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- [00:01]
Glenn Diner
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Julia Rothkopf
Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Julia Rothkopf and I'm the program associate at YIVO Today we have Glenn Diner joining us to promote his new book the Light of Hasidism in Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust. And we will be selling it in the Great hall after tonight's program. And accompanying Glenn tonight will be Lawrence Glamberg who will be performing various Hasidic nigunim. For those of you who do not know yivo, we are a very special place for the celebration, contemplation and exploration of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish culture. We are located in New York City where our library and archive contain over 24 million documents and 400,000 books. And these resources are used by scholars and everyday people from all around the world. We also have lots of classes on Yiddish language and culture, public programs just like this one, as well as exhibitions where we like to bridge the world of our vast archival and library collections and Jewish culture. And I would also like to thank the center for Jewish History for co sponsoring tonight's program. So we're so excited to have you joining us this evening to introduce our two participants of this evening's program. Glenn Diner is the Carl and Dorothy Bennett professor of Judaic Studies at Fairfield University and editor of the journal Shofar Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. He's also a recent Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of Men of the Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society and Yankel's Jews, Liquor and Life in the Kingdom of Poland and now the Light of Learning. And Lawrence Glamberg has served as YIVO sound archivist since 2000. He is a founding member of the Grammy Award winning Yiddish American roots band the Klasmatics. And his work in the field of Yiddish music draws extensively on the unsurpassed wealth of materials held in Yubo's library and archives. And now I will hand it over to Lauren who will begin by performing a Hasidic niggin for us. Thank you everyone.
- [05:54]
Glenn Diner
Welcome everybody. Everybody here, everybody on zoom. It's so nice to see you all and just want to say what you have just listened to is a nigun. Really? A medley of nigunim attributed to the Ger dynasty, which was the most popular Hasidic dynasty in Poland, performed by Lawrence Klamberg of the Klasmatics. And for those of us who grew up listening to Kleismatics, this is a huge honor. I also want to thank Yivo and the center for Jewish History for sponsoring this event and the Bennett center at Fairfield University as well. And I really want to thank my wife Heather, for just being with me through this throughout this whole journey of writing a book about seven years the the Labors of Yaakov Avinu. And yeah, it's just wonderful to be here. So I'd like to begin the presentation with a Kvitzal that was composed by Yaakov Yitzchak of Volek, who goes by the name, thankfully, of Zelig, which he presented to the 3rd Ger Rebbe in 1905, who just become the new Rebbe of Ger. Now, most kfitlech are short, formulaic. We have a whole collection here in Yivo. They just ask for a couple of blessings and that's it. But Zellig decides to tell his life story. And woven into his story are these recollections of encounters that he had with the major Polish Hasidic leaders. It's actually important enough to Hasidim today to have been published, which really rarely happens because these are seen as too intimate and they study it. Actually. It's also a great boon to historians because it really lets us in on the somatic or emotional experience of Hasidism. Give you an example. Zelig first encountered the Kotzka rabbi as a teenager. When I arrived there in his holy presence, he asked me, where are you from? What's your name? I was seized by fear and dread and lost my composure and lost touch with this worldly reality. And the impression has lingered in my heart up to this very day. And as I turned to depart from his presence, I was transformed into a different person and my heart blazed with clarity. And then Zelig goes on to describe his meeting with the first Ger Rebbe Yitzchak Meir Altar, which entailed less fear than love. And secular academics among us might find a little bit of eroticism in here as well. When I entered his holy presence to hear his words which were issuing from his holy pure mouth, burning like coals of fire, I woke like a man who wakes from sleep his sleep. His words descended to the innermost parts of my stomach and entered into my bowels like a serpent's venom. My heart melted within me and all my limbs TR my limbs trembled. His holy words flew down like an arrow slung at a hairbreadth and did not miss. When I returned home, the Rebbe inhabited my every thought. Now an old man, Zelig ends