Hasidic Groups Research Articles

Piety, Purity, and Pain: The Head Shaving Ritual for Women in Ultra-Orthodox Communities and Its Underlying Concept of Halachah

Abstract Within the Hungarian and Galician Hasidic communities, women customarily shave their heads shortly before their weddings. Henceforth, they meticulously adhere to this practice, preserving a shorn appearance throughout the duration of their married lives. This practice has long stood at the center of a halachic and quasi-halachic discourse. An analysis of the arguments presented reveals that the halachic and kabbalistic foundations of this custom are extremely tenuous and largely dependent on homiletical interpretations. Although the precise origins of this practice remain elusive, its proponents have elevated its normative status, venerating it as an ancient and sacred tradition. This study endeavors to comprehend the underlying motivations driving the preservation efforts of this custom. The analysis herein demonstrates that the observance of this custom aligns three fundamentally non-halachic principles: a zealous commitment to minhag (custom); a “lust for asceticism,” historically associated with select Hasidic groups since that movement’s inception; and a demand for self-sacrifice, perceived as an ideal within greater ultra-Orthodox society. This study concludes that the normative standards emanating from these avowed non-halachic principles are regarded within ultra-conservative circles as an indispensable element of the Halachic system, thereby integrating these principles into their broader halachic worldview.

The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers

Reviewed by: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers Jeffrey S. Gurock Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers. The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 477 pp. The Satmar Hasidic enclave of Kiryas Joel was established in bucolic upstate New York in the early 1970s as an extension of that Jewish sect’s presence in America that initially took root after the Holocaust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, under the leadership of its charismatic leader Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum. In Kiryas Joel, an area that was “formally incorporated as an autonomous village within the town of Monroe” in Orange County (4), they succeeded in creating and maintaining a separatist, homogenous Jewish world, possessed of a “degree of group insularity unimaginable in Europe” (125). Back in the Old World, Jews of various religious and political stripes lived together in shtetls, including numerous Hasidic groups with their different and competing orientations, along with the gentiles who also resided in these largely Jewish villages. Not so in Kiryas Joel, where the Satmar have been able to fashion a life apart from other Americans and other American Jews due to the ongoing willingness of local and federal governments to assist them. [End Page 211] At first glance, these Hasidim might be seen as Jewish Amish, akin to those who reside in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and who—in culturally pluralistic America—have been permitted to adhere unqualifiedly to their traditional customs, dress, and language. Where the Satmar are fundamentally different from this Christian sect is in their wise use of their rights as American citizens to actively engage in politics even as they pray for the day when the messiah will come to return them to the Holy Land of Israel. Rabbi Teitelbaum understood, early on in America, the power of the properly placed vote. He and his successors have directed their followers to cast their ballots for designated candidates. More often than not, these politicians are gentiles; after all, Monroe County is predominantly non-Jewish. While after election day Satmar leaders do not have coffee with the Christians they have backed, they are sure to arrive at the winners’ doorsteps to remind them of what their backing meant to them. Accordingly, in return for their electoral support, state education officials subsequently have, for example, turned a blind eye to Satmar school curricula that are generally in conscious violation of Regents protocols. In the 2020 presidential election, the Satmar showed that in addition to their use of politics for “direct, tangible benefit” to their community (32), they were keen to have their say about America’s cultural environment that exists well beyond the borders of their enclave. Notwithstanding the evident fact that Donald Trump was a “highly imperfect vessel” for their “political expression” in terms of “ethics and deportment,” 99 percent of their voters chose the Republican candidate because he was seen as an “assertive leader” who defied “liberal norms.” So disposed, Satmar activists could even be seen at Trump rallies waving his flags even as they kept respectable social distances from activist Christian religious groups who had comparable views of the challenges facing America. These themes are among the central and most intriguing findings of Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers’s comprehensive study that unravels the complexities of the Satmar Hasidim’s desire for separatism while they engage with American life. As such, American Shtetl now stands along with another recent study of those Satmar Jews who remained in their erstwhile Brooklyn hub and who have also effectively worked within the New York City political system to enhance their lives. Together, these works have deepened our understanding of a highly visible but until-now largely understudied group of American Jews.1 Stolzenberg and Myers could not have crafted their volume without the extensive help of this ostensibly closed Satmar community. Both its leaders and the group’s rank and file granted access to these two ambitious and decidedly non-Hasidic researchers. Obviously, for some reason, they wanted their story to be told. But why and how they came to that critical...

