moving to the religious right, becoming even more aggressively insular, anti-Zionist, and antimodern. Extremism was increasingly becoming the norm. Friedman felt uncomfortable taking on the leadership of such a group. “I could not,” he explained to an interviewer, “give up all my worldly interests to become somebody who was at the beck and call of a very strict Orthodox community, especially the one in Israel.”20 Moreover, his wife’s position as a sociologist at Columbia University did not comport with the Hasidim’s view of a rebbetsin.
The senior Hasidim also realized that without a rebbe, they ran the risk of losing followers to one of the many competing courts, and indeed some did move to the Rebbe of Sadagora, Friedman’s uncle. Next they turned to the late rebbe’s daughter, married to Menahem Brayer, a double PhD in biblical studies and clinical psychology, a practicing psychotherapist as well as a professor of education at Yeshiva University. They thought that perhaps because her husband came from a distinguished rabbinic background and sometimes appeared in Hasidic garb, he might trade his academic appointment for the title of rebbe. But he was no more ready to take the position than his brothers-in-law. His older son, Yigal, tried for a while to fill the role and allowed himself to be sent to Israel and schooled at the yeshivah. In the end, he decided he could not be a rebbe and ultimately moved to the West Coast, where he worked as an aerospace engineer.
That left one remaining possibility, Brayer’s younger son, Nahum Dov. Only when the Hasidim realized that there were no other viable candidates did they turn to Professor Brayer and ask that his young second son, now just over twenty-one, be transformed into the rebbe they needed. Brayer, the father, felt compelled to enable Boyan’s continuity. Beyond the needs of the court, the Boyan Rebbe also had a major role in the emerging Hasidic traditions of Israel: he was the one who lit the great bonfire on Lag ba-Omer in Meron, the burial place of the saints, a contemporary ritual that had become tremendously important to many Hasidim. Brayer acquiesced and, having kept notes on his father-in-law’s practices as a rebbe, took on tutoring his son, who had agreed to the succession, in order to transform this young American boy into a Hasidic rebbe.
Nahum was sent to the Ruzhin yeshivah in Jerusalem like his older brother to be prepared for taking on the crown and, because no full-fledged rebbe can be unwed, he was introduced to the daughter of Zusya Heschel of Kopitshinits, who was also studying in a seminary in Jerusalem. They agreed to marry. After his marriage, the Hasidim came to him to tell him that it was time for him to start serving as rebbe. He was reluctant, claiming he needed more time to study, and was able to put off his elevation for four years. But in 1984, he at last relented and was crowned the new Rebbe of Boyan, signifying his leadership by accepting kvitlekh from Boyan Hasidim. Unlike Kopitshinits, Boyan (with a Kopitshinits rebbetsin) emerged triumphant from the perils of Hasidic succession in late twentieth-century America, but moved the court to Jerusalem, where it has since flourished.
These stories of succession make clear that one of the primary challenges facing Hasidism in America is the continuity of leadership. In some cases, the inability to create new courts resulted in battles among potential successors for leadership. In others, the process of modernization had weaned the descendants of these dynasties—as well as other ordinary Hasidim—away from Hasidism and into professions scarcely suited for rebbes. The increasing ritual and ideological conservatism designed to construct bulwarks against the modern world was a response not only to a general threat but also to a process that took place within families, including those of the tsaddikim. Yet despite these issues of leadership, Hasidism has had remarkable success precisely in the American environment where it might have been least expected. The unique conditions of American democracy, in which the separation of Church and State has promoted religious diversity in an atmosphere of political stability, have favored Hasidism’s resurrection no less than the conditions in the renewed State of Israel.
1 David Meisels, The Rebbe: The Extraordinary Life and Worldview of Rabbeinu Yoel Teitelbaum (Lakewood, NJ, 2011), 159, and Shlomo Ya’akov Gelbman, Moshi’an shel Yisrael: Toldot Rabbenu ha-Kadosh mi-Satmar (New York, 1987/1988), vol. 3, 247.
2 Meisels, The Rebbe, 148, quoting Retson Tsadik (Kiryas Yoel, NY, 1998), 5–6.
3 Joseph Berger, “Divisions in Satmar Sect Complicate Politics of Brooklyn Hasidim,” New York Times (July 5, 2012).
4 Diglenu, Iyyar 5718 (May 1958).
5 Va-Yoel Moshe (New York, 1961), vol. 2, chapter 157.
6 Allan Nadler, “The Riddle of the Satmar,” Jewish Ideas Daily (February 17, 2011).
7 Yosef Yitzchak Kaminetsky, Days in Chabad: Historic Events in the Dynasty of Chabad-Lubavitch (Brooklyn, 2002), 115.
8 See A Prince in Prison: The Previous Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Account of His Incarceration in Stalinist Russia in 1937: An Extract from Likkutei Dibburim, trans. Uri Kaploun (Brooklyn, 1997), a version of Yosef Yitzchak’s diary.
9 See Menasheh Laufer, Yemei Melekh (Brooklyn, 1989), 1164.
10 Israel Shenker, “The Lubavitch Rabbi Marks His 70th Year with Call for Kindness by Israel,” New York Times (March 27, 1972).
11 See for example, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Sihot Kodesh 5720 [1960] (Brooklyn, 1986), 175, a description and summary of the events on 10 Shvat 5720 (February 2, 1960).
12 We thank Elkanah Shmotkin for pointing us to this speech. See http://www.chabad.org/multimedia/media_cdo/aid/779312/jewish/Mission-of-Love.htm, accessed December 30, 2008. According to his aide, Yehuda Krinsky, the rebbe and his wife regularly read the New York Times (interview with SCH, May 10, 2009).
13 Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Iggerot Kodesh Volume 14 (Brooklyn, 1989), 11–12.
14 Faitel Levin, Heaven on Earth, http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/294285/jewish/A-Synopsis-of-the-Dirah-Betachtonim-System.htm, accessed April 10, 2008.
15 Laufer, Yemei Melech, 1268.
16 Shenker, “The Lubavitch Rabbi.”
17 http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/david_next_move_ZlajhrnkpbWKwQpf1oeGAO, accessed October 19, 2009. See also http://theantitzemach.blogspot.com/2009/12/munkacs-renovation.html, accessed May 6, 2012.
18 See B. Moses, “The Kopyczynitzer Rebbe: Reb Moshe Mordechai Heschel, Zt’l,” in Yated Ne’eman, http://www.tzemachdovid.org/gedolim/kopyczynitzer.html, accessed May 8, 2012.
19 Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 81.
20 Mintz, Hasidic People, 78–79.
