Born in Vienna in 1924, Halperin moved with his family to Palestine in the wake of fear produced by the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933. They settled in the religious neighborhood of Bnai Brak, where Halperin’s father would eventually found the ultra-Orthodox Zikhron Meir quarter. Halperin studied in a local yeshiva, but after a few years, he showed interest in more than the Gemara. Attracted by the new physical culture of the Yishuv, Halperin began a regimen of exercise and weightlifting. His parents were furious about it, and his yeshiva buddies thought it was strange. But Halperin approached his rabbi, Avrom Yeshaye Karelitz (better known as the Chazon Ish), the don of the Litvish ultra-Orthodox sect, for approval. Karelitz was known for having engaged in some secular studies of his own, notably the natural sciences, and he told Halperin to carry on pumping iron.

Halperin soon became obsessed with body building, and in 1948, he left Palestine for the United States to study physical culture. Upon his return to what was then Israel, he opened a gym called “Heroes of Israel.” This led to a complaint in the newspaper Davar, which asked that if Halperin was such a “Hero of Israel,” why had he spent the War of Independence in America? In a letter to the editor, Halperin responded that he was, in fact, ready to fight as war broke out in 1948, but had received special permission from the Israeli army to travel to the United States. In the wake of these accusations, he quickly changed the name of his gym to “The Samson Institute.”

Questions of heroism notwithstanding, Halperin organized the first Mr. Israel contest in 1950, and one reporter called the show “a symphony of muscles.” Halperin won the contest, but instead of focusing on the issue that the winner of the event was also its organizer, the Israeli press made much hay from the fact that the winner was a yeshiva-bokher from Bnai Brak. In the eyes of the press, this was proof positive that the new state was creating supermen out of nebbishy, peyes-wearing Clark Kents.

In the early 1950s, apparently at the behest of an American wrestling promoter who was visiting Israel, Halperin entered the professional wrestling world and began to travel to Europe and the United States to perform. He never lost touch with his religious roots. After returning triumphant from a tour in the United States in 1955, Halperin went straight to shul in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim, where, as he walked down the street carrying his tallis bag, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox kids followed him joyfully shouting, “It’s Samson the Second!”

But Halperin’s strength wasn’t only a feature of his body. The first inkling of a giant entrepreneurial spirit came to light when he turned his gym into the first chain of health clubs in Israel. He called the men’s version “The Samson Institute” and the women’s “The Venus Salon.” He also briefly served as a personal trainer to the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, traveling back and forth from Eilat to Adis Ababa.

In the United States, Halperin was part of a stable of popular Jewish wrestlers promoted by the Warsaw-born wrestling impresario Jack Pfefer. Among them were Blimp Levy, Abie “The Jewish Tarzan” Coleman, Max Krauser, Sammy Stein, and Herby Freeman, among other Yiddish-speaking grapplers. Jewish fans relished the chance to see these Hebrew behemoths compete in the ring. And while it’s well known that wrestling results were often predetermined, Halperin refused to throw matches. Even grizzled American sports writers, like the New York Daily Mirror columnist Dan Parker, were amazed by Halperin’s tenacity.

But in Israel, Halperin battled heavily with the police. He was arrested a number of times in relation to improprieties in the way he ran his businesses. In 1962, he was arrested after a partner alleged that he stole 50,000 Israeli Pounds from the coffers of “New York,” a restaurant Halperin owned on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. He was also investigated for failing to declare the large number of goods he was bringing into Israel after his trips abroad. In spite of these obstacles, Halperin continued to open restaurants and hotels. In 1965, he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv and lost. His bread and butter remained wrestling—but even that couldn’t keep him out of trouble.

In 1966, Halperin organized a wrestling bonanza in Bloomfield Stadium in Ramat Gan. After the the final match, Halperin entered the ring and addressed the crowd. As he spoke, he was jumped by the angry loser of the main event, a man known as Fuad the Terrible, King of the Arabs from Nazareth. Fuad the Terrible’s real name was Alexander Deligorgos, and he was actually an Armenian from Haifa, not an Arab from Nazareth, but, to the shock of the audience, he began to choke Halperin and slam him to the mat.

Though this gimmick had apparently been planned by Halperin and Fuad the Terrible beforehand, the two had neglected to inform the police, who didn’t know what was happening and rushed the ring to break the wrestlers apart. Convinced that Deligorgos was an Arab attacking a Jew, the audience broke down barricades and tried to attack him. A small riot ensued, and many police were injured trying to protect Fuad the Terrible, who was nearly lynched by the crowd. As a result, Halperin had a hard time finding facilities willing to host his wrestling extravaganzas. The police claimed Halperin was a provocateur and refused to provide security for his matches.

As wrestling wore him down, Halperin began to focus on his many businesses. In addition to his gyms, hotels, and restaurants, he opened the first automat in Israel, on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, and he also launched Israel’s first automated car wash. He founded a sports-oriented, “Samson” summer camp for kids. Halperin was a gregarious type and, in spite of his occasional troubles with the authorities, an excellent businessman.

Although he was never typical of any particular strain of Judaism, Halperin always remained religious, and in the 1970s, he returned to yeshiva to earn his rabbinical ordination. In 1981, he founded a political party—and called it Otzma, or strength—and ran for Knesset. More suited to business than politics, Halperin would eventually open the most successful optical chain in Israel: Optika Halperin. Part of Halperin’s profits went to charity, and the chain’s low prices, his ads touted, “smashed the monopoly” of Israeli opticians, forcing them to reduce their prices as well. With the profits from his chain of optical stores, Halperin began to invest in the business he felt was most profitable: the Sabbath.

In the decade following 2000, Halperin funded the development of a credit card that would not function on the Sabbath. He also paid for the installation of Sabbath sirens throughout Israel that alert citizens to the start and end of the weekly day of rest. In 2005, in a political coup, he attracted thousands of Israelis to Tel Aviv’s Nokia Stadium to declare their support of the Sabbath and to encourage storekeepers to close on Saturdays.

But Halperin’s last great business venture was perhaps his happiest. Last year, he opened “Zisalek,” the first glatt kosher ice cream shop in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood Mea Shearim and the only ice cream shop in Israel with separate lines for men and women. The shop was such a hit that its opening nearly caused a riot. Halperin claimed to be shocked at Zisalek’s popularity. But a riot? He was used to that.

Appearing every spring in the Yiddish press and in humor journals produced specifically for Passover, these haggadot lampooned the poor, the rich, communists, socialists, capitalists, alcoholics, farmers, lepers, immigrants, loose women, politicians, rabbis, Hebrew teachers, even vacation homes. You name it and there is probably a mock haggadah skewering it.

Some of these spoofs functioned as political propaganda or critical commentary masked as holiday fare. Leftist ideologues, often products of the yeshiva world, took to undermining the traditional texts they knew so well. An early, beloved secular parody first appeared in the London-based Worker’s Friend in 1887 and was reprinted multiple times as the Socialist Haggadah. Lamenting the pitiful situation of the Jewish worker versus the exploitative Jewish capitalist, the author took a text familiar to every Jew and used it to promote socialism:

“Ma nishtane, why are we different from Shmuel the manufacturer, from Meyer the banker, from Zorach the money lender, from Reb Todros the rabbi? They don’t do anything and they have food and drink during the day and also at night at least a hundred times over, we toil with all our strength the whole day and at night we have nothing to eat at all.”

But every parodist had an ax to grind, and if the subject being parodied wasn’t the might of the capitalist bourgeoisie, it was something else. In 1909, a New York satirical weekly, Der groyser kundes, worked a bit of Yiddish-theater criticism into its haggadah:

“Ma nishtane, why is the current theater season worse this year than in all previous seasons? Shebekhol halaylos, every season for the past ten years had chometz and matzah, awful potboilers, but also some good literary dramas, and this season has been only unadulterated crap.”

The characterizations of the four sons in a 1916 Der groyser kundes parody might seem dated in the details, but its underlying dynamics are surprisingly familiar:

“The Wise Son: a shtetl horse thief who escaped from prison, stowed-away on a ship to America where he became a horse poisoner and a gangster until he managed to become a saloon keeper and a politician. Today he’s the president of his synagogue, a fighter for Judaism, in short, a mentsh …

“The Wicked Son: a man who fills his wallet with relief receipts for victims of the war that he picked up off the ground and shows them to volunteers asking for money to prove what a big philanthropist he is. ‘See how much I already gave?’

“The Simple Son: a kid who sits with a girl until 2 a.m. waiting for permission to kiss her.

“The Son Who Doesn’t Even Know How to Ask a Question: a traveling salesman who only comes home on Passover to find his wife about to give birth and doesn’t think to ask how a woman can be pregnant for 12 months.”

By the early 20th century, the haggadah had become the most parodied text in Jewish history. It’s easy to see why: With its fixed structure of four questions, four brothers, and 10 plagues, it is a simple text to manipulate. The vast majority of Jews—from children to the elderly—were at least nominally familiar with the text, a fact that made the gags easy to understand.