his petition by pledging his fealty to the new 39 year old Ger Teach me our Holy Master, long may he live the way in which we should proceed in the worship of the Lord and teach us knowledge so that we may understand the inner Torah, by which he means the esoteric understanding of the Tanakh. Now, what we learn from these descriptions is the sheer power of the encounter with the Hasidic leader, the Rebbe, which was felt not only as a kind of spiritual transformation, but also a very bodily transformation. What is Hasidism? Well, Hasidism is a mass movement that is centered around charismatic leaders known as rebbes. And by the 19th century, these rebbes had actually founded courts and dynasties all over the formerly Polish lands to which pilgrims could visit for blessings, advice, fertility, and all kinds of different services. There are a few physical traces of Hasidism's founder, the BAAL Shem Tov. What we do know, though, is that he really innovated a new theology which emphasized joy over ascetic worship. And his star disciple, the Magid of Mezhric, actually helped formulate this new way of seeing a new way of believing and new way of worshiping into a more formal theology. And it really mounted to a new way of looking at the world. We perceive our world as material and coarse only because we chase after empty goals and physical desires. However, if we're discerning and commune with the pleasantness and sweetness of the light of God and the constant performances of his commandments, this world has proven to be good and valuable. For then, in every place, one sees nothing but the sweetness and pleasantness of the vital energies of the Creator. The entire world, then, is nothing but a portal and a gate to perceiving and communing with God. So it's a very optimistic way of looking at the world. Everything is really potential access to the divine. But as Hasidism developed really as a mass movement, it really emerged as a movement of defiance, defiance against government initiatives, such as the attempt to force Jews to abandon their traditional modes of dress and integrate with the Polish population without actually offering them emancipation. And you can see by this painting by Gerimski, a Polish painter, in 1884, it didn't work. In fact, all it did for Hasidism was reinforce its desire to dress distinctively and uniformly. At the same time, by the 20th century, though, the youth had begun to stray. They were drawn in by secular movements like Zionism and socialism to a small degree, but they were also acculturating and becoming more and more drawn to Polish culture. And the Rebbes and other rabbis, rabbinic leaders began to panic really, really feeling that they were losing the youth. And their fears only intensified during World War I, which saw the physical destruction of Hasidic communities, the scattering of Hasidim and their leaders. Some were actually killed on spurious charges, charges of espionage, and the youth were simply deprived of a devot Torah education and they began to stray in greater and greater numbers. They were also probably pretty corrupted by smuggling and other kind of wartime endeavors. Now one Rebbe in particular, Rabbi Shmuel Borenstein of Sochoshev, the Sochashev Rebbe, really kept the light of Hasidism alive throughout the war. He was in UJ or Lodz and he would sort of combine his sermons as sort of like an encouragement, but also a rebuke of secular. It's always darkest before the dawn in Egypt. The audacity of Pharaoh and his Jewish collaborators, by which he means secularizing Jews in the present with Nathana Naviram in the biblical context, increased before the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. That is God's way. He allows audacity and abuse of the Torah to increase amid the birth pangs of the Messiah. The real war is against the audacious and reckless transgressions in the hearts of our own people. Nevertheless, those few transgressors among our people are not doing so of their own accord, but rather under pressure from Gentiles. I'd like to conclude this section with a discovery from the YIVO archives. A 418 page diary written by Jula Wald, who is a young Hasidic woman, self declared Hasidic woman, who helped to run her family's tavern in a small town outside of Krakow throughout the First World War. Eula's diary first of all provides an extremely rare perspective of a Hasidic woman, but it also illustrates the complexities of acculturation because she's writing in Polish, as you can see, not in Yiddish, and she reads Western literature voraciously. She attends Polish public school. She socializes with Catholic Poles and engages in flirtations with dashing young officers. She's even proposed to by one of them as a pogrom is raging nearby in the wake of the war. So you see how complex Polish Jewish relations were at this time. When you actually see somebody's real life, you know, which is much messier and less binary. And even her moments