You Cannot Feel a Mother’s Heart: The Centrality of Women in the Hasidic Music of Yom Tov Ehrlich

Abstract: Recent scholarship on the history of Hasidism suggests that the role of women within Hasidic communities before World War II was minimal, and that Hasidism eliminated women from its social structure by establishing a religious praxis that was exclusively male. Studies of postwar Hasidic life similarly minimize the presence of women and suggest that they remained an ancillary and silent population within the life of the movement, in large part because scholars have relied on written and experiential Hasidic modalities to gauge female involvement. Analysis of the music of Yom Tov Ehrlich as an untapped source demonstrates that women appear to be seen, heard, and reckoned with in Hasidic life before and after the war. In Yom Tov Ehrlich’s musical texts, women are valued as religious and Hasidic actors, and serve a vital, if not precisely equal, role to that of their male counterparts, providing spiritual guidance, motivation, and agency. A significant proportion of the 317 songs released publicly by Ehrlich feature women. Physical descriptions, both of women’s dress as well as their demeanor, proliferate within the song lyrics, and women and young girls are often described as beautiful. While Ehrlich’s representation cannot be construed as historical fact, female predominance within the songs, and the widespread acceptance and encouragement of this music even within the most stringent Hasidic groups, attests to a vocal and vibrant presence of women within the panoply of religious and Hasidic experience in prewar Europe and postwar America.

The Politics of Language Choice in Haredi Communities in Israel

Abstract Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Israel, this article explores the politics of language choice as a part of the negotiation of Haredi identity. Yiddish choice can be a subtle resistance to the Zionist project, of which Israeli Hebrew is a part. Certain Hasidic groups, and some very strict Lithuanian Haredi Jews, speak Yiddish, while others have adopted Israeli Hebrew. These choices illuminate ideologies of these groups, attitudes towards the State, and the levels of the community’s and individual’s civic-mindedness. Haredi attitudes towards the State exist on a spectrum, which may or may not correlate to the community’s language choice. Instead, language choice illuminates how Haredi individuals negotiate their minority identity and their relationship with the State and Zionist ideology. Language choice clarifies how internal divisions are negotiated, identities are formed and reformed, and how these choices impact the Haredi world’s interaction with the State of Israel.