The parodies ranged in scope and ambition, from a 1911 advertisement titled “The Eleventh Plague,” which explained how the most horrible affliction of the Passover holiday was hemorrhoids, to longer parodies that took the “Kadesh, Urkhats” Seder mnemonic and played on the various duties required of Seder participants. Some parodies are complete haggadahs unto themselves.

The quality of the parodies often depended on the Yiddish news cycle. Local and international news always crept into these works. A good local scandal often made for the juiciest parody. When, for example, a political scandal surrounding a Jewish beauty pageant in Warsaw exploded in the early spring of 1929, Yiddish satirists produced an unusual amount of beauty pageant-related Passover material.

But politics was always paramount in the Yiddish press, and the roles of the four sons and the 10 plagues were often filled with political figures. The Hitler Haggadah of 1934 is a typical example.

Appearing in the humor section of the Warsaw daily Moment, just prior to Passover, the Hitler Haggadah zips through the main sections of the text with all manner of sarcastic political commentary in Yiddish interspersed with the original Hebrew. The four sons are Mussolini (wise), Hitler (wicked), Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss (simple), and Paul von Hindenburg (doesn’t know to ask a question). The 10 plagues are transformed into the litany of problems facing German Jewry. The parody is a pastiche of bitterness: A cartoon shows a German Jew sitting in front of a huge bitter pile of horseradish. The four questions wonder how long the Nazis will stay in power. Hitler, who ostensibly answers but simply dodges the questions, is compared to Laban the Aramean, a figure considered to be the Deus ex machina of the Exodus by some rabbis. But Pharaoh only killed the first-born males, whereas Hitler “wants to uproot everything: the males, the females, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, the living and even the dead,” a frightening premonition of what was to come.

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But in contrast, we tend to know less about average Jews, whose lives didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Newspaper readers don’t often consider what kind of behind-the-scenes insanity goes into the articles they peruse. I’m not referring here to either the intrepid news-gathering or the hysterical keyboard pounding of writers on deadline. The insanity I’m curious about has to do with the tension-filled relationship between writers and editors.

Is it true, as some writers contend for example, that editors wantonly destroy perfect copy? Or do they artfully reshape a writer’s prose into a more cogent text? The editor-journalist relationship is as fraught as that between a mohel and baby. The mohel has no choice but to snip; the baby has no choice but to cry, but he drinks a little wine and he gets over it.

Renowned for its minor and major disputes, the Yiddish press was a place where editors ruled inky fiefdoms, cracking the whip over writers who served as bitter and often disloyal subjects. Editors controlled the fates and livelihoods of writers and journalists, many of whom felt the press functioned as a kind of commercial department of Yiddish literature—something over which they felt they should have more control.

Most of the battles within the Yiddish journalistic world never left the perimeter of the editor’s desks. But on occasion, these spats leapt out of the editorial offices and onto the pages of the papers, making for some of the juiciest Yiddish snark this side of Pinsk.

When, for instance, famed columnist Hillel Zeitlin jumped ship in late 1910 from Warsaw’s daily Haynt to a new competitor, Moment, his editor, Shmuel Yatskan, was furious but temporarily held his tongue.

Zeitlin had been one of Haynt’s most popular columnists. Born into a family of Lubavitcher Hasidim, he strayed from his yeshiva studies after discovering Spinoza, Nietszche, and a slew of other Western thinkers. Like any shtetl kid in the process of ridding himself of tradition, he moved to the city—Warsaw, in this case—and involved himself in Jewish political matters and journalism. But Zeitlin never completely gave up his traditional ways, and an interest in Kabbalah eventually brought him back, not only to full religious observance, but to a promotion of Jewish tradition in his newspaper columns.

Zeitlin’s former editor, Yatskan, was also a Litvak plying journalism in Warsaw. An ordained rabbi from the highly regarded Ponevezh Yeshiva, Yatskan was a major figure in the Yiddish press, having founded some of Warsaw’s early Jewish dailies, including Haynt, which became the best-selling Yiddish paper in Poland.

With an understanding that a popular newspaper should have a broad mandate, Yatskan printed a lot of sensationalistic trash along with high-quality literature, as well as excellent cultural and political criticism. His papers always appealed to the widest possible audience.

That’s where Zeitlin fit in. Able to synthesize abstract philosophical ideas about Jewish culture, religion, and modern society into a readable article, Zeitlin was one of the paper’s major assets. In particular, his columns appealed to religious readers. So, when he decided to abandon Yatskan’s Haynt it was a devastating blow.

Yatskan and Zeitlin sniped at each other for a while, printing what in Yiddish is called “secrets from kheyder.” Words like hypocrite, trash, liar, and provocateur were bandied about briefly, but then things seemed to settle down. The appearance of tranquility was deceptive, however, and by September in 1913, Yatskan could no longer control his anger at Zeitlin’s departure and rekindled the fight by printing a blurb in Haynt by an unnamed “correspondent” from Pinsk:

Seeing how Hillel Zeitlin is still around and unashamedly screams before the public in regard to his holiness and complains about the “lies” that are being spread about him, that he, tragically, is a “holy man” who is being hounded for his religiosity, and also has the audacity to compare the accusation against the victim of the Kiev blood-libel with himself, it is my duty to remind him of the fact that when he was here, in Pinsk giving a lecture, I, along with numerous others who can verify it, saw with my own eyes, as the others saw with theirs, how in the train station buffet he ate a pork chop, with a roll, followed by a cutlet.

Although this rambling sentence (21 lines of one newspaper column) was a grammatical mess, it was also a finely crafted accusation, attacking Zeitlin for his hypocrisy, arrogance, and trangression: the eating of trayf.

The accusation was the last straw. Zeitlin and the Moment staff responded in the paper by saying that Yatskan and Haynt were rank liars attacking a former colleague who had left for good reason. In printed testimonials supporting their besmirched colleague, dozens of journalists sided with Zeitlin.

Haynt, as well the daily Der fraynd, pounded away at Zeitlin, attacking him for all manner of sin, ranging from writing on Shabbos to violating Yom Kippur. Moment shot back, asserting that Yatskan wrote a fake Torah, printed pornography, and promoted conversion among Jews, claims Yatskan said were “a product of unscrupulous swindlers and a gang of Sodomites who created a horror story comparable to some of the worst crimes ever committed.” No one ever accused Yatskan of subtlety.

To Zeitlin’s readers the attacks were devastating. How could their beloved writer, a frumer yid, stand accused of such heinous transgressions? Thousands signed petitions of support and wrote letters, dozens of which Moment published. Haynt claimed that it was all a ploy: The letters and the names were fakes.

Yiddish cartoonists had a field day: Zeitlin’s bushy beard and shock of long hair made for great caricatures. With the battle coming to a head just before Yom Kippur, Yosef Tunkel, the brightest satirical light of 20th century Yiddish, found the perfect analogy for this tempest—the kapores slaughter ritual, a custom in which Jews on the eve of Yom Kippur wave a chicken over their heads three times and then kill it in order to expiate their sins (the Jew’s, not the chicken’s).

Tunkel drew Zeitlin’s bushy head onto the chicken with which Yatskan performs kapores, while chicken Zeitlin defecates. The image perfectly captured their unhappy relationship. By the time this cartoon appeared on the cover of Tunkel’s special Yom Kippur humor magazine, the organized Jewish community had begun to freak out over the fact that the mudslinging had gotten so out of hand, that the Polish press had begun to report on it in a series of “look at these crazy Jews” articles.

At that point a number of communal leaders decided to create an arbitration panel to put an end to the ugly public dispute. There was probably no need; by early October, 1913, the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial was underway, a huge story that dominated the Yiddish press through the fall as the Zeitlin-Yatskan episode fizzled into another forgotten incident in Jewish journalism, though it remains an exemplar of the way editors and journalists, Yiddish or otherwise, feel about each other.

“The [Lower] East Side is a volcano of superstitious ignorance,” read an article in the New York Tribune in the steamy June of 1906, referring to masses of immigrant Jews prone to the kind of mass hysteria that occurs every so often in the quarters of poor and ignorant.

In this case the volcano had erupted in a riot earlier in the month when 50,000 immigrant mothers descended on their local public schools demanding to see their children, having had heard that there was a Board of Health-sanctioned child slaughter taking place. Greeted by locked doors, the screaming throngs surrounded the schools and began smashing windows and pounding on doors. On Essex Street, some white-hot mothers clambered up ladders in an attempt to break into P.S. 137 through the second-floor windows.

During this rampage, gangs of immigrants cursed out principals, fought police, and attacked anyone in the street bearing the slightest resemblance to a doctor—and, according the Tribune, this meant anyone in a pair of spectacles. Some of them raided vegetable pushcarts for ammunition while others, like one young man who pulled a revolver on a member of the Board of Health, used more serious weapons.

Word had spread among the Jews of the Lower East Side that uptown doctors were coming into downtown public schools and were, as described in the daily Varhayt, “cutting the throats of Jewish children!” After a two-hour assault, the rag-tag army achieved victory: Their kids were released early and alive, proving that no such slaughter had taken place.