of Hasidic inspiration seem like they're tinged by ambivalence. I want to just read one passage. June 1918. The Baba of a Rebbe came to Lishki. That's her town. And although I was not so impressed by him, I went with Hanka and Sella to the synagogue to hear his kiddush, the blessing over the wine, something that would have never occurred to me to do. But he was addressing Daddy, so I had to go. I'm sure my daughters can relate. I went and did not regret it. While standing and listening, a strange feeling pulled at me. I had not expected that the vision of Jews gathered respectfully around a single rabbi would awaken my dormant feelings so much against my own will. I began to tremble, recalling the numerous times I'd been urged to get baptized and might have voluntarily deprived myself of this vision that so moves me. Oh, no, never. And that might sound like inspiration, but wait. She was tempted to become baptized and she's going to see this famous Rebbe reluctantly. There's just a lot of ambivalence there. And she's representative, you know. A lot of the youth were just strain away from the Hasidic communities. Most of them did not break with the community, and that's a corrective I try to make in my book. They stay reluctantly, and she does. She gets married eventually to a Hasidic lawyer, somebody who's modern or as she would put it, civilized, yet Hasidic. But as the war ended, it really became clear that there was a kind of state of emergency. And to add to the sense of crisis, the Polish state, the new Independent Republic of Poland, began instituting mandatory public school education in primary school. Okay, so there was this real sense that the children are going to be somehow forcibly acculturated. And now Hasidic leaders felt like they had to rescue the youth. And one of the most energetic rescuers was the Babova Rebbe. So I'd like to pause for a bub over. Now a passage from the book about the Baba Rebbe. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Bubova Rebbe, Rabbi Benson Haberstam, managed a veritable resurrection of the dead in the towns of Poland. According to one Baba witness, Halberstam's first feat was to re establish his shattered court in Etzheim Yeshiva in Baba, a small town in the Carpathian foothills of Western Galicia, now part of the Second Polish Republic. This was a delightful town, recalls a former resident. The buildings were kind of ramshackle and set on crooked streets of dirt and cobblestone. The streets were filled with bearded Jews and children playing. Dogs ran barking after wagons, and blue wood smoke hung about the rooftops. Baba Va was a quiet place. However, the yeshiva itself was anything but quiet. Upon its reopening in 1922, it drew hundreds of students from both Hasidic homes and the outside, all united in clamorous full time study. Halberstam would go on to establish at least 33 Atzhayim branches across Galicia. In the face of formidable challenges, Halberstam was driven by a sense of cultural embattlement. The recent successes of Zionism and socialism, he believed, had been made possible only by the wartime destruction of Torah institutions, as a result of which misguided ideas had entrenched themselves day after day in the Jewish street. And profane movements, organizations and parties had cast their nets and ensnared numerous innocent souls in their idolatry derived from the profane teachings of every gentile land. At the same time, the Polish state had begun to mandate secular knowledge, alternately termed heresy. Profane teachings, or more often external wisdom represented the gravest threat to Jewish survival. Increasing numbers of youths were voluntarily enrolling in secularist gymnasia, or high schools, and had distanced themselves from the ways of Judaism, he wrote. But after speaking with Halberstam, they would often abandon that path and enter as yeshiva. Those who lacked the requisite background were brought up to speed by fellow students, sometimes working in shifts. Now, the Bhava Rebbe was not alone in this rescue mission. In fact, one Hasidic leader may have outdone him in terms of organizational land, and the could call him the most energetic rescuer of all. That was the Ger Rebbe, Rabbi Avraham Mordechai Alter. So let's pause for another dig in by Ger.
- [23:16]
Lawrence Glamberg
Oh, okay.
- [23:17]
Glenn Diner
If you have. If you don't, I can go on.
- [23:20]
Lawrence Glamberg
Sure, why not? Yeah, but I didn't plan on singing this one, but.
- [23:26]
Glenn Diner
Okay, let's do it.
- [23:28]
Lawrence Glamberg
Let's do it, actually. Yeah.
- [23:30]
Glenn Diner
By the way, are we allowed to clap along or are we allowed to.
- [23:33]
Lawrence Glamberg
Yeah, you can. You can sing along, sing along, clap along. Okay, so this one I learned. I learned from Velvel Pasternate, actually. He once or twice taught at Kles camp where I used to be the coordinator, and he taught this tune. Let me pick a key. Let's see. Yeah, okay. Did I.