The Eastern European Problem of Hasidic Studies

The Eastern European Problem of Hasidic Studies Wojciech Tworek (bio) “Karl marx was a German philosopher,” writes Leszek Kołakowski in the introduction to his history of Marxist thought. “This does not sound a particularly enlightening statement, yet it is not so commonplace as it may at first appear.”1 Mimicking the Polish philosopher, I will begin by saying that Hasidism (lehavdil!) was an Eastern European phenomenon. And while this statement sounds trivial, and recurs in many publications about Hasidism, it has had limited impact on the shape of Hasidic studies. There is little of Eastern Europe in Hasidic studies, and, conversely (and to some extent resulting from this), there is very little Hasidism in the Jewish studies programs taught in Eastern Europe. This short essay is not—and cannot be—a thorough critique of the field of Hasidic studies. Still, my general impression is that there are three dominant modes in which Hasidic scholars engage with Eastern Europe. The first one is inadvertent erasure, in which this geography is relegated to the margins by, to paraphrase Daniel Dennett, free-floating rationales of Hasidic theology. The second one uses Eastern Europe as a symbolic reservoir of Hasidic culture divorced from its complex historical context, a frum variation of the Yiddishland nostalgia. The third one treats Eastern European spaces as actualized by Hasidic performance. My intention is not to discredit the prolific production of Hasidism scholarship in the phenomenology of religion, cultural history, history of ideas, anthropology, literary studies, and so on. Many excellent and illuminating studies emerge from these perspectives, but I would say that their relation to Eastern Europe is tangential at best. For the record, my own work subscribes heavily to the first and third models. [End Page 256] Admittedly, I paint this image of Hasidism scholarship in rather broad strokes. Scholars have criticized some methodological biases of the field, most directly Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern in his description of “star-struck Hasidim,” and Marcin Wodziński in his “five cardinal sins” of research on Hasidism.2 A number of recent works have, in fact, pushed against these tendencies. These important corrigenda notwithstanding, I argue that the Eastern European problem of Hasidic studies is inherent in the construction of this area of research as a subfield of Jewish studies, according to which particular methodological choices are only secondary. Drawing on recent critical discussions of Jewish studies and their implications for identity politics,3 I will focus here on three major consequences of this state of affairs for Hasidic studies. The first one is the parochialism of Hasidic studies, in which—as in Jewish studies in general—research is implicated in the identitarian work of Jewish self-understanding. I do not mean here only overt and covert neo-Hasidic projects, in which Hasidic sources are reinvented as tools for renewed engagement in Jewish theology or praxis. This tendency is clearly visible in the disproportionate interest in the aspects of Hasidism that are vital for the community today. Thus, for example, the most researched Eastern European Hasidic groups today remain Lubavitch and Breslov, not because of their historical role in the Jewish society of Eastern Europe, but because of their communal significance today. The field (including my own work) focuses so much attention on them because it responds to the need of the contemporary community to understand itself and to tell its own story, in which Chabad mitzvah tanks or the crowds at Rabbi Nahman’s tomb play an important if controversial role. Secondly, the orientation inward contributes to the double marginalization of Hasidic studies. If Jewish studies, in general, pursues a path of “splendid isolation” in academia, then the research on Hasidism often doubles down on it. While scholars of Hasidism have drawn on many disciplines, attempts at integrating their research within broader theoretical and disciplinary frameworks are rare, especially with regards to Hasidism as a historical phenomenon in Eastern Europe. Quite tellingly, one will not find research on Hasidism at the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies conferences, and very few adepts of such [End Page 257] research go on to learn Eastern European languages or incorporate into their work sources other than emic and elitist...

Silent springs: The nature of water and Israel’s military occupation

Drawing on interviews with, and observations of, officials from Israel’s Nature and Park Authority, fieldworkers from environmental and human rights nonprofits, and local Palestinian farmers, this article tells stories about springs in the occupied West Bank. Entangled with the physical decline of the springs’ water supply and quality, it examines this waterworld also in a broader sense, which includes cultural, political, and religious—with a specific focus on legal—spring-related practices. After discussing the relevant water and land regimes within which springs exist, and their socio-geological uniqueness, I pause to tell the story of Ein Kelt—a desert spring on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. Next, I move to discuss a variety of colonial dispossession tactics at work in the West Bank springs. In many cases, such tactics are performed by Jewish settlers with the tacit support of Israeli authorities. Inspired by legal geography scholarship on the coproduction of law and matter, I examine Israel’s seemingly paradoxical preoccupation with the rule of law in the administration of springs in the occupied territories, what I refer to here as a hyperlegality, on the one hand, and its disregard of formal law in the face of settler misconduct at these sites, on the other hand. Complicating the story, I also describe recent spring-based practices of purification carried out by Jewish Hasidic groups. The springs newly emerge in this context as sites of recreation, pilgrimage, and purity. Simultaneously, they are becoming places of danger for the Palestinians and are increasingly figuring in the mobilization of Palestinian protest. After all is said and done, one is left wondering whether water is actually different from land and soil. Could springs possibly serve as an alternative socio-material foundation that moves away from traditional colonial regimes?

