The Hasidic Movement

The Hasidic movement was one of the major religious-intellectual movements of European Jewry. It had been founded in the eighteenth century in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the Baal Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer, around 1700 to 1760), and by the late nineteenth century had become the dominant form of religious Jewish life across the eastern European territories from Galicia and Hungary in the south to the Lithuanian borderlands in the north. The major dynasties (Ger, Belz, Lubavitch, Satmar, Bobov, Vizhnitz, Munkacs, Sanz and many others) ran their own substantial communities, their own yeshivas, their own publishing operations and their own networks of religious practice. The substantial majority of the European Hasidic world was killed in the Holocaust. The dynasties that survived did so largely because their rebbes had emigrated to Palestine, the United States or other refuges before the destruction.

The world that was destroyed

The pre-war Hasidic population of Europe is estimated by the historians at around 600,000 to 800,000, the majority concentrated in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The major dynastic centres were the small towns of Ger (Góra Kalwaria) outside Warsaw, Belz in Galicia, Munkacs in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Satu Mare (Satmar) in northern Transylvania, Sanz in western Galicia, Lubavitch in Smolensk Oblast, and dozens of smaller centres each associated with a particular rebbe and his community. The dynastic structure made the Hasidic world substantially decentralised: each rebbe had pastoral and intellectual authority over his own community, with limited central coordination across dynasties.

The substantial Hasidic intellectual production of the inter-war period included the Talmudic and homiletic publications of the major yeshivas, the substantial Yiddish-language religious journalism of the Polish Hasidic press, and the development of distinctive theological positions on the questions of the modern world (Zionism, secular education, the position of women, the political organisation of the Jewish community within the Polish state). The political affiliation of the substantial majority of Polish Hasidim was with the Agudat Yisrael party, the Orthodox-Hasidic political movement that had been founded in 1912 and that participated in Polish parliamentary politics through the inter-war period.

The destruction

The destruction of the European Hasidic world was substantially complete by 1945. The major dynastic centres were among the first communities targeted in the German occupation operations. The Ger Hasidim, the largest single dynasty with around 100,000 followers in Poland in 1939, were substantially destroyed in the Warsaw ghetto deportations of 1942 and 1943; the Gerrer Rebbe Avraham Mordechai Alter escaped to Palestine in 1940 with a small group of followers and re-established the dynasty there. The Belzer Rebbe Aharon Rokeach escaped from occupied Poland through Hungary to Palestine in 1944 in one of the most controversial escapes of the war (the rebbe’s brother Mordechai had used substantial community resources to facilitate the escape and had then died in the Bergen-Belsen detention shortly afterwards). The Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum escaped from Hungary to Switzerland in 1944 on the Kasztner train, the controversial deal with Eichmann that saved 1,684 Hungarian Jews. The Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn was extracted from German-occupied Warsaw in late 1939 by a US State Department operation and re-established the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Brooklyn. The Munkacser Rebbe Chaim Elazar Spira had died in 1937; his son-in-law and successor Baruch Yehoshua Yerachmiel Rabinowicz survived the war.

The substantial proportion of the Hasidic rabbinic leadership that survived did so by emigration before the war or by extraction during the war. The substantial proportion of the wider Hasidic communities did not survive. Estimates of Hasidic deaths in the Holocaust vary because the historiography does not always distinguish Hasidic from non-Hasidic Jewish victims, but the figure is generally taken to be substantially greater than the proportional share of Hasidim in the wider European Jewish population (which had been around 9 to 12 per cent), because the Hasidic populations were concentrated in the eastern European territories where the killing rates were highest.

The post-war reconstruction

The post-war Hasidic world was reconstructed substantially in the United States, Israel and (to a smaller extent) Britain, Canada and Australia. The Brooklyn neighbourhoods of Crown Heights (Lubavitch), Williamsburg (Satmar) and Borough Park (a substantial mixed Hasidic population) became the principal American centres. The Israeli neighbourhoods of Mea Shearim and Bnei Brak in greater Jerusalem and Tel Aviv became the principal Israeli centres. The dynasties that survived through the rebbes who had emigrated rebuilt their communities through high birth rates and the recruitment of post-Holocaust survivors who had previously been from non-Hasidic backgrounds. The Lubavitch movement under Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the seventh rebbe, 1902 to 1994) became the most internationally active of the dynasties through its sustained outreach programme to non-Orthodox Jews from the 1950s onwards.

The Hasidic population in 2026 is substantially larger than the pre-war population. The Lubavitch movement alone has around 90,000 to 200,000 members depending on the count, with around 5,000 emissaries (shluchim) operating in 100 countries. The Satmar movement, the second largest, has around 75,000 members concentrated in Brooklyn and in the Israeli town of Kiryat Yoel in upstate New York. The Ger, Belz and Bobov dynasties have substantial Israeli communities. The reconstruction has been one of the most documented religious-demographic recoveries of the post-war period.

Theological aftermath

The Holocaust produced substantial theological responses within Hasidic thought. The position of Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, in Va-Yo’el Moshe (1961), was that the Holocaust had been a divine punishment for the Zionist movement’s attempt to anticipate the messianic redemption of the Jewish people through political means. The position of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson was substantially more cautious, treating the Holocaust as an event whose theological meaning could not be definitively settled and whose practical implication was the urgent reconstruction of Jewish religious life. The wider Hasidic theological response continues; substantial Hasidic religious literature on the Holocaust is published every year and the question is not closed.

See also

Sources

  • Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut Polin: Megamot Ra’ayoniyot ben Shte ha-Milchamot u-vi-Gzerot 1940-1945, Bialik Institute, 1990
  • Esther Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust, Mossad Harav Kook, 2007
  • Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 (for the non-Hasidic Lithuanian counterpoint)
  • Marcin Wodziński, Historical Atlas of Hasidism, Princeton University Press, 2018
  • Pearl Benisch, To Vanquish the Dragon, Feldheim, 1991 (memoir of the Bais Yaakov Cracow community)
  • Joseph Friedenson, Dateline: Istanbul: Dr. Jacob Griffel’s Lone Odyssey through a Sea of Indifference, Mesorah, 1993 (on the Vaad Hatzala rescue effort)
  • Joel Teitelbaum, Va-Yo’el Moshe, Brooklyn, 1961 (the principal post-war Satmar theological response)
  • Avraham Rubinstein and others (eds), Encyclopaedia of Hasidism, Jerusalem, 1996 (the standard reference work)