- [26:30]
Glenn Diner
We staged that whole thing. We really. Now Lauren is the sound archivist for Yivo. So if anybody can pull one out when they have to, it's definitely Lauren. So thank you for that and apologies. I want to say this is going to be really. My main argument is that the Jews of Poland were really caught in a kind of a vice because the Polish government is really trying to forcibly Polonize them, so to speak, by forcing their children to go to these Polish schools. And on the other hand, still really subjecting the Jewish population to special economic restrictions. They can't serve in government, they have special taxes and eventually not really protecting them from violent anti Jewish boycotts and outright pogroms. In fact, the government itself is going to endorse the boycotts as sort of a way of saying, better that you don't buy from Jews than you actually do violence to them. But of course, that message gets lost. And so there's no viable path to social or societal acceptance for the Polish Jewish community. And in such a situation, which I'll define as coercive assimilation amid ongoing discrimination, what happens is there's the rise of the popularity of the very politicized subcultures. Socialism through the Bundes, Zionism and various different manifestations, and finally Hasidism. Now, historians of the interwar period, those of you who know, will recognize the first two in the historiography, as we call it, the literature about this period. It's a secularization narrative, right? And religion supposedly declines. And what I tried to show in my book is, no, actually not just through a Gura, which is the Hasidic political party, but in many manifestations. Hasidism and Orthodoxy experience a kind of revival at a time when they're not supposed to. Now, if we look at the Aguda, it's an extraordinary achievement because what it does more than these other movements, the socialist and Zionist movements, is it really focuses on education as the magic bullet, really. And the results are extraordinary. Before World War I, there were almost no Hasidic yeshivas. There was Lubavitcher 1, there were a couple of others, if you could even call them yeshivas. And now suddenly, this map doesn't really illustrate it so well. But those squares represent hundreds of Hasidic yeshivas affiliated with different dynasties. And on the other side, you see the most famous one, Yeshivat Hachme Lublin, which you may have heard of, that's the one that you had to have memorized 400 pages of Gemara Talmud before you could even gain admission. But really, in the matter of a couple of years, years, about a dozen Hasidic yeshivas become world renown to the point where even American parents are sending their sons to study there as a kind of junior abroad, so to speak. And it really becomes an extraordinary resource. Now, Ger itself, or the Yaguda, sponsors its own yeshiva, called Masivta, which is remarkable in its own right for actually implementing secular education, which Proves to be really modernizing influence in a very controlled environment. That was the goal, at least. And many of you will be familiar with another thing that Eguda sponsored, which was founded by Sara Schneer. And that's, of course, the besiaka of school system for girls and young women. Unprecedented, really. There had been more of a. There had been something in Vilnius and so on, but nothing to this extent, and certainly not in the Hasidic communities. Really was a pan Hasidism that also included other Orthodox schools as well, or movements as well. But 38,000 girls and young women were attending as many as 250 Bas Yaakov schools. And the experience was deeply emotional for these young women. A spiritual immediacy that wasn't always available to them in the prior conventional Hasidic communities, let alone the education. According to one student, we lived here as one large family. We have a mother, the wonderful Sarah Schneer. We have friendly teachers and how close they are to the students, like sister to sister. So Schneer really became what Naomi Simon has described as a female Rebbe with a female Pan Hasidic following. And it wasn't just educational that that was the emphasis. You know, we really see a transition from these Hasidic courts and dynasties of the prior century now to Hasidic yeshivas, which become the focal point, the main centers through which communal identity is constituted. You know, And Hasidism itself becomes much more scholarly, intellectualist. The rebbe is less of a miracle worker. He's seen more as an educator, an educational entrepreneur and that kind of a thing. And it's reflected in artwork from outside the communities. You know, where's the Hasidim? You don't see the dancing Hasidim now. You see Hasidim studying. And this is only one example, the one I used for the COVID of the book. Beyond the education, though, a is really establishing something very worldly with summer camps and youth movements and choirs and libraries. They have a newspaper that they loosely sponsor with cartoons and even advertisements with women, I should say, not to shock anybody. So really we have what could be arguably called a Hasidic modern orthodoxy at this time, which for some Hasidic leaders was considered just going too far. And one of the foremost opponents of a gooda, or at least somebody who opted out of a gooda, we could say, was the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who enters Poland in 1933 and establishes his court there, first in Warsaw and then in Otwock. And I think it might be a good time for the Bubba's Indigo. I'm not shocking you?
- [33:27]
Lawrence Glamberg
No.
- [33:28]
Glenn Diner
Okay, good.
- [33:30]
Lawrence Glamberg
Now this one is blah. Yeah, A little change of pace. This is Kihine kah as clay in the hand of the potter who expands or contracts it at will. So are we in your hands, God heed your pact. Heed not the accuser. K.
- [35:38]
Audience Member 1
Love.
- [36:55]
Julia Rothkopf
Sa.
- [37:47]
Lawrence Glamberg
Ke. In l.