Thrilled at having gotten a miraculous half-day’s vacation, the kids didn’t even know what the ruckus was about. “I dunno sir, I t’ink the school exploded,” one boy told a reporter from the Evening Post.

As with many hysteria-inducing rumors, this one contained a kernel of truth. After cases of tonsillitis kept scores of Jewish students out of school a week earlier, one school principal recommended that these kids have tonsillectomies. The mothers complained that the trip uptown for such a procedure wasn’t possible for people who worked 12-hour days, six days a week. What’s more, the 50-cent doctor’s fee was too high. So, the principal kindly arranged for doctors from Mt. Sinai hospital to come to the school and perform quickie operations.

Just days before the riot, doctors performed 83 tonsillectomies at P.S. 100 on Cannon Street. Most of the kids were back in class the following day. According to the Tribune, none of the operations were performed without parental consent, and, they added, there were no complaints. A tonsillectomy was no big deal.

But the Yiddish daily Varhayt claimed otherwise, reporting that not only did many of the young patients fail to get their parents’ permission, they had been sent home with unintelligible permission slips. “First of all,” the Varhayt editorialized, “the poor and unhappy immigrant mothers who suffer the stifling heat and confinement of the tenements can’t even read. And secondly, they aren’t able to understand the technical English on the permission slips that was being read to them.” All they knew was that when the children returned home from school after their procedures, they did so drooling mouthfuls of blood, barely able to speak. Shocked, their parents asked what happened. “Doctors cut our throats,” the children replied.

Rumors of a wholesale slaughter leapt like wildfire throughout the tenements and shops. As the gossip wended its way through the neighborhood, the story grew from “doctors cut our throats” to “two children died” to a wild “83 children died.” Street-corner orators got into the act, screaming about the massacres in the schools, comparing them to the pogroms in Russian-ruled Poland.

Coming on the heels of a particularly brutal pogrom in Bialystok that had just been reported on—accompanied by gruesome photos—in the Yiddish press, the Lower East Side surgeries morphed, in the eyes of gullible parents, into evidence of an American pogrom. Accustomed to such violence in Europe, many of the recent arrivals believed such things could happen even in America.

But if the Tribune implied that the Jews were superstitious dupes prone to wild overreaction, the Yiddish Varhayt shot back that the fault lay with the Board of Health and the school’s principal for stupidly sending home permission slips not in Yiddish. The Varhayt also launched into a tirade about how Irish principals have no respect for Jewish immigrant parents and essentially do what they want with the children.

All the Yiddish papers decried the overwrought reaction of the mothers. But in an attempt to fully blame the Lower East Side’s Jews for the riot, both the Tribune and the New York Times alleged that there was a gaggle of local Jewish doctors who had spread the rumor because they were furious that uptown doctors were performing tonsillectomies on local kids for free, when they could be getting 50 cents a pop. The Yiddish press opted not to remark on that theory.

The Tribune also took the opportunity to bemoan the episode as one of a series of events that plagued the overcrowded and frequently obnoxious Jewish quarter. Four years earlier, they noted, Jewish women rioted against local butchers, and three years earlier, they rioted against doctors who were treating their children for trachoma. These same immigrant women joined together most consistently for “Landlord Riots,” which exploded every time rents were raised, and for bank riots, which occurred every time a Jewish bank went belly-up, leaving its poor immigrant depositors with bupkes.

The great tonsil riot fizzled quickly, as it occurred at the end of the school year and was forgotten almost immediately as students graduated and parents kvelled. The police, however, worried a little longer and, according to the New York Times, posted squads of cops outside heavily Jewish schools, on Essex and Grand Streets, where, on the last day of classes, graduates performed scenes from The Merchant of Venice to their Yiddish-speaking parents, none of whom rioted or even panicked. Well, maybe they panicked just a little.

In July 1936, one of Warsaw’s Yiddish dailies, Moment, described the wedding of two Jewish deaf-mutes. An arranged marriage of a well-educated boy from a well-off family to a “poor, but beautiful” bride, the story made special note that the groom’s parents, who owned a successful hat-making company, had a “strange pall hanging over them.” All three of their children were unable to hear or to speak.

The majority of the wedding guests were similarly afflicted, which made for an unusually quiet wedding. The many guests the article commented, “were greeted with hearty handshakes and dead silence.” The groom’s friends, seated around him at his tish, were described as “shuckling happily and speaking with their fingers.”

It was a traditional Jewish wedding, with a ketubah read and signed. The rabbi had the groom stammer the line, “With this ring you are betrothed to me according to the laws of Moses and Israel,” after which the newlywed smashed a glass. The Moment reporter noted the oddity of only hearing a few mumbled “mazel tovs,” but he wrote that, despite the silence, the wedding was a joyous one.

Jewish tradition was not especially tolerant of subgroups. Deaf Jews, for example, were grouped together in the Talmud with the mentally retarded as exempted from religious obligations. In other words, they were not considered full Jews.

According to Jewish law, the deaf could not be counted in a minyan nor could serve as ritual slaughterers. They weren’t allowed to purchase real estate nor could they testify in court. On the other hand, if a deaf man’s ox accidentally gored someone, he wasn’t responsible for the damages. And a hearing-impaired person would be less likely to be cursed: Damning the deaf is forbidden in Leviticus, which is hardly a square deal considering the intolerance.

Although halakhah traditionally prevented many deaf Jews from full participation in their religious communities, their position changed as far back at the Medieval period, according to Rabbi David Feldman, who notes in his 1986 essay “Deafness and Jewish Law,” that Maimonides argued that a deaf person who could speak could in fact participate in ritual matters, marry, and divorce. But the Rambam drew the line at business contracts, saying that a deaf person risked missing nuances in potentially complicated situations and could therefore be cheated. Other rabbis disagreed, saying that a deaf person who could speak was on solid ground for professional matters.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, deafness was often debated among rabbis, especially with the development of sign language. The founder of the Chabad movement, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, argued that the rules governing the treatment of the deaf should remain in force no matter how well a person can communicate. But later poskim, or legal scholars, such as Rabbi Simcha Bunim Sofer, recognized that improved communication among the deaf meant they could become fuller members of the Jewish community, in contradiction to the conventions established in the Talmud.

Education of the deaf improved in recent centuries in large part because of Jewish pioneers like Jacob Rodrigues Pereira, the son of Marranos who fled Portugal in 1741 to live openly as a Jew in France. He’s considered the first person to have taught a deaf-mute to speak and was an early sign-language developer. There was also David Seixas, son of Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas, who opened the first school for the deaf in Philadelphia in 1819. It was non-sectarian but funded by Jews. The first exclusively Jewish school for the deaf was founded by philanthropist Hirsch Kollisch in 1844 in Nikolsburg, Moravia. Eight years later, the school moved to Vienna to serve a larger population of deaf Jews.

There was even a deaf congregation, which was offered a place to gather in New York City’s Temple Emanu-El in 1907. Three years later, the New York Times reported that the synagogue offered simultaneous signing translation of its services. The signing was done by Samuel Cohen, a deaf congregant who had studied for the rabbinate. Emanu-El also had a deaf choir, made up of three girls, who wore white gowns and signed the hymns sung by the congregation. “Their skill demonstrated that there is music as well as poetry in motion,” wrote the Times reporter.

In addition to a number of Jewish-run schools for the deaf in the United States, there was also a monthly periodical, The Jewish Deaf, which chronicled issues in the community in the early 20th century. The publication reported on improvements and fallacies in deaf education, on job opportunities, holiday services, dances, picnics, and sporting events. Deaf Jewish institutions apparently had excellent basketball teams that competed in “normal” leagues. One story from 1915 indicates that a Jewish deaf team, the Lexington Avenue Midgets, crushed the Flushing Federals, 42-7.

In the early 20th century in Eastern Europe, there were similar strides in deaf education. The first Jewish school for the deaf in Poland was founded in Lodz in 1911 and used Yiddish as its language of instruction. But at a Jewish school for the deaf in allegedly Yiddish-centric Vilna, the language of instruction was Russian.

In spite of advances in deaf education, the press persisted in reporting on the deaf as a novelty and with condescension. In an article in the Warsaw daily Haynt, for example, reporter Meyer Barenholtz describes what he considers to be a very strange ball for the deaf in the spring of 1932. “Beautifully dressed women in ball gowns, and well-dressed men in tuxedos were in attendance,” wrote Barenholtz. “In spite of of the dead silence, faces were beaming and a good time was had by all. Like at any dance, there was much flirting, although here it was performed by nervously moving fingers and lips. … It was a strange, silent dance of tragically, permanently silent people.”

This clip, which shows a scene from a Jewish-themed play performed in sign language, has been mislabeled as a Yiddish theater performance in a number of documentaries and, according to UC Berkeley Theatre Professor Mel Gordon, was even once used in a BBC documentary on Lee Strasberg to demonstrate how over-the-top and unruly the Jewish actors and audiences were in New York City.
CREDIT: “Hebrew Actors Give Deaf-and-Dumb Play for Mute Audience,” Courtesy Mel Gordon.