Marketing problems of kosher production in Ukraine

Ukrainian producers, selecting a segment of consumers on the basis of religion, should estimate its capacity and growth prospects. Nowadays, the consumption of kosher products in the countries of the world continues to grow. However, the study of domestic market of kosher products in Ukraine raises the problem of its prospect for domestic producers. The analysis of articles dedicated to the kosher production in Ukraine allows us to identify a number of problems in this area. Based on data, collected in the process of secondary marketing research, the author has come to the conclusion that the number of Jews in Ukraine is decreasing, in the same time the tradition of purchasing kosher products by non-Jews has not been formed. The complexity of the requirements for the production technology, the problem of promotion of kosher products, the low purchasing power of the population of Ukraine allows the author to make the following conclusion: the domestic market of kosher products in Ukraine in the next decade will not be perspective. In this industry, producers should use local micromarketing focused on Jewish religious communities, Jewish educational institutions and Hasidic pilgrim groups. At the same time, the author believes that in the marketing activity the supporters of healthy eating are the most perspective group. The author also supports the thesis that the Ukrainian agrarian sector has natural competitive advantages and a large export potential in the production of kosher products.

Bobover Yiddish: “Polish” or “Hungarian?”

Abstract Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish speakers perceive a distinction between “Hungarian” and “Polish” Yiddish. This article explores that distinction by examining the Yiddish of the Bobover Hasidic community, the largest “Polish” Hasidic group in the United States; the Yiddish of its “Hungarian” counterpart, Satmar, and its rootedness in the Unterland Hungarian Yiddish was demonstrated by Krogh (2012), reflecting the origins of the Satmar dynasty. But is Bobover Yiddish similarly rooted in western Galician Yiddish? Interviews with informants from the Bobover community reveal a mixed picture. All showed phonological features of non-Hungarian Central Yiddish, but all featured “Hungarian” vocabulary. While most of the informants’ grandparents were from interwar Poland, several had grandparents from the Unterland region; one-third identified their spouses as “Hungarian” or were members of “Hungarian” Hasidic communities. This shows the permeability of the two groups, leading to a mixing of features, which creates the need for shibboleths as clear markers of identity.

Marriage and Sexuality in Pearl Abraham’s The Romance Reader and Hush by Judy Brown

This article examines two authors’ perspectives on marriage and sexuality in Hasidic Judaism through the leading female characters in their semi-autobiographical novels: The Romance Reader by Pearl Abraham and Hush by Judy Brown. Each novel features an adolescent woman on her path to marriage and their experience of matrimony and sexuality within their respective Hasidic communities. The aim of the article is to analyse and compare their views in order to gain a better understanding of the female experience of sexuality and marriage within contemporary Hasidic Judaism. Furthermore, this article discusses the treatment of sexual abuse within a particular Hasidic group. It employs a methodology of close reading combined with a discussion of Talmudic, theological, sociological and ethnographic commentaries on the subject.

The Socio-Economic Profile of a Religious Movement: The Case of Hasidism

This article revisits the once popular issue of the socio-occupational profile of Hasidism, arguably the most important socio-religious movement of modern Jewry. Well-known anecdotal materials are confronted with much broader archival sources, mainly from central Poland in the first half of the nineteenth century. These are both rich narrative sources (anti-Hasidic denunciations by the kahal elders, official reports on the Hasidic conflicts in the communities, etc.) and, most importantly, quantitative materials, which allow for the analysis of four Jewish communities in central Poland and one in Belarus. These materials provide a unique picture of the occupational and financial profile of the Hasidic groups in these localities (as confronted with the picture of the entire communities) and, by implication, of the whole Hasidic movement. Contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, these new materials point to Hasidim’s relative affluence, as well as to their tendency to cluster in commercial professions and to avoid the crafts. More broadly, it points to the dynamic character of class–church interdependence and the ideological and cultural factors creating them. It also confirms the correlation between a religious group’s strictness and its strength and attractiveness.

Space and spirit: on boundaries, hierarchies and leadership in Hasidism

This article examines spatial aspects of Hasidism, arguably one of the most important socio-religious movements in modern Eastern Europe. More specifically, it focuses on the relationship between religious leaders in their courts and their followers in towns scattered across Eastern Europe. The article starts with the argument that in the wake of the exponential growth of Hasidism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it developed an innovative institution of shtiblekh, or Hasidic prayer halls. These prayer halls, often far from the court, became the basic structure for the influence of Hasidism. Their number and geographical distribution allow us to establish the internal boundaries of Hasidism and the Hasidic groups' internal hierarchy. Most importantly, the article argues that the size of the group and the spatial distribution of their shtiblekh were closely correlated with the type of religious leadership employed by this group: from distant charismatic leadership at the great dominant courts through many intermediate forms down to small ephemeral groupings with intense, intimate relations of close charismatic leadership.