- [38:26]
Glenn Diner
Gotta be one of the most beautiful songs ever written, really. Now, Lubavitch, as I mentioned before, is a highly intellectual, a scholarly movement within Hasidism. And Lubavitcher leaders had often derided the Polish Hasidic leaders this week. Polish Hasidim meant synonymous with being emotional and non rational. They like to distinguish themselves. Imagine the surprise of the Bhavacha Rebbe when he arrives and he finds himself in the midst of this pedagogical revolution. It was pretty extraordinary and perhaps unnerving, but without missing a beat, he just begins establishing yeshivas, you know, branches of Tom Che to Mem Yeshiva. He moves the upper two classes from Warsaw to a small town outside of Warsaw called Otwock. And really he's expanding in enemy territory, so to speak. Right in Ger territory and other areas where it's pretty audacious. And yet he's attracting Polish Hasidic students from Polish Hasidic families. And the teachers tend to be refugees from the Soviet Union who had fled and really entered Poland illegally crossing the border because of Stalin's anti religious campaigns. So it's this amazing phenomenon in just a short amount of time of this real spread of Lubavitch throughout Poland as well. Unfortunately, the year is 1933. And what's happening next door in Germany, you all probably know already the effects in Poland are beginning to become more and more palpable because Polish right wing nationalists can draw inspiration through what's happening next door in Germany. And so the the right wing for another two years are kept in check. But when Poland's benignly authoritarian leader, Yusef Pisudski passes away in 1935, it's just like all let loose. And you really have just this effort to drive Jews out of the economy through violent boycotts and outright pogroms, and to really drive them out of Poland. And this image is pretty extraordinary because if you look at the sign, it says to Palestine, right? Jews should go back to Palestine is the attitude. And the title of the journal is Kalindar's Samobrone, which is the calendar journal of self defense. Right? So attacks against Jews are viewed as self defense. Why is this happening? Well, it's happening because Public schooling also affected the mainly illiterate peasantry who once they obtained a modicum of an education, were no longer content the younger generations to work on their parents dwindling holdings on their farms. They want to enter more lucrative urban pursuits. And they find it very hard to break in because Jews really still, despite all the boycotts and all the special taxes, are still really predominant in these urban pursuits. They have centuries of experience and networks of clients and all kinds of trade networks. And so they just can't break in. So it fuels resentment, which makes them prime targets for right wing nationalism and the promise that you can actually drive Jews out of the economy that they're supposedly controlling. Interestingly though, while Zionist youth and socialist Bundist youth are forming self defense units and fighting back, sometimes preventing pogroms, but if we're going to be honest, sometimes causing them at least exacerbating them. Hasidic youth are simply redoubling their efforts to study. And the attitude really is throughout these pogroms, and you can see they're kind of. They could be deadly pogroms, you know, nothing like what happened in Ukraine or Ukrainian territories between 1918 and 1921 where the death tolls like exceeds 100,000. Still, these are deadly pogroms. But the attitude of Hasidic leaders. Here's one notorious pogrom in Breast or Bzec Hillel Simon writes in the Hasidic a good newspaper, Dos Yida Shatoghlat. He writes, establishing a yeshiva, a new yeshiva would be the ultimate refutation of the Iranian barbarity. Right? The recent brutality he began must not silence Torah study. Okay, so how are you going to respond to Bagrams with building yeshivas? Of course, now this might seem like a passive response. That's the way historians will often describe the Hasidic communities. But actually they saw these pogroms as dangerous, even lethal. But not the greatest danger. The greatest danger is the Polish public school. It's very hard to get into that mentality. But I just want to give you this one quote. There are two kinds of exiles, bodily exile and spiritual exile. Bodily exile occurs when the haters of Israel torture the Jews with bodily torments, with beatings and pogroms and heavy taxes and levies. You feel the taxes as much as the pogroms, I guess. Right. And so on. But spiritual exile is the weapon of the more devious haters of Israel who befriend Jews like beloved neighbors and indirectly seek to seduce and lead them astray by establishing schools in which they learn their manners and ways. You can see that there's a great deal of distrust, probably because of the pogroms and other forms of violence and exclusion, but they really feel like they have the schools to fear the most. Now, lest this seem paranoid, it's a little paranoid, but I just want to show you what was being openly admitted by Polish officials. Every non Pole in the Polish state must be raised under the influence of Polish culture, a culture of great tolerance with which he will be easily reconciled. Polish schooling will exert a magnetic influence over the minority's weaker cultures. So this is really classic, like, you know, colonialist rhetoric where they're going to civilize their Jewish population, the Ukrainian population, and and so on. So what I've argued throughout the book is this kind of colonialist Catch 22 formula, which is that