The contemporary Satmar Chassidic sect originated with Joel (Yoel) Teitelbaum (“Reb Yoelisch”), who was born in the nearby town of Siget in the Maramureș County region, though the family genealogy goes back to three generations. They are politically powerful, well-funded and promote a fanatical hatred of Zionism, which they view as akin to the work of the devil.
Their outlook is based on Reb Yoelisch’s main book, Va’Yoel Moshe, in which he builds on a radical interpretation of the “Three Oaths,” an outlook which is very much in dispute. Even journalist Peter Beinart is enamoured of their anti-Zionist approach.
Given this, coupled with the Satmar support for him during the election, it comes as no surprise that Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor-elect, came to Satmar and made two appearances at their Chof Alef Kislev celebrations on Dec. 10 that mark the Rebbe’s “miraculous rescue” from war-torn Europe and the Nazis in 1944. Last year marked the grand 80th anniversary of that escape.
The separate gatherings were held by the two brothers of the nephew of Reb Yoelisch, Moshe Teitelbaum, who share a divided kingdom. One event was held under the auspices of Aron Teitelbaum of Kiryas Yoel, an Orthodox enclave in New York state, at the Waterfront venue on Kent Avenue in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. The second was held under the auspices of Zalman Leib Teitelbaum at the Brooklyn Armory in the Crown Heights neighborhood of the borough.
Mamdani seemed to enjoy the festivities and relished the attention. And yet, through no fault of his own—and despite Satmar opposition to the modern-day State of Israel—the events were very much Zionist.
In a new Hebrew biography, The Zealot, Menachem Keren-Kratz researched contemporary Hungarian, Romanian and Yiddish documents and newspapers, eschewing hagiographies, details, reporting that it was a Zionist leader of Hungarian Jewry who supplied Teitelbaum with a piece of documentation that facilitated his escape. He ended up in Mandatory Palestine before moving on to Brooklyn.
Dovid Meisels, as Motti Inbari reminds us, claims that in 1940, Agudat Yisrael attempted to persuade the Hungarian Haredi leadership to take advantage of its quota for emigration to Palestine in accordance with the religious imperative to save lives (pikuach nefesh). At this time, many rejected the proposal. Teitelbaum’s view was that because Agudah cooperates with the Zionists, working alongside them to achieve a Jewish state, not by God’s own hand, is forbidden.
In the end, however, Reb Yoelisch was saved by both the Zionists in Budapest and the Zionist Jewish Agency. As can be found in Paul Bogdanor’s book, Kasztner’s Crime, Rezső (“Rudolf”) Kasztner achieved the impossible and arranged for the Nazis permit a train to leave Hungary carrying 1,684 Jews. Among officials of their Rescue Committee and their family members were wealthy Jews who could pay $1,000 per person, Zionist youth movements’ members and the Satmar Rebbe, with his wife and assistant.
At the end of his trek, during which the Zionist movement again intervened to prevent Teitelbaum’s expulsion to a refugee camp in Algiers, he entered British Mandatory Palestine in September 1945 on a Zionist immigration certificate, a system best described in Chapter 7 of this 1946 report in Chapter 7, prepared for the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry.
As for the ethics of leaving behind so many of his followers after he prevented them from doing so for four years during the war, we have the testimony of the Rebbetzin of Stropkov against Aharon Rokach, the Admor of Belz. Her diary was found in Auschwitz; in it, she bitterly railed against him, saying he took advantage of a precious certificate three months before Hungary fell in March 1944 to emigrate to Mandatory Palestine.
The Rebbetzin wrote of several Chassidic Rebbes: “They themselves fled to the Land of Israel at the last moment, saving their own lives and leaving the people to go as lambs to the slaughter. Master of the Universe! In the last moments of my life, I beg you, forgive them for this terrible desecration of your name!”
Satmar’s odd mixing of religion, ideology and politics is not new, especially for the pro-Palestine camp, as we can see by this latest Chanukah initiative promoted by the Jews for Food Aid Chanukah Tzedakah campaign, which supports the planting of olive trees in the West Bank, and Rabbis for Human Rights. For $18, one can receive a “Palestinian olive oil kit” that includes “a 500ml bottle of extra-virgin olive oil made in the West Bank from Nabali olives, an indigenous variety,” and join a Zoom session to “learn about the importance of olive oil in Jewish and Palestinian culture.”
This corruption of Jewish legacy customs—not to mention religious practices—is absolutely kinetic. As Jews (should) know, Chanukah commemorates a Jewish military revolt against the occupying Greek-Seleucid regime, the retaking of Jerusalem, the capital of Judea and the rededication of the Temple worship—specifically, the kindling of the candelabrum.
Moreover, assuredly, our Jewish “peace” groups facilitating the image of the heroic “terrorists for Palestine” would be aghast to know that, as Rabbi Marc Angel notes, “when the Maccabees entered the Temple, they indeed did not find the menorah there. It had already been stolen by the enemies of the Jews. So the Maccabees improvised by putting together a makeshift menorah made of spears (shipudim). The midrash (Pesikta Rabbati 2:1) surmises that the spears had been left behind by the Syrian soldiers who fled in haste during their defeat.”
Anti-Zionist/anti-Israel Jews—from Peter Beinart to Naomi Wolf, from IfNotNow to Jewish Voice for Peace, from Na’amod to the Diaspora Alliance—have overlooked an additional aspect of Chanukah. And that element is the entire narrative of the holiday: the adoption of a cultural Hellenization philosophy that threatened Judaism’s erasure.
We know they overlook it because they are basically repeating the process of intellectual assimilation marked by an irrational denial of Jewish heritage values, while disemboweling Jewish obligations and customs to fit the false narrative of a “Palestine.”
This Chanukah season has brought us a progressive anti-Zionist politician into the halls of Chassidim, belonging to the anti-Zionist camp, whose founder was saved by the Zionist movement while other anti-Zionists, steeped in a contemporary form of Hellenization, assist the agricultural produce of Arabs grown on the side-by-side soil of the Jews who reside there. One group, the Arabs, is indigenous; the other, the Jews, somehow, is not.
Yet the produce of Nabali oil, grown in that side-by-side soil, is to be boycotted if tendered by Jews, while the Arab-produced oil is used to light a Chanukah menorah to celebrate the holiday of Jewish physical, political and religious liberation of old. And that oil is named after the city of Nablus, a location whose original name was Shechem, but renamed Neapolis in 72 C.E. by the Roman emperor Vespasian (who destroyed Jerusalem). The city itself has been consistently mispronounced by subsequent Arabs, whose alphabet lacks a “p” sound.
Our stories here have come to an end; sadly, they are not fiction.
Nevertheless, Happy Chanukah, and light up!