The holy contract: The social contract of the Toldos Aharon Hasidic group

The article, based on fieldwork conducted among an extremist Hasidic group, demonstrates how religious fundamentalism may be linked to modernism through the way in which modern ideas infiltrate fundamentalist culture. The authors examine the contract that is signed annually by members of the group, which reaffirms their acceptance of stringent regulations. The contract is signed by every individual by means of a performative act that consolidates the separatist Hasidic social fabric on the basis of contractual legal rationality and creates categories and values that bind the individual to the community, an act that circumscribes that cultural enclave.

Kedushah: The Sexual Abstinence of Married Men in Gur, Slonim, and Toledot Aharon

Kedushah (holiness) developed as a pietistic ideal for the virtuous few, encouraging married men to limit to the minimum the frequency and modes of sexual intercourse with their wives. Today, the hasidic groups of Gur, Slonim, and Toledot Aharon (Toldes Aaron) radicalize this ideal by imposing it on the community as a whole. Gur’s version is the most restrictive and the only one formalized as a set of ordinances (takunes), while Toldes Aaron’s version is the most lenient.

Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism (review)

Reviewed by: Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism Gershon Bacon Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism, by David Assaf. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2010. 336 pp. This new volume of collected studies by David Assaf, Professor of Jewish History at Tel-Aviv University and a leading scholar of nineteenth-century Hasidism, is an extremely worthy successor to his path-breaking study of Rabbi Yisrael of Ruzhin, The Regal Way (2002), and his painstakingly researched edition of the memoirs of Yehezkel Kotik, published under the title [End Page 157] Journey to a Nineteenth Century Shtetl (2002). The author describes his present work as that of the historian as detective, as he endeavors to uncover six hidden and suppressed stories from the Hasidic world. Beyond identifying the "perpetrator," that is, reconstructing the portrayal of the Hasidic personality whose story had been deemed too sensitive to be told, Assaf's goal as historian-detective is to reveal the fascinating series of wrong turns and misleading clues, and to describe the various mechanisms of apologetics, polemics, or suppression employed by Hasidim and their Maskilic critics alike over the last century and a half. The essays included in the volume appeared earlier in various journals, but have been amplified and updated by the author. The volume is an English translation and adaptation of Assaf's Hebrew work entitled Caught in the Thicket: Chapters of Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism (2006). It has been adapted for the English-speaking audience with additional explanations and annotations, by the elimination of several documents in appendices and by the shortening of footnote references (that still comprise over 70 pages of the total). One study in the Hebrew version, which had appeared originally in English, was also eliminated from the present version. For those desirous of further bibliography, the author refers to the relevant passages and footnotes in his Hebrew volume. The studies in Assaf's excellent book span the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and deal with figures and aberrant incidents from different regions of Eastern Europe. They have in common the marginalization of their protagonists in Hasidic society, the sad and troubling fate of children or close relatives of noted Hasidic figures, or the suppression of stories that might besmirch the name of Hasidism. The author reminds his readers that his small number of studies of children of famous Hasidic figures who strayed from family ways by converting to Christianity or becoming Maskilim is but part of a much larger group. See his references to other cases (243-44nn2-11). The longest study in the book (29-96) is on the story of Moshe, the mentally disturbed son of Habad founder Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady and a communal rabbi himself, who converted to Christianity in 1820. Assaf published an article on him in 2000, but this present version is greatly expanded and enhanced thanks to the discovery since then of crucial archival documents related to the incident. Following the general theme of the book, though, beyond reconstructing the story, Assaf devotes much space to the ongoing attitudes of generations of Habad writers (including [End Page 158] the sixth rebbe, R. Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn) to the saga. Habad, arguably the most historically conscious of Hasidic groups, has dealt with Moshe's apostasy in ways ranging from suppression, to outright denial, to providing a "happy end" to the story with Moshe becoming a penitent returning to the Hasidic fold. The subjects of the other essays in the book: the story of the fall of the Seer of Lublin from the window of his house in 1814 (he would die several months later from the injuries he sustained) and the varying interpretations given to the incident by Hasidim and Maskilim; the campaign against Bratslav Hasidim in Ukraine in the 1860s (which provides an interesting contrast to the present-day resurgence of that group); Akiva Shalom Chajes of Tulchin, who started out as a fierce opponent of Hasidism and eventually joined the movement, though never completely forgoing his critical stance; Menahem Nahum Friedman of Itscan, a scion of the Ruzhin dynasty, who engaged...