Cartoon from Yiddish satire magazine Der blofer (April 1, 1927):
Q: What’s the big rush? Who are the chasing? What happened?
A: They say there’s a man over there who hasn’t tried suicide yet.
CREDIT: Courtesy Eddy Portnoy

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But in contrast, we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, whose lives didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Although suicide is categorized as a type of murder in the Jewish tradition, its illicit nature has not stopped everyone from shuffling off their mortal coils on their own terms. Statistics indicate that though Jews are less apt than other groups to commit suicide, they are not removed from it altogether. And at certain times and in certain places, suicide has actually increased among Jews, especially when economic and social conditions have gone south. One 19th-century German statistic indicates that as rates of assimilation grew among Jews, so did rates of suicide. There’s nothing like a conflicted identity to make one feel like ending it all.

Because of suicide’s disreputable status in Jewish law and because, as is so often the case, it was frequently a mystery why a close friend or relative threw himself off the top of a building or drank a vial of poison, suicides were a source of embarrassment to survivors. The departed became the topic of family secrets. Once the Yiddish press came along, though, it was tough to keep anything in Jewish life very private.

In Warsaw, for example, there were huge numbers of suicides during the 1920s and 1930s, which reporters wrote about with gusto at least once, and often multiple times, each day. Readers seemed to love nothing more than a juicy story with an unhappy ending.

“The number of suicides has increased in a frightening manner on the Jewish street. Not a day goes by without at least a couple of Jewish suicides,” began an August 1931 article in Moment. The story tells of three suicides that occurred the previous day: 19-year-old Benjamin Levin killed himself by asphyxiation; 26-year-old Yitzhok (no last name given) poisoned himself with iodine; and 38-year-old Dvoyre Berger jumped out of a fourth-story window. The latter two deaths were understood to have been undertaken as a result of severe poverty, the reason for many Warsaw Jewish suicides, especially during the Depression.

Reporters who worked the suicide beat were usually anonymous, although journalists of note, including Dr. Gershon Levin and Shaul-Yitzhok Stupnitski, wrote articles every few years decrying the plague of suicides that had descended on the community and asking what could be done to stop them. Levin, for one, argued that the large number of Jewish suicides was the result of alienation from traditional life, the laws of which acted as a cork, plugging potentially explosive personalities.

No population in the Jewish community was immune to suicides; every group from the secular to the Hasidic experienced them. According to Haynt, in February, 1931, in the Polish shtetl of Lusiev, Shevakh Halperin jumped into a well wearing his tallis and tefillin; in August of the same year, Anshel Gotfried ended up as a floater after drinking poison in Lemberg’s biggest mikveh.

Many of the victims had tried killing themselves more than once. “For the third time, the nervous tallis dealer Avrom Aba Lehrer tried to commit suicide,” reported Warsaw’s Haynt in September 1927. “A few months ago, on a beautiful summer’s night by the light of a full moon, he attempted to hang himself by a beam under a wooden bridge on the Vistula near the Citadel. But the rope was too weak and it broke. Lehrer fell between the pillars of the bridge and lay there all night with the noose still around his neck.” Botched suicide attempts spun off into the creation of “suicide comedy” in the pages of the city’s Yiddish humor mags.

Pinye Rogochinsky, a Warsaw Socialist who lived with his three brothers, was known as the “Shabbos Suicide,” for his failed attempts to kill himself on the Sabbath. One day, reported Moment in March, 1927, after having caught a cold, he stayed home in the rented room the brothers shared on Stavski Street. At about 11 that morning, neighbors heard screams. They tried to open the apartment door to no avail; it was locked. They could hear Pinye thrashing about as his wails grew louder. When they finally broke the door down, the neighbors found him with a knife in his hand, lying in a pool of blood. Having nearly butchered himself, Pinye howled to his neighbors, “Down with the bourgeoisie!”

Among those who attempted to confront the suicide crisis was Reuben Gildenstern. Having grown up in early-20th-century Palestine, he traveled to Europe after receiving a large inheritance. While abroad, Gildenstern, who spent two years on the Russian estate of Leo Tolstoy as a literary groupie, fell in love. His affections were unrequited, and he ended up attempting suicide a total of eight times. In a 1926 interview in Moment, he said he had no regrets about “remaining among the living” and dedicated his life to helping those with similar temptations resist them. Gildenstern created a club in Vienna where survivors of attempted suicide could enjoy one another’s company. He also wanted to launch a Budapest-based magazine titled Der Selbstmörder or The Suicide. His plan was to hire only what he called “one-time suicide candidates” as his writers, editors, typesetters, and printers. These people were, he felt, the best candidates to understand what it meant to feel the need to kill oneself. He was adamant on this point, which is perhaps why the magazine never came to fruition.

But the ever-resourceful reporters of Warsaw’s Yiddish press could always be counted on to bring in a good suicide story. And, during the 1920s and 1930s, at least a handful appeared each day in the crime blotter. Suicide was a type of murder, after all, and as such required investigation. Whether it was the story of the woman who was sliced in half after capriciously diving under the wheels of a tramway car while on an afternoon stroll with her father-in-law, or the high-school student who hanged himself in detention, or the spurned lover who drank poison and leaped out of a fourth-story window into the courtyard of his ex-girlfriend’s building, these minor, daily tragedies kept the readers of Warsaw’s Yiddish press horribly entertained.

***

Here are some samples of Yiddish press accounts of suicides.

Moment, April 1927

“The Anatomical Institute Returns the Body of a Jewish Suicide Because the Bones Are Worthless”

As readers remember from December of last year, a young Jewish girl committed suicide by jumping from the fourth floor (on Targova St.) because she was not able to recover from tuberculosis.

That victim, Rokhl Weinstein, left a will saying that her body should be donated to the Anatomical Institute so “it can be helpful in finding a cure for this dreadful disease” of which she was a victim. That exact expression was taken directly from her will, which she had scrawled in ink on her body. Not wanting to deny her wish, the dead girl’s family did not try to oppose her decision and the body was sent to the Anatomical Institute, where it has been for the last four months.

On Saturday, the Burial Society received a notice from the Anatomical Institute, saying that the body of Rokhl Weinstein is of no value for scientific inquiry, because the most important bones were damaged by the tuberculosis. Therefore, they do not need the body and request that they take it.

Yesterday, the Burial Society picked up the body and the burial takes place today.

And so ends the tragic life story of 17 year-old Rokhl Weinstein. Even her bones are worthless. Even the humanitarian efforts she attempted in her could not be fulfilled.

Moment, May 1927

“Jewish Boy Commits Suicide in the Courtyard of his Ex-Fiancee on 19 Mila St.”

Around 9 am, a number of residents of 19 Mila Street watched as a young man leapt out of a third story window.

The victim landed on the thick electrical wires that spanned the courtyard on the second floor level and he remained there, dangling.

Many people came running to see what happened after hearing screams. In the midst of the chaos, no one could figure out what to do.

In the meantime, after hanging on the wires for a number of minutes, the victim fell onto the brick street, receiving horrible bruises over his entire body.

Emergency services were called and the doctor who arrived determined that the victim drank a large dose of iodine before jumping.

The victim was brought to the Jewish hospital on Tshista Street in critical condition. It appears that the victim was 18 year-old Yekhiel Braf, who had only a mother in the town of Kotsk. He came alone to Warsaw a few years ago and lived with his cousin, Khaym-Dovid Braf on 20 Mila Street.

The young man had studied to become a tailor and earned a decent wage. Recently, he began going to dance halls with his friends, where he showed off his skill as an excellent dancer.

Not long ago, Yekhiel made the acquaintance of Ms. Brontshe P. (19 Mila St.), also known as Brontshe the Cossack. She was also an excellent dancer and Yekhiel quickly fell in love with her.

Because Brontshe liked going out with elegant gentlemen and partying, the boy spent his entire savings on dates and theater tickets.

During Passover, Yekhiel went to visit his mother in Kotsk. He went to tell her that he had found his basherte and that he was preparing to get married.

During this time, however, Brontshe met another young man who was better off financially than Yekhiel. When Yekhiel got back to Warsaw, Brontshe made it clear that she didn’t want anything to do with him.

Yekhiel took it real hard. He stopped working and would walk around for days at a time as if there were a black cloud over him.

Yesterday at about 6 am he went over to Bzovski’s Pharmacy on Mila Street and bought a bottle of iodine. He went home with the bottle of poison with the intention of taking it in bed. But after getting in bed, his plans suddenly changed: he decided to go kill himself in the same house where his unfaithful “bride” lived.

At about 8:30 am he left home for 19 Mila Street. He wandered around the front gate for a while because he thought Brontshe might pass by and he would get to see her one last time.

Finally, he went up the stairs, drank the bottle of iodine and jumped out of the window.

When Brontshe found out about it, she also wanted to poison herself. But residents saw what was happening and they stopped her. The condition of the victim is critical, but not hopeless.