coercive assimilation amid ongoing discrimination will fuel a traditionalist revival. And that's my explanation for why Hasidism revives at a time when most historians had really declared it practically dead. Now, September 1st, 1939, the Nazis invade. They requisition these yeshivas or simply burn them down. Here's Yeshiva Lublin with a Nazi guard outside. Many Hasidim just gave up their Hasidic modes of dress for the first time. You know, it was just too dangerous. They were getting beaten, harassed, beards were getting cut off, ripped off. But interestingly, a sizable number of young Hasidic men and women actually created yeshiva bunkers in the ghettos where they would just study all day long and people would bring them food. And it's a pretty remarkable phenomenon. You know, this what we call spiritual resistance. In Warsaw, according to one document, there were 700 full time students at one time. We know because the Judenrat was actually bringing them lunches and had the records and even more on Shabbat. According to Hillel Seidman, Jews hid in bunkers and bolt holes and cellars and attics and cold and fear and learned Torah in depth and with dedication. They ignored this bitter reality to soar to the spiritual heights of Torah and fear of God. And he personally witnessed and described one yeshiva bunker in particular. Around a long table Before Open Talmuds, 20 yeshiva students sit and learn heartily, concentrating with great fervor. Their faces are pale, their eyes sparkle with an otherworldly fire. And the same was true of base Jakob students. According to Guta Sternbach, hungry, cold, destitute, working without textbooks. The teachers and children drew strength from each other. We would speak to the girls souls and hearts more than to their minds. We would climb a Ladder up one flight. Although this climb was a little frightening. Once upstairs, after we pulled the ladder up after us. We felt as though we were an enchanted, protected world. Where no one could reach us. We were like queens, beings. Free and distant from the terrible reality of the ghetto. Now there's an interesting thinker cultural theorist named Stuart Hall. Who coined the term culture of resistance. And what he argues is that when a marginalized culture is actually feeling pressure. It tends to grow stronger in sort of opposition. A culture of resistance with its own sort of priorities. Its own codes. And its own sense, sense of virtue and superiority. Here you can imagine the sense that by studying full time, we're refuting, we're repudiating this Western culture. Which has kind of proven itself to be murderous. And that's a pretty powerful statement in making. Even if they're not involved in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Other physical modes of existence. At least that's what I would argue. Now I'm going to conclude with the most famous thinker from the Holocaust, possibly. And that is Rabbi Colonist Colin Shapiro of Pia Secchner. Who moves into the Warsaw Ghetto. And really becomes known as the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. And he really delivers these powerful sermons. Throughout his time in the ghetto. His sermons were written down and preserved in milk cans and buried. And one person, according to Sam Kassow. One person remembered where everything was buried. And after the war was able to lead investigators to find. And it came to be known as the Ringelblum Archive. Because it was all organized by Emmanuel Ringelblum. So I want to conclude with this sermon. But just to understand what it meant to be delivering a sermon in the Warsaw Ghetto. In June of 1942, people knew what deportation meant. By now, rumors had come there were even people had escaped from concentration camps. The Lublin Ghetto had been deported to Majdanek and other centers. And at this point, Treblinka was under construction. And around over 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. Are going to be deported there. In this kind of swirling chaos. He offers what I think is an extraordinary message of hope for the future of the Jewish people. Here's an image of Shapiro. And there's the Warsaw Ghetto. The birthing process of the Jewish people is eternal. It is achieved not only by giving birth to children. But by means of the Torah that we teach them. For the teacher is a creator. And he imparts insights. In a manner similar to the creation and rebirth that occurs within the heavenly realm. For by means of this kind of creation. Godliness is revealed. Students, like children sustain Jewish eternality by means of the Torah knowledge imparted to them, which they in turn impart to their students, and so on through the generations. So I think it would be nice to conclude with pset Chandigu.
- [52:05]
Audience Member 2
D.
- [53:51]
Lawrence Glamberg
Hey. D. Thank you.
- [54:47]
Glenn Diner
Okay, thank you, Lauren. That was really amazing. I'm happy to take questions from anybody. We'll take a few and have a mic circulating. Talk about the first. Thank you very much for the lecture. Can you talk about the rivalry between the Misnag and the Hasidim? Right, so now we're much more familiar with the earlier periods where there was a really open rivalry. And I'm not saying that rivalry ever stopped, but that sense of state of emergency, you could say, was felt by Hasidim and non Hasidic Orthodox Jews alike. I have a whole chapter on this brawl that breaks out in synagogues. Erev Yom Kippur, between the Lubavitchers and the non Hasidic. Actually they're Mizrachi, they're religious Zionists. But such things were not that common because of a Guda.
- [55:51]
Audience Member 2
Really.