On Writing about the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe and His Hasidim

When Menachem Friedman and I resolved to write what became The Rebbe: The Life and the Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, we did so because as sociologists we were puzzled, as we put it in our preface, by how a “a small Hasidic group that seemed on the verge of collapse in 1950 with the death of their sixth leader” had replanted itself in America and in less than a generation “gained fame and influence throughout the world in ways no one could have imagined” at the time their next and thus far last rebbe, Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, took over the reins of leadership in 1951. More than that, we were quite amazed that this group, which at its height during the twentieth century was never among the largest hasidic sects and probably numbered at most about 100,000 worldwide, had managed to become among the most well-known hasidim in the world. We were no less struck that they had found ways to make their Jewish outreach efforts, as well as their extraordinarily parochial belief that the contemporary world had entered messianic times (and that only Lubavitchers and their rebbe knew how to hasten his coming), both newsworthy and known far beyond the borders of the hasidic world. Through a series of directed campaigns that aimed to transform Jewry and the world, many, if not most Lubavitchers had also tried to convince the world that their leader, who had reigned over them from Brooklyn for forty-three years, was the Messiah incarnate, even as he lay dying at Beth Israel Hospital in New York.

A rabbi‐informer and the Hasidim of Będzin. Dimensions of Hasidic politics

This study analyses the interplay between the high and the low, or local, level of Hasidic political engagement, an important matter, that has been so far neglected. The best‐known actions of Hasidic shtadlanim (political intercessors), such as interventions by Rabbi Isaac of Warka or Rabbi Menehem Mendel Schneersohn, occurred at the highest state levels, and attempted to influence regulations of a general nature. This portrays Hasidic politics as being chiefly engaged in solving general problems for the whole Jewish community. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that significant sections of Hasidic politics were not concerned with general issues at state level, but rather, with small local conflicts and individual problems. Thus, seeking to find similarities and links between Hasidic macro politics and local community politics appears to constitute a legitimate question. Were these local activities in any way connected or dependent on wider national politics? Did any structural similarities exist between them and, if so, what was their source? What implications did this have on the relations between the leaders and community in a non‐democratic political system such as the Kingdom of Poland? The article discusses an episode from Będzin, a medium‐sized town in the south of the Congress Kingdom, where the local Hasidic group clashed with the communal rabbi‐informer, Hersz Rozynes. The detailed analysis of the case demonstrates that in a highly bureaucratised and centralised state, there were no political undertakings that could be classified as purely local. Every intervention in a local matter required state‐level competences and triggered administrative procedures reaching far into the central government. This made local, communal politics dependent upon state‐level professional intercessors, and so paved the way to the increasing professionalisation of Hasidic – and more generally Jewish – politics in the course of the nineteenth century.

Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism (review)