In 1848, a new science emerged that challenged phrenology. It was nasology, set forth in a text of the same name by Eden Warwick, which held that the nose was the seat of an individual’s essence and that his or her character could be determined by the size and shape of their nose, not by the bumps on their skull.

The holiest of Jewish holidays isn’t Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. It’s Shabbat, a holy day so important that it ranks on God’s top ten list. The Sabbath is mentioned a dozen times in the Torah, far more than any other commandment. The Talmud claims that remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy is like observing all 613 commandments at once, which is why, as we learn in The Big Lebowski, religious Jews absolutely do not roll on the day of rest.

For those dedicated to the commandment’s full implementation, the Sabbath is something that must be protected against any infraction, no matter how minute. As recently as last year, a group of religious Jews in Jerusalem violently protested the operation of a parking lot on Shabbat. The people who took part in the action are the latest incarnation of Shomrei Shabbos, “Guardians of the Sabbath,” or, “Sabbath Enforcers.” The Enforcers have their distant origins in the medieval character known as the klopper, the man in the shtetl whose job it was to walk about the village and bang on the Jews’ houses to let them know it was time to close up shop because Shabbos was beginning.

This form of public communal cultural preservation was particularly tested during the urbanization of the 19th century. When Jews opened businesses, there were always those Shabbos enthusiasts who made the rounds on Friday evenings making sure Jewish shops were shut down. Infractions were often met with threats of boycotts and violence. The holy day was not something to take lightly.

As secular Yiddish groups like women’s rights organizations and sports clubs established themselves in the early 20th century, so too did Orthodox groups begin formalizing their unions. Chief among them was the establishment of an official Shomrei Shabbos organization. After the organization was founded, at a conference in Berlin in 1929 by a group of German rabbis, religious Jews from many countries soon joined, all agreeing that desecration of the Sabbath was on the rise as a result of the nature of modern life—forced store and factory closures on Sundays required Jews to work on Saturdays. Rabbis at the conference sought a way to ensure Sabbath observance among Jews who had no choice but to work on the day of rest. They considered petitioning governments to allow a day off on Saturday and to work instead on Sunday.

In 1930, a second, much larger Shomrei Shabbos conference was held, also in Berlin. Some 2,000 people attended the event, and, by then, the Shomrei Shabbos were active in more than 21 countries. Among ideas floated at the event was a proposal to approach the League of Nations about making Sabbath rest an international priority and the suggestion of creating a Shabbos Encyclopedia, which would examine the history of Saturday work stoppages from biblical times to the present. Famed poet Chaim Nachman Bialik promised to contribute an article.

Geared to helping Jews who wanted to but couldn’t observe Shabbos, the conference did not take into account people who cared nothing for the day of rest, or those who might purposely break it as part of their political or social ideology. But, as Asher Ginsburg (aka Ahad Ha’am) once noted, “Shabbos keeps Jews more than the Jews keep Shabbos.” To the Enforcers on the streets of Warsaw, this was a matter of national concern. They had no qualms about cracking skulls for the sake of Shabbos and, occasionally, breaking it in order to keep it whole.

The Yiddish press is full of incidents involving the Enforcers. In August 1927, the Yiddish daily Moment told the story of a young Jew riding a bicycle through a heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Warsaw on a Saturday. It was just before noon, when synagogue services typically ended and thousands of congregants spilled into the streets. As the young rider approached the corner of Tvarda and Marianska Streets, a Hasid saw him and screamed, “Mekhalel-shabesnik!” (“Shabbat breaker!”) at the top of his lungs, and hurled himself off the sidewalk to block-tackle the cyclist.

“A bitter holy war began to play out,” Moment’s reporter wrote, as the cyclist got up and began to argue with his assailant. The cyclist was furious at being smashed to the ground. The Hasid, meanwhile, was equally angry at the public flouting of the holy day. The two began throwing punches, and Hasidic bystanders joined in, taking their own swings at the biker, for “the honor of the Sabbath,” Moment reported. The Hasidim “saw fit to ‘get even’ with the young man’s bicycle, breaking spokes and bending the frame and wheels until it was transformed into a heap of junk.”

Eventually, the police showed up to drive the large crowd away. They arrested the cyclist and his attackers and lugged the smashed bike back to the precinct as evidence. While Baghdadi Rabbi Chaim Yosef, also known as Ben Ish Chai, the same name he gave to his 19th-century halakhic treatise, wrote that bicycle riding is permitted on the Sabbath within the confines of an eruv, Warsaw’s Hasidim seemed to know nothing about such a ruling.

Fear of arrests did not deter these Shabbos watchdogs. A year later, Moment reported on roving gangs of them every Friday evening. One particular night, they happened upon a Jewish boy at the corner of Gzhibovska and Granitshna Streets in Warsaw shouting, “Buy ‘em ladies, pumpkin seeds, fresh out of the oven, buy ’em now!”

One of the Enforcers walked over and calmly alerted the boy that Shabbos had begun and that he should stop selling the roasted seeds. The boy ignored him. What began as “moral advice from the Enforcer quickly turned into a physical threat,” according to Moment. While the Enforcer was yelling at the kid, a crowd grew. On one side were Jews on their way to synagogue. They were poised to drag the “mekhalel-shabesnik” into an alley and pound some sense into him. The other side consisted of people defending the alleged transgressor.

As in the earlier incident, the fight escalated, and soon people were screaming and smashing their canes over each other’s heads. Moment’s reporter doesn’t say what happened to the peddler-boy during the fracas but does tell us when the police arrived they arrested a half a dozen people who spent Shabbos in the clink.

The melee didn’t stop other Enforcers from continuing to prowl that evening, and, “after determining that the Jewish seltzer stands on Tvarda Street were indeed closed,” they came upon a young couple on a date. While a Shabbos rendez-vous does not qualify as a transgression, it turned out that the young man was smoking a cigarette—an act that necessitated the lighting of a match, strictly prohibited on holidays.

One of the Enforcers flew into a rage upon seeing the smoker, snatched the smoker’s hat off his head, threw it to the ground, and stomped on it. The victim, as Moment dutifully reported, “was baffled and didn’t quite know how to react. His date, on the other hand, was a real eyshes khayel—a woman of valor. She knew exactly what was happening and jumped on the Enforcer, scratched his face like a cat, and tore out a hefty chunk of his beard.” The Enforcer, Moment continued, let out a “blood-curdling scream which brought hundreds of people into the street, crowding it so much that the tram was unable to get through.” The police finally arrived and arrested everyone involved.

The Enforcers did not only antagonize relations between religious and secular Jews in interwar Poland. Sometimes, they used their powers to deal with internal matters.

Take, for example, the May 1933 case of Yoel Weiderfeld, a well-off Hasidic landlord. According to Moment, Weiderfeld had evicted a family with six small children from an apartment, throwing them into the street. Though local Hasidim tried to get Weiderfeld to reconsider his decision, the landlord remained unmoved.

Not so the Shabbos Enforcers, who sprang into action. On a Friday night, while Weiderfeld was at his shtibl greeting Shabbos, the Enforcers moved the poor family, “together with their meager belongings, back into their apartment.”

When Weiderfeld found out about it, he was furious and vowed to initiate new eviction procedures. But the Shabbos Enforcers remained on the case. “When the landlord went to pray that Shabbos morning, the other worshippers asked of him that he allow the poor renter back in,” Moment reported. They also tried to delay Torah reading until Weiderfeld agreed to allow the family to remain. But the landlord was a stubborn sort and steadfastly refused their entreaties.

Without other recourse, the Enforcers’ next move was to grab Weiderfeld’s tallis, wrap it around his head, throw him over a bench, and start punching his back and buttocks—a Yiddish underworld tactic known as “aroysnemen a mashkante,” taking out a mortgage, on someone. In spite of the serious shellacking, the landlord freed himself and fled the synagogue to a nearby pharmacy, where he called the police—himself violating Shabbos. Instead of returning to shul, he engaged the services of the law, who again, Moment continued, “threw the poor family out of the apartment—on Shabbos, no less.”

Condoned by the most important rabbis, the street-level tactics of the Enforcers remain a violent inheritance today. While the contradiction inherent in their aggression seems to elude them, their desire to protect, defend, and enforce the Sabbath remains paramount: While they’re around, they’ll see to it nobody rolls on day of rest.

Yiddish poetry was once popular enough to make its way into the pages of major daily newspapers, where it shared space with reporting on politicians, criminals, and the feats of athletes, among other prosaic matters. Yiddish poets sometimes became minor celebrities, drawing large audiences to their readings.

Like the vast majority of the language’s literary figures in the late 19th and early 20th century, these poets had excised themselves from Orthodoxy in order to live and work in environments unfettered by traditional mores. Their productivity kept pace with changes and explosions in other fields—art, literature, and politics attracting young people and sometimes wooing those young away from Orthodoxy. Though many Orthodox Jews were threatened by the new Yiddish papers and literary journals that proliferated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they did not all turn away from the new media of the day. Some religious leaders saw the need to allow a measure of cultural permeability, especially after the failed Russian revolution of 1905, when a slew of new Yiddish papers were founded, lest modern art forms and print media lure community members away altogether.

One such figure was the Gerer Rebbe, a forward-thinking rabbi in charge of one of Poland’s largest Hasidic courts. In 1907, he gave the first religious dispensation for a newspaper to serve Orthodoxy, easing tension between tradition and a burgeoning press. He was also among those who founded Agudas Yisroel, the first Orthodox political party, in 1912. Though slowly, modernity was insinuating itself into traditional Jewish life, and the Gerer Rebbe showed that if Orthodox groups failed to adapt to the times, they would continue to bleed adherents.

For some people, the compulsion to write is as powerful as it is unavoidable, and a number of Orthodox writers—those willing to compose prose and poetry within the parameters of traditional Jewish life and law—began to appear in the pages of the newly minted religious press and in tiny literary journals during the 1920s. Many yeshiva kids revered these writers for being able to remain within tradition’s boundaries while writing modern poetry and prose.

One such poet was Shmuel Nadler, profiled in Beatrice Lang Caplan’s excellent essay in a recent anthology, Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon. Nadler was born in 1908 into a Hasidic family in a shtetl in Galicia, went to heder and yeshiva, but also studied in a public high school. Considered an excellent pupil, he studied at the Lublin Yeshiva with Rabbi Meyer Shapiro, renowned for having developed the daf yomi, or “page a day,” system, still in use, for Talmud study. Nadler took the unusual step of writing poetry in Aramaic and Hebrew, then considered somewhat daring; in Orthodox circles Hebrew was a holy language to be used for liturgical purposes. In addition, he contributed poems to several literary, political, and socially oriented journals such as Ortodoksishe Yungt Bleter and Beyz-Yankev.

In 1933, Nadler published Besht-symfoniye, the Baal Shem Tov Symphony, which mixed both prose and poetry as well as tradition and modernity in a paean to the founder of Hasidism.

A glowing sun
You have hung upon the skies,
Red roses,
Grass green,
And the trees and I
Draw strength from the sun’s burning.
Praised be God
Creator of Light.

(translated by Beatrice Lang Caplan)

Nadler also included, Lang notes, veiled hints at disbelief and disobedience, pushing the limits of what Orthodoxy would allow.

And though Nadler, the so-called “court poet of the Aguda,” was very much the darling of young religious readers who found him artistically appealing while maintaining some fidelity to traditional parameters, older readers, those who oversaw literary production at the Aguda-run newspapers and journals, were vexed by him.

Meantime, Nadler’s worm had turned, and by the end of 1933, he’d cut off his beard and peyes and left the religious world. His poems, with a distinctly left-wing political sensibility, advocating Communism, began to find their way into publications religious kids were not supposed to read—papers like the Lodz-based Communist journal Literarishe Tribune, where his poems shared space with ideologues like Isaac Deutscher.

Differences between Nadler and his Aguda handlers came to a head in late December 1933, when the party leaders meddled in a performance of the traditional play The Sale of Joseph, meant to be a fundraiser for Khinukh, an Aguda-run educational youth organization. Aguda leaders demanded that the actors in the play be either boys or girls, but not both. Mixing was mukste, or forbidden. They also demanded that the audience be divided by a mekhitse. In the end, neither the play’s directors at Khinukh nor the authorities at Aguda would budge, and the antagonism between them led to the performance’s cancellation.

Nadler, who wasn’t involved in the matter, was nevertheless furious at the meddling and angrily criticized the Aguda for putting its nose where it didn’t belong. He went on to attack Aguda representatives for their lack of action in Palestine, though he did not specify what that action should have been. As reported in the Yiddish daily Moment, Nadler’s grievances were news to the Aguda, and they were shocked by the acerbic provocations on the part of their “court poet.”

But Nadler’s criticisms were just an appetizer. In what seemed like an overnight transformation, he publicly announced that he had become a Communist, shocking everyone. The week after the Khinukh incident, in early January 1934, he gave a lecture at the Warsaw Jewish Literary Union in which he intended to explain his move from God to man. The hall was packed with young people—Hasidic and Communist alike. It was an uneasy mix, and furious arguments broke out between the two groups.

The Hasidim harangued Nadler the turncoat while the proletarians tried dragging them out of the hall. The two sides screamed and pushed and shoved each other until wild fistfights broke out. For his part, Nadler tried to read his text, to explain his exit from the world of Orthodoxy, which had apparently been a long time coming, but he was constantly interrupted by howling catcalls.

Amid the ruckus, a strange thing occurred. A young Hasid who looked remarkably like Nadler mounted the stage and awkwardly approached the poet, screaming in his face, “Akher! For me you are dead,” referencing the Talmudic figure, Elisha ben Abuya, who is said to have gone into pardes, paradise, and became an atheist. The young man began sobbing hysterically, tore his jacket, and collapsed to the floor, silencing the audience. The hysteric turned out to be Nadler’s brother, with whom he had studied in the Lublin Yeshiva, and who was now a rabbi in a Galician shtetl. Nadler’s transformation, in the mind of the brother, was a transgression so colossal that Nadler the poet had to be considered dead. Nadler the rabbi had, right then, begun the process of mourning.

According to Moment’s reporter, the reading was a complete fiasco, brought to an end with the onstage breakup of the Nadler brothers. The crowd dispersed shortly thereafter.

Nadler the poet didn’t stick around either. Immediately after the episode in the Warsaw Literary Union, he left for Paris to work for Di Naye prese, a new Communist Yiddish paper, and eventually became its editor, dropping the heavily biblical “Shmuel” for his nickname, “Munye.”

The last work he published in Warsaw was his Baal Shem Tov Symphony, a mix of Hasidic tales and poetry. Appearing just before he made his public break with tradition, it offered the following:

And to the believer—such goodness for he who believes
In the holy tsadik and the protection he offers,
And who attaches himself to the one above, in thanks and in praise,
When his prayer is realized.

And he who knows that justice will break his solitude
Will never be the man to stumble,
We should all be so privileged to make it
To the redemption in once piece, Amen.

When Nadler got to Paris, his style changed in both tone and content. In the1934 poem “I Didn’t Get My Revolutionary Newspaper Today,” he wrote:

I didn’t get my revolutionary newspaper today,
I waited fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour
And the postman finally said to me: no way.
My revolutionary newspaper, you didn’t show up.

Not here …  I know, my dear, you did not betray me.
Someone pointed you out, a reactionary, no doubt,
And had a policeman shut your powerful mouth.
I didn’t get my revolutionary newspaper today.

When World War II broke out and the Nazis occupied Paris, Nadler was still there. It wasn’t the safest place for a Jew or a Communist, but Nadler remained true to his revolutionary ideals and published underground French and Yiddish newspapers during the occupation. By summer of 1942, when it got really hot for the Jews in Vichy France, the Nazis caught and executed him, bringing the story of Shmuel Nadler to a close. He shared his radical attitude toward tradition while facing his own demise in a poem quoted in a Yizkor book for Yiddish writers in Paris:

You shouldn’t say Kaddish at my grave,
And don’t light candles for my soul,
This flourishing, fruitful life
Is our purpose on the earth

Now that the saccharine idiocy of Valentine’s Day is safely behind us, we can focus on the beneficial fallout of love: the breakups. It is, no doubt, a tragedy when a marriage or a long-term relationship dissolves into an angry knot of hatred and acrimony, when fury and venom are spit from lips that only recently touched in tender embrace. Except, of course, when you get to watch it happen.

Such was the luck of Yiddish journalists of the 19th and early 20th century who were assigned to report from the Warsaw beyz-din, the city’s storied rabbinical court, which functioned as a kind of Las Vegas-style divorce court, where couples could show up without an appointment and request an instant divorce. More often than not, proceedings would devolve into pitched battles between appellants. And because people knew that journalists would be present, the court began, starting in the mid-1920s, to take on the flavor of a Yiddish Jerry Springer show in which chairs and fists would fly on a sheitel-trigger.

Illustration of a “get machine” from Haynt, October, 1926

The reporters of the Yiddish press understood that divorce court was almost always a guaranteed winner when it came to providing fodder for a sensational article. As a result, reports from the Warsaw beyz-din became popular fare in the press until journalists were banned by Warsaw’s Rabbinate committee from attending proceedings in early February, 1927. But in a remarkable turn of events, the rabbis who sat on the court refused to comply with the order; in an interview in the Yiddish daily Moment, one of them noted that “under the current progressive societal conditions, it is simply not possible to shut the door of such an institution like the rabbinate on the Jewish public.”

Many of the cases that came before the three-rabbi panel dealt with one of the wedded, typically the man, having taken a second spouse. Other couples had more pedestrian reasons—sexual affairs, poverty, irreconcilable differences—to dissolve their unions. Some men insisted upon a divorce because they didn’t like their wives’ cooking. Some appellants were there before they got to the chuppah seeking an engagement divorce: because marriages were contracted and involved dowries, Jewish law provides for engagement breakups, which were adjudicated before the court—with damages—just like divorces.