- [55:52]
Glenn Diner
A Guda was unifying. That's what the name actually means, was unifying Hasidic and non Hasidic leaders. Major non Hasidic rabbonim like Rabbi Ochanan Wasserman Baranovich is where he is at this point. And the Chafetz Chaim, they're joining with the Gerar Rebbe. And what's fascinating is in Wasterman's letters, he's actually admitting that maybe Hasidism was a good thing because he sees how it energizes the youth and they can study on just as high a level. So really what you're finding, I think first of all, the dynasties become much less relevant because students want to study in whatever yeshiva is the best yeshiva. Right. They're not necessarily interested in what the dynastic affiliation is as long as their parents would let them. But you also have non Hasidic youth being attracted to these really high powered Hasidic yeshivas like Hohme Lublin and possibly vice versa as well. So there's a rare point in which it all becomes amalgamated and then in the post war period, it becomes atomized again into specific dynasties and specific affiliations. Lakewood versus whatever. So really, I think we're at a rare moment where I don't mean to romanticize, but that it did become an intellectual priority that tended to unify everybody, along with that underlying anxiety about the secularization of the youth and all the temptations of this Culture, which at the same time was repelling the youth and pushing them back into the traditional societies, as I've tried to show.
- [57:43]
Audience Member 2
Thank you so much. They were very, very informative. Okay, just a few little questions. When my parents referred to a Galitsyana, were they referring basically to Jews who came from Poland, or did it involve a much larger area?
- [58:06]
Glenn Diner
Okay, so Galicia is actually Austrian Poland. Poland was partitioned, really, Poland, Lithuania was partitioned at the end of the 18th century. So in 1772, then 1792, and finally completely 1795, Poland is just wiped off the map. The Austrian part, or the Habsburg part, becomes known as Galicia. It carried with it a kind of cultural connotation of being a Luftmensch and more emotional, less cerebral than perhaps the litvish or Lithuanian cultural areas. And so these stereotypes would emerge, which of course, like any stereotype, we have to take with a huge grain of salt.
- [58:47]
Audience Member 2
And.
- [58:48]
Glenn Diner
But it did have a lot to do with the educational system, with poverty, which was really, really widespread throughout these rural Galician areas. At the same time, you do have a Haskalah enlightenment, so we can't generalize. When your parents said Galician, or they might have meant literally Galicia, they might have been referring to the stereotype, the cultural stereotype.
- [59:13]
Audience Member 2
The other part is, you see, the university today, I don't think we would refer to that as a Hasidic institution. So which group of Jews or which philosophy did they have that produced a very academic institution? Because I think even though you said that these yeshivas were educational as well as, we'll say, religious in nature, I don't know. I always had the impression that these yeshivas were far more religious than academically educational.
- [59:55]
Glenn Diner
Right. So I'm actually pointing to a moment where Hasidic yeshiva started to incorporate secular education seriously. Also vocational training. They were training students to be bookbinders and weavers. And it's really an incredible moment. You had to work. You had to work if you were going to, you know, not everyone can become a rabbi. Yeshiva university is different because it's a modern Orthodox institution that tries to balance the sacred and the profane, so to speak. Right. And so that's a specifically modern Orthodox project which most Hasidic Jews would not be sympathetic towards, because, honestly, the secular subjects today, in most Hasidic communities, communities are probably regarded as what we call Bittul Torah, a waste of time, unless it's for your vocation. Right. So really, Yeshiva university, I think, has a disposition that's modern Orthodox. It's also pretty misnagtic, meaning Anti or non Hasidic. I would even say the same thing about jts. I sense a real kind of rationalistic emphasis to JTS that probably derives as much from the Lithuanian model as it does from Germany and other places where it directly sources its influence. But Hasidic yeshivas today, really, the secular education has receded. That's why there are all these scandals that have been happening and something of a crisis. So that's a very different situation. There was a moment, though, where they seemed to be starting to take secular education seriously and. And they started really producing more worldly rabbis who knew Polish fluently, who were learning Polish poetry, if you can believe it, in the Sivda Yeshiva. It was just a rare moment in time, which makes the demise so tragic.
- [61:54]
Audience Member 1
Thank you so much. Two questions, one on the political and one on the educational. On the political, we know that there
- [62:02]
Lawrence Glamberg
were
- [62:05]
Audience Member 1
Hasidic city councilmen, Hasidic members of the same, from the Aguda, for example, and you mentioned that they're now part of government. So could you explain what you meant as far as, you know, with the head representation? But you know, and the second question is on educational. Alexander Hasidim, as you know, were the second largest group as far as the number of shuls, that they have an educational system. What about Radomsky? When you speak of yeshiva, do you mean higher learning? Did Radansk have a network of lower level? Like lower level, meaning as far as age group, was it directed for the youth? And therefore it's not what you spoke of till now.
- [62:50]
Glenn Diner
Okay, so can you repeat the first question?
- [62:53]
Audience Member 1
You mentioned that the Jews in Poland were not allowed to be part of government. I believe you said in the white. But they had representation, but they wouldn't be right.
- [63:07]
Glenn Diner
So what I meant was they couldn't be civil servants, but they could create political parties and even have representation in the parliament in the same. So that was absolutely the case. You often get the sense that Hasidic Jews weren't interested really in this kind of political power. It was more a form of intercession, lobbying. But at the local levels, in the Kehila, where you're determining educational budgets, they were extremely, extremely concerned about who held the power. And they would run for those offices. And the government, especially the Pilsudski government, preferred the Hasidic and Orthodox Jews because their only aspiration was just education on religious. Whereas the Zionists would make trouble and the Socialists would make trouble. They want a revolution. So there are forms of this interesting alliance between the Pilesudsky regime and Aguda. And other Hasidic leaders. The second part of your question, all the groups I didn't mention, Radomsk especially extraordinary networks of yeshivas. Radomsk is probably the largest one with enrollment exceeding 3,000. Right. So really a very, very serious, high level Talmudic study happening in Radomsk. Alexander, you don't hear about as much, but it was Radomsk that was the serious one. Masivta was considered less serious because they were actually training you to become a rabbi, which is sort of using the Torah as a spade to dig with, you know, so to speak. Even Chachmaelublin, there was ambivalence about it. There was talk of implementing secular studies. There was an ordination there as well. So Radomsk was where you would go. Most of them were near Krakow, in Sosnowiec, which is close to Krakow, that was where you went if you were a purist. Also the bub over yeshivas, you're a purist, you want to minimize secular education. That's where you would go. So you have really. Yes, absolutely. Those who are what today we call haredi. Back then they used the word, but it sort of meant every observant too, right? And there you really have this kind of sectarian separation where you just don't want to have anything to do with the modern world. World Aguda and Gair, believe it or not. Because what we know of Gar today, Gair represented this kind of modern Orthodoxy that was developing as a way really of gaining influence over not just the yeshiva system, but also the primary schools, because they cut a deal with the government where if we implement two hours of secular education in our schools, then our children don't have to go to your schools, they can go to ours, et cetera. But really, Gura was making this kind of a compromise which other Hasidic leaders found completely unacceptable.
- [66:21]
Julia Rothkopf
But I think we'll end with a question from our online audience where we have over 150 people tuning in live. So this question is asking, so you're talking about Poland. What else is happening elsewhere in Hasidic Europe at this time?
- [66:40]
Glenn Diner
The boundaries of Hasidism are still predominantly in what comes to be known as independent Poland, but really the formerly Polish lands. There are very important exceptions. I would say the most important exception is Vienna, because in Vienna, the Chortkova Rebbe settles. He. He once lived in this magnificent palace in the town of chortkov. In the 1920s and 30s, it proved impossible to rebuild it. It was just too expensive. So he stays in Vienna and then his son's successor stays in Vienna. So what you have is this fascinating phenomenon of Hasidic Jews making this pilgrimage to Vienna to this very elaborate. You can imagine the coffee houses and the beautiful architecture and Hasidim gathering outside the window of their Rebbe and dancing throughout the night. Another interesting thing about Vienna is Hasidism could be catching. So you had certain college students who were drawn to this Hasidic energy and dropped out of college, dropped out of university and quit their socialist movements and became Hasidic. So there's this whole Baltchuva movement that's happening in Vienna as well now. There are little Hasidic pockets elsewhere. But really, I would say to have a dominating influence, there had to be a Hasidic leader in a Hasidic court. And that's what you had in Vienna. That's why it was a really, really interesting exception. Generally speaking, though, emancipation, and full fledged emancipation, meaning equal rights under the law but also equal opportunities, tended to be bad for Hasidism throughout most of the 19th century and into the early 20th century. So in places where Jews were fully emancipated, they tended towards the universities, towards the professions, and towards much more, I would say, acculturated forms of Jewish observance practices in existence. Okay, thank you very much.