From then until 1979 they were led by their charismatic founder and grand rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum (born 1887), who is considered a major contributor to the postwar growth of Hasidism in the United States. The Yiddish-speaking Satmars settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which already boasted a large, diverse Jewish population, including Hasidim from other groups, in the late 1940s. They not only practice a radical austerity but regard fellow Jews who don’t as sinful. Satmar social attitudes differ from most other Hasidic groups, especially in their relationship to other Jews. A Fortress in Brooklyn, however, focuses on the Satmars, the largest Hasidic group in the world (estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000 followers), who originated in Hungary. The best-known of the Hasidic groups are probably the Lubavitchers, with their well-organized outreach programs, roaming “mitzvah tanks” blasting music, enthusiastic emissaries sent around the world, their “Come on in!” attitude of welcoming Jews wherever they are (or aren’t) in their religious observance, and tradition of opening up their homes for Sabbath dinners and always abundant Jewish holidays. But after the war, the saving presence of a place of refuge made anti-Israel objections irrelevant like all other refugees, those who belonged to Hasidic communities gratefully settled into Jerusalem-and other cities that would have them, including Montreal, London, Antwerp, Buenos Aires, New York, and, in time, a handful of towns in upstate New York and New Jersey. Some settled in the recently founded state of Israel, the idea of which the Orthodox rabbinate had shunned and repudiated before the war, convinced that a true Jewish state could not exist until the arrival of the Messiah and that a secular one, functioning independently of Jewish law, was essentially sacrilege. The decimated Hasidic “courts” of Eastern Europe-as the various pietistic groups named for the places they originally came from were called-scrambled to establish new communities. Figures for the number of Hasidim who died in World War II are notoriously unreliable. Some 200,000 live in the US, about half of whom are Brooklyn residents. It has been estimated that there are some 400,000 Hasidim in the world today. This is a worthy aspiration but tonally quite different from the teachings of the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, who emphasized the mystical presence of God everywhere and had as a goal the infusion of all aspects of life-eating, storytelling, praying, dancing, socializing-with holiness and joy. Hasidim in Williamsburg employed the same term in a dramatically different sense: to repair their own small corner of Brooklyn and make it a “vineyard,” free from the corrupting influence of the outside world, albeit one that would ideally spur a much wider spiritual renaissance. “When liberal Jews in the United States were reinventing the kabbalistic concept tikkun to mean the ‘repair of the world’ through social justice, civil rights, environmental activism, and so on,” Deutsch and Casper write, Any work that sheds fresh light on a Hasidic community adds welcome dimensions to our patchy understanding.Ī Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg, Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper’s meticulously researched study of Hasidic survival in Brooklyn, opens the door on yet another previously obscure aspect of Hasidic life. And, except for the curious, it’s unlikely that anyone outside the cordon sanitaire of a Hasidic community will ever get to hear the beautiful nigunim, or religious songs-sometimes joyous, sometimes solemn, sometimes set to well-known secular tunes like “The Marseillaise,” sometimes just wordless melodies-sung at Hasidic gatherings. Hasidic joy? Not obvious in everyday street sightings. Yet despite these offerings, the young Hasid striding peppily along under a massive fur hat in ninety-degree weather, the barely-out-of-her-teens pregnant mother pushing a stroller with a toddler or two in tow, the pale, richly bearded septuagenarian parsing a Hebrew text on the subway, oblivious to everything around him, continue to be largely unknown. Over the years, glimpses into the inner sanctums of the Hasidic world have come along via literary or scholarly works, a few television miniseries, and, once in a while, an intrigued but puzzled magazine article.
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