Violence frequently broke out during these cases, a fact that challenges stereotype that Jews, particularly in pre-war Eastern Europe, had an aversion to physical aggression. The stark reality was that with its large, uneducated, urban Jewish underclass, Warsaw saw a great deal of small scale violence in daily life. Brief outbursts were not at all rare. If anything, pushing and slapping were a common component of social interaction and even more so among the amkho, the Jewish rabble.

Even those who were educated and more financially secure, including culturally and politically engaged members of the community, were known to explode into physicality in a way we might find alien today. For example, cultural activist Noyekh Prilutski and Zionist politician Yitskhok Grinboym once got into such a furious argument in the Warsaw Jewish Literary Union, they began hurling ashtrays and paperweights at one another. The poet Meylekh Ravitsh, who reported on this event in My Lexicon, his memoir of Yiddish literary figures, wrote that what made it obvious that these two men were highly educated was the fact that they did not aim for the head.

The Yiddish press published these stories not only because they were entertaining, but also in order to introduce an element of moral suasion. These stories of amkho gone wild were finely honed examples of how not to behave. The press, of course, had it both ways: they were able to editorialize on these behaviors while exploiting them as fodder for their reporting. As for their readers, it was just good, clean, schadenfreude. Without further ado, there, here are a few examples of Yiddish divorce court reportage:

“Krochmalna ‘Amkho’ Throws Punches in Rabbinate,” Moment, November 1928
“In the Shadows of Jewish Family Life: A Woman of Valor,” Moment, January 1929
“A Hot and Bloody Day in the Rabbinate,” Moment, February 1934

Yitzhok Farbarovitsh was known as a good kid in the shtetl of Vizne, a small town in Russian-ruled Poland, in the years just before World War I. He excelled in cheder, Jewish elementary school, and, when he reached his tweens, was sent to another town in the Pale of Settlement to attend a yeshiva. Yitzhok was on track to fulfill his mother’s dream that he become a rabbi. But not long after his bar mitzvah, his mother died, sending the Farbarovitsh household into a depression, and throwing Yitzhok’s life onto a different track.

Stuck as a boarding student at the yeshiva, Yitzhok wrote his family letters asking about the future—would they be able to pay his tuition and continue supporting him? Nobody responded. In those days, yeshiva students who were boarders took occasional meals at the homes of local members of the community. One of these kindly hosts was a prostitute in a local brothel, whom Yitzhok visited on Thursdays for meals. Seeing that the boy had no means, the prostitute took Yitzhok in while he took it upon himself to convince her to quit her trade, explaining that her terrible sins would lead her to Hell. His reservations about her lifestyle were strong but not strong enough to make him quit her—he left school for a spell and stayed at her place. After all—he had nowhere else to turn for help, and, in spite of her unseemly vocation, she obviously had a heart of gold.

Some months later, Yitzhok returned to the yeshiva and, a few years after that, in his mid-teens, he took a job as a Hebrew teacher to a family in another nameless shtetl in the Pale. Essentially abandoned by his family and with little money outside of his meager teaching income, he became attracted to a group of shtetl toughs who randomly stole and shook people down for cash. Attracted to the underside of life, he soon apprenticed himself to a group of local thieves. He moved to Warsaw, where he ascended in the city’s underworld, working his way up from smalltime pickpocketry to well-planned heists of local businesses, and he formalized his pursuit by taking the name Urke Nachalnik, which means “brazen master criminal,” in the lingo favored by Yiddish-speaking Eastern European thieves.

Nachalnik landed in jail and went on to return to various prison cells a number of times. By his mid-30s, he had spent half his life behind bars, where he took up writing. During his last stint, an eight-year sentence for bank robbery that began in 1927 in Western Poland’s notorious Ravitsh Prison, he went to lectures given by Stanislaw Kowalski, a graduate of a nearby teacher’s college. Kowalski asked the prisoners to bring whatever works they had written in prison. Urke Nachalnik showed up with two novels and part of an autobiography, which kicks off as follows: “Before I begin the sad story of my life I feel bound to give at least a summary of the circumstances that led me away from the straight and narrow. I ask the reader’s forgiveness for first starting with a picture of my entrance into the world.”

Kowalski liked what he read and encouraged Nachalnik to keep at it. The teacher corrected and edited the autobiography and had it published as Zyciorys wlasy przestpcy, The Autobiography of a Criminal, by the prison authority in 1933.The story of a boy seemingly abandoned by his family who finds a place in the seamy underworld was an instant bestseller in Poland, becoming the most popular book of the year, serialized in Polish and Yiddish newspapers including Warsaw’s Haynt and New York’s Forverts. It was translated into a number of other languages.

Impressed by his literary celebrity and its implication that he’d turned his life around, the prison authorities released Nachalnik in 1933, two years before his sentence was up. He called himself a writer, no longer a criminal, and moved to a house in the woods outside Vilna, secluding himself to concentrate on his craft.

Nakhmen Mayzl, editor of Literarishe bleter, the most respected Yiddish literary journal of the day, visited Nachalnik at home. He was curious about this former thief, especially since he had begun writing in Yiddish instead of the Polish he picked up in jail. Living near Vilna meant that he was relatively close to the YIVO Institute, an organization that researched virtually all aspects of Eastern European Jewish life, especially the Yiddish language. Mayzl brought the former criminal into YIVO, where he showed him the Institute’s extensive collection of Yiddish criminal vernacular in the philology department. More than amazed that such a collection existed, Nachalnik was incredulous that an academic Jewish institution even existed. He wanted to contribute however he could, and, as Mayzl and a group of Yiddish scholars stood around him, he offered corrections and additions to their collection of crime vocab.

Having heard that Nachalnik was revealing their linguistic ciphers, Nachalnik’s former crime buddies accused him of hiding out in Vilna like a coward. Nachalnik claimed that he was done with his life of crime and wanted to create a safe home in which to raise his newborn son—he’d married and had a child shortly after his release from prison. But Nachalnik couldn’t keep away from Warsaw and, not long after, moved his family to Otwock, a suburb of the city. From there he made occasional trips into Warsaw, where he would visit the famed Jewish Literary Union, the heart of Poland’s Yiddish literary life. But he was ill at ease among the literati, he felt there like a “victim among thieves,” according to a 1946 article in the magazine Yidishe kultur.

Nachalnik’s serialized stories of the Jewish lowlife were a huge hit among the Jews of Poland and in early 1934, actors involved with the smallish La Scala Theatre (not the opera house in Milan) decided to stage a play based on his tales. La Scala wasn’t one of the top Yiddish theaters in Warsaw, but one that always managed to snag an audience with an attractive combination of classics, like Sholem Aleichem’s, Teyve the Milkman, and the Yiddish prurient, like Nachalnik’s Din toyre (Thieves Trial). The latter, which opened just after Christmas, 1933, drew big crowds not only because it brought the master criminal-turned-author to the premiere, but also because the play portrayed the street life of Jewish pimps, prostitutes, and criminals in its own raw reality, complete with nasty language and foul behavior. High-brow critics in the Yiddish press were hostile to the production and either ignored it, as they did with most of La Scala’s shows, or called it low-grade trash. “In La Scala Theater, they’re putting on ‘Urke Nachalnik’ and every serious and decent spectator is taking the play like a glob of spit in the face, as if they’d been raped,” read the opening lines of a front page editorial in the Yiddish Weekly for Literature, Art and Culture. “We are raising our voices against the degradation of Yiddish theater, against a play that spits hateful trash in the faces of a huge theater audience.”

After packed houses for first performances, the actors and stage-hands showed up at the theater for the third evening to find that all the electrical cords had been cut and all the costumes were missing. Even the set had disappeared. It was a mystery—the theater had been hijacked, but by whom? Gossips in town suggested that members of Warsaw’s underworld were furiously unhappy with the play, exposing, as it did, some of their trade secrets and, perhaps most damaging, their Yiddish slang. So, in an episode of practical criticism, they stole the whole set, the gossips said.

The actors and director put an advertisement in the afternoon edition of Unzer ekspres, a popular Yiddish tabloid, addressed to the “Erlikhe ganovem,” the “honorable thieves,” asking them to return what they’d taken. If they did, the ad asserted, the theater would not call the police. There was no response.

The theater managers didn’t know what else to do and sent for Urke Nachalnik. He made things right; he contacted some of his former cronies and every costume and piece of the set was returned, enabling the show to go on as scheduled.

Warsaw’s Jewish underworld was not the only group dissatisfied with the play. The socialist Bund’s arts magazine fulminated angrily against what they called theatrical “trash.” On the front page, an editorial griped that “when the prostitutes are on stage, talking their dirty talk, and the thieves are doing business in their pubs and hideouts, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting…. For three hours, the audience and the theater is dragged through the mud.”

Readers, though, seemed to like the mud and didn’t necessarily mind being dragged through it. The play was a minor hit.

As for Urke Nachalnik, he made good on his commitment to the literary life. He continued to write, more in Yiddish than in Polish, and he produced a number of works on crime-related topics that were consistently popular with Yiddish audiences. Among them were Der korbn (The Victim), Mokotov, and Yosele goy (Yosele the Goy), all of which contain vivid descriptions of underworld characters and their lives in prison and on the outside. These were published in Polish and in Yiddish papers in Poland and in America. The Yiddish dailies also serialized the subsequent volumes of his autobiography: Lebedike kvorim; Der letster klap (Living Graves: The Final Blow) and Videroyflebung, oder der oysgeleyzter (Resurrection, or the Reformed One). Exposing the Yiddish underworld was a tough business though, and he never received the critical recognition he craved, or one that was on par with his popularity.

Nachalnik’s publishing career was cut short with the onset of World War II. After the Nazis occupied Warsaw, he re-established contact with the criminal underworld and began to collect money and weapons for armed attacks against the Germans. In March 1940, he and a band of Jewish gang members attacked a group of Polish collaborators who had been hired by the Germans to attack Jews in the street. It was one of the first organized attacks of this kind.

According to Leyb Feingold, a Bundist leader who would later figure in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Nachalnik showed up at a meeting of Jewish underground leaders that included Mordechai Anielevitsh, a commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Bundist leader Michael Klepfish. At the meeting, Nachalnik demanded funding to organize immediate reprisals against the Nazis. While Anielevitsh supported the plan, the request was ultimately rejected. Ignorant of the mass extermination about to take place, even most Jewish underground groups didn’t think retaliation against the Germans would be a good idea. Nachalnik returned dejectedly to Otwock, outside of Warsaw, where he sabotaged the rail lines that led to Treblinka, helping a number of Jews escape from the trains; he then helped these people hide in nearby forests. Nachalnik was caught by the Germans in 1942, and as he was being led in shackles to his execution in the center of Otwock, he attacked his guard, causing nearby soldiers to shoot him to death.

Warsaw Ghetto memoirist Peretz Opoczynski commented in his article on smuggling in the Warsaw Ghetto that “we ought to erect a monument to the smuggler for his risks, because consequently he saved a good part of Jewish Warsaw from starving to death.” It might also be remembered that hotheaded Jewish criminals led one of the first attacks against the Nazis, Urke Nachalnik, writer criminal, at their head.

Itzik Gottesman’s Yiddish song-of-the-week blog features an interesting recollection of a song from Urke Nachalnik’s play, Din-toyre, recorded for your listening pleasure.

The New York World-Telegram called Martin “the Blimp” Levy “the most meat which ever stepped into a ring.” Other papers used the “miniature mastadon” and the “Boston pachyderm.” Discovered in the mid-1930s working as the fat man in a Coney Island side show by wrestling impresario Jack Pfefer, Blimp tipped the scales somewhere between 600 and 700 pounds. Nobody knew exactly how much he weighed because normal scales couldn’t contain him. With the larger men in the mat game weighing in somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds, the morbidly obese Blimp, with his ample corpus and bug eyes, was one of the first freaks in professional wrestling.

But freaks were his manager’s specialty: Pfefer made wrestlers in his stable shave their heads or grow huge antennaed mustaches. He also brought in grapplers like the acromegalic Swedish Angel, christening him “the ugliest man in the world” and guaranteeing that ladies in the audience would faint, men would shout, and children would cry upon laying eyes on him.

Just as there was there was heavy Jewish participation in boxing during the early part of the 20th century, so too were there Jews in pro wrestling. Long before Bill Goldberg became the champ of the WWF in the late 1990s, Jewish toughs such as Harry “the Jewish Bad Boy” Finkelstein and Abie “Hebrew Hercules” Coleman were mixing it up in rings across the country, sporting Stars of David all the while.

Raised in Boston, Levy was a big boy from early on. He weighed 200 pounds at his bar mitzvah and was over 350 by the time he got to high school. He played football for a short time, but was asked to leave the team after falling on opponents and breaking the legs of several linesman. In a 1946 Washington Post interview, Blimp described his unusual dietary regimen: “Some mornings I eat a dozen eggs, and then again, sometimes only two. Sometimes I eat six pounds of steak, and then I might eat a pound.” He also admitted to going on an occasional mashed potato binge, requiring a half bushel of spuds, two quarts of milk, and a pound of butter.

In spite of his massive bulk, the Blimp was surprisingly nimble. Paul Boesch, one of the only wrestlers of the Golden Era of the 1930s and ’40s to write a cogent autobiography, wrote that his first impression of the Blimp was that he was simply a pituitary case who won his matches by falling on his opponents, immobilizing them with his enormity. That may be partly accurate. But Boesch noted that the Blimp suspected the other wrestlers considered him a no-talent fat man, and one day in a locker room, he was challenged to kick a small metal can which dangled from the ceiling about six feet off the ground. In an attempt to show off his athletic prowess, the Blimp gingerly approached the can, brought one of his monstrous, fleshy, tree trunk-like legs up high into the air and tapped it with his foot. The other wrestlers were amazed because they couldn’t do it themselves without falling on their asses. It became evident that Blimp Levy wasn’t a run-of-the-mill, morbidly obese wrestler: he had skill. He was, as his manager insisted, “a freak with class.”

Outside the ring, the Blimp was said to have a voracious sexual appetite and regaled peers with stories of his conquests. A kind of Semitic Pantagruel, he was characterized by Boesch as “a seething volcano of sexual passion.” While his conquests were not elaborated upon (thankfully, perhaps), the Blimp married multiple times, usually women far younger than he. In 1946, he wed 18-year-old Charlotte Jones, a woman half his age, in Dallas. A few years before that, 24-year-old-Juanita Thomas was so eager to get hitched to the Blimp that she neglected to obtain a divorce from her previous husband or to inform her newly betrothed that she had been married. This little fact came in handy when, in 1945, she tried to squeeze alimony payments out of poor Mr. Levy. Moreover, he testified in court—after having been shoehorned into the witness stand—that little Ms. Thomas physically abused him. In the end, the court had mercy on the Blimp and ruled against Juanita.

In spite of that victory, bad luck trailed the Blimp. In 1946, the Connecticut State Athletic Commission revoked his license on the recommendation of physicians, who said he was in poor health. Even his manager opined he was so fat that he would probably drop dead in the ring. But all was not lost; the Blimp wrestled abroad. In Malaysia, a Singapore-based promoter lined up Harnam Singh, Son of Kong, and the 6-foot-10-inch Da Ra Singh, among other famed South Asian behemoths, and offered the Blimp $2000 plus travel expenses and accommodations. But perhaps the most attractive clause in his contract had to do with an unlimited supply of food to throw his weight around the subcontinent for six months.

In spite of the mockery he endured, the Blimp was a pretty good wrestler. He defeated Tor Johnson, the Swedish Angel, and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers, names familiar to anyone who went to wrestling matches in the 1940s and 1950s.

But by the end of his career, around 1950, Blimp’s health truly did begin to fail. Astoundingly, the incidental exercise provided to him by his profession had helped him keep somewhat trim. When he quit wrestling and dropped from sight, he really ballooned. At his death in an Alabama trailer park at 56, Blimp weighed 900 pounds and had a 120-inch waistline. Take 10 steps, turn around and look at the spot where you started: that was the final measurement of Blimp Levy’s waist.

It may not seem so, but, in a certain time and place, Blimp Levy was famous, world famous. He performed in front of thousands of people regularly, fans gasping upon seeing his blubbery mass as he lumbered up the steps into the wrestling ring. They howled when he quite literally crushed an opponent. He was a major attraction that brought in legions of fans. But like many such characters who inhabit the liminal world between sport and entertainment, where abnormality is a virtue, the Blimp has been lost to history. With Jews of this magnitude so few and far between, it is a value simply to know of him.

Feivel Goldschwartz, a 21-year-old worker in a Warsaw clothing factory was a stand-up guy. In 1927, he and 18-year-old Reyzl (Ruzhe) Shulkleynot had been an item for six months and were engaged to be married. Reyzl accepted the thin engagement ring Feivel offered her, even though the young man’s family was against the match; they thought Reyzl was low-class trash and didn’t want her in the mishpokhe. They weren’t entirely wrong; Reyzl’s mother had died when she was a baby and her father, who was well known to Warsaw police as a fence, raised her alone on a particularly rank stretch of Volinska Street, a road in one of the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Family pressures grew too strong and eventually Feivel was persuaded to dump Reyzl. He wanted to end things on a happy note and broke the news on a hot July night. They took a walk. Feivel wanted to get his ring back and offered Reyzl 20 zloty for it. Realizing their engagement was over, she took the money and gave him back the jewelry.

The breakup seemed amicable and Reyzl asked if Feivel would walk her to her apartment building, which also housed a low-end brothel run by Rivka “the Cow” Linderbaum and her son, Khatzkel, a notorious pimp. Feivel agreed to escort her to the front steps. When they got there, the two began to kiss. In the shadows at the side of the stairs, Reyzl began slithering downward, descending to her knees. Though they were broken up, Feivel didn’t stop her. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain like none he’d ever felt before. He collapsed on the macadam and looked up