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 400 pp. $45.00. The Izbica/Radzin hasidic dynasty, founded by R, Mordecai Joseph of Izbica (1800-1854), was of the most creative and controversial hasidic groups in nineteenth-century Poland. Mordecai Joseph's teachings, contained in the Mei ha-Shiloah, introduced new perspectives on determinism, messianism, and antinomianism that reverberate to the present. His grandson, R. Gershon Henokh of Radzin (1839-1891) was the most important figure in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism after Mordecai Joseph. He was a prolific and erudite author and editor, editing and publishing the writings of his father and grandfather. Gershon Henokh's own writings covered four main areas. His Sidrei Tehorot (of which only two volumes were published) sought to create a Gemara for those tractates in the Order of Tehorot that had no Gemara. His second interest was the rediscovery of the tekhelet (the blue thread of the zizit). The majority of rabbinic authorities rejected this discovery, and only his own followers wore his tekhelet. He also wrote a number of traditional style hasidic commentaries on the Pentateuch that expanded on the teaching in the Mei ha-Shiloah. Fourth was a small work, ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha (Introduction and Preface), a preface to his father's commentary on Genesis, Bet Ya'akov al Sefer Bereshit. Magid concentrates on the last two areas of Gershon Henokh's work in this monograph, ignoring the first two areas. This work is divided into three parts. The first part, chapters 1-3, is devoted to a close reading and analysis of the ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha. Magid sees it as the programmatic foundation of Izbica/Radzin Hasidism. He also argues that it is one of the first attempts, internal to Hasidism, that seeks to place Hasidism in the trajectory of meta-halakhic Jewish literature, incorporating both medieval Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah (p. xii). These claims serve to justify the attention devoted to this fairly small text. It may indeed be a systematic attempt, but treatises are rare in Hasidism, and hasidic interest in Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed is virtually non-existent. Magid's analysis is interesting, but he fails to demonstrate the importance and influence of the ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha beyond Gershon Henokh's own writings. The second part, chapters 4, 5, and 6, examines Gershon Henokh's understanding of free will and determinism as they emerge from his exegesis of the major biblical figures in the book of Genesis from the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to the perfection of the biblical personality in the figure of Jacob, who integrates and unites the human and divine will. …

Chabad in Copenhagen: Fundamentalism and Modernity in Jewish Denmark

After establishing its mission in Copenhagen, Denmark, over ten years ago, the Hasidic group, Chabad, has little success to show for its proselytizing efforts. Yet it is admired and welcomed by the religiously liberal Danish Jews for its stringent religiosity, cultural otherness, and commitment to social ethnicity. Despite the profound ideological differences between the two, relations between and the Jewish community have been markedly positive. Indeed, Chabad's organizational independence has allowed it to relieve internal strains that have increasingly troubled the established Jewish community. The anthropology of religious fundamentalism has largely focused on ideological conflicts between fundamentalist and liberal religious ideologies. This case suggests that closer attention to social processes can enrich an understanding of the complexities of social interaction and the possibilities for engagement between ideologically opposed religious groups. (Hasidism, liberalism, Danish Judaism) ********** One Saturday in the autumn of 2000, just after midday, I joined a procession leaving the gates of the Great Synagogue in central Copenhagen. It was not a grand procession, but a ragged chain of perhaps thirty people trailing along the narrow sidewalks of the Danish capital. We had just come from religious services, and our suits and dresses stood out among the crowds of shoppers and tourists. It was our leader, however, who stood out the most. A small man of about thirty with a long auburn beard, he wore a long black coat, black pants, boxy black shoes, and a huge black fedora hat. He strode briskly at the front of the column as we wound our way through the old center city, taking us across the bridge to Frederiksberg and finally to a small brick apartment block with a metal plaque outside one of its doors. The plaque read Chabad House, in Hebrew and English. The man in black, an English-born rabbi named Yitzchock Loewenthal, stood by the door and greeted us as we straggled up, a few at a time, to shake his hand and thank him for his invitation before going inside. There we stayed, most of us for hours, generating a buzz of talk, prayer, and clanking dishes that filtered through the windows of the little apartment until well after sunset. The weekly walk from the synagogue to House will never rival the changing of the palace guard at Amalienborg, but for those who know its context, it is a remarkable event. The long walk itself is a striking act of piety in a generally nonobservant Jewish community, where few worry about the prohibition against driving on the Sabbath. In a self-consciously modern Jewish community, moreover, where most Jews dress, speak, and behave in a manner indistinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors, marching through the streets behind a man in full Hasidic dress makes a powerful statement. Perhaps most surprising, however, is the procession's size. Ten years ago, House did not exist; eight years ago, it attracted only a handful of tourists and the occasional curious Dane. Today, it regularly draws dozens on Saturday afternoons, and hundreds for its frequent holiday festivals. It maintains weekly Kabbalah classes, Hebrew instruction, social gatherings, and Sabbath dinners, each with a body of regular attendees. The larger Jewish community in Denmark is shrinking, following a trend common to much of the Western world, but the growth and vitality of are unmistakable. In its piety, its commitment, and its public visibility, seems to have found an appeal that has eluded the Jewish establishment in Copenhagen. On its face, the success of in Denmark seems to confirm a widespread thesis in the social science r Antoun 2001; Eisenberg 1996; Failer 1997; Lawrence 1989; Shahak and Mezvinsky 1999; Stump 2000; Westerlund 1996). …

Lubavitchers as Citizens: A Paradox of Liberal Democracy (review)

Reviewed by: Lubavitchers as Citizens: A Paradox of Liberal Democracy Barry Trachtenberg Jan L. Feldman . Lubavitchers as Citizens: A Paradox of Liberal Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 212. Lubavitch Hasidim appeared in Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century as one of many Hasidic sects to form in the wake of the death in 1772 of the movement's second leader, Dov Ber of Mezeritch. The founder of the Lubavitch sect, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812), based his movement on a theological doctrine derived from the principles of hokhmah (wisdom), binah (understanding), and da'at (knowledge), earning the group the acronym HaBaD (or, more commonly, Chabad). Over the next two centuries as it spread throughout Lithuania and beyond, its members (like so many other Jews) experienced oppression under the tsars, persecution by the Soviets, and near total destruction at the hands of the Nazis. At the same time, Lubavitch Hasidim were forced to compete for Jewish hearts and minds against other Hasidic sects, mitnagdim (Orthodox opponents of Hasidism), Maskilim (advocates of the Jewish Enlightenment), and various waves of modernity that swept across Eastern Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the sixth Lubavitch rebbe, Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn (1880-1950), reestablished the headquarters of the sect in Brooklyn, where it began to transform itself into an international movement with emissaries and religious schools throughout North America, Europe, Israel, and South Africa. With his passing in 1950, his son-in-law Menachem Mendel (1902-94) assumed leadership of the movement. In the forty-four years that he served as rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn expanded the Lubavitch community to its greatest heights of influence. Although it numbers today approximately 200,000 members out of an estimated thirteen million Jews worldwide, this does not reflect the movement's strength and presence in either the Jewish community or the larger world. At one time forced to practice in secret, the Lubavitch movement found in the United States a society that granted full rights of citizenship without threat of violence or persecution. Operating from this base of unparalleled tolerance, Lubavitch Judaism now boasts a massive network of 2,400 outreach centers in two-thirds of the countries of the world, an annual budget estimated at one billion dollars, and literally millions of Jews who have participated in its outreach campaigns. In recent years its mission has been to keep Jews fully within the Orthodox fold, which leads its activists to fight interfaith marriage, to reach out to [End Page 390] single Jews, and to establish strong ties with influential Jews in politics, business, and entertainment. In this work the movement has at times been very public, very influential, and very controversial. Many Americans have come to learn about the Lubavitch and other Hasidic groups through periodic controversies. These controversies and scandals have included street battles between African Americans and Lubavitchers in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; court battles over public displays of menorahs during Hanukkah; storms of protest over the creation of a school district in Kiryas Joel, New York; charges of voter fraud in Hasidic neighborhoods; and the pardons for the leaders of New Square, New York, by outgoing President Bill Clinton. Recent articles in the press have discussed the messianic activism that has sprung up around the figure of Menachem Mendel and that has left divisions in many Lubavitch communities. Like all other groups of Jews who found safety in North America, Lubavitchers have been forced to contend with the political, economic, and cultural demands of a modern and largely secular society. They too have struggled to find the right balance between their desire to remain isolated from the potentially corrupting influences of modernity and the need to incorporate those aspects of the outside world that are beneficial to the community's survival. For the most part, they have been quite successful at maintaining many of their long-standing communal practices while at the same time keeping abreast of the high-tech, fast-paced world. Despite maintaining a separatist status, they conduct widely publicized telethons, run their own media outlets, court high-ranking politicians, and have countless sites on the Internet. Recent years have witnessed several excellent scholarly...

NOVOE VREMIA’S WAR AGAINST THE JEWS

NOVOE VREMIA’S WAR AGAINST THE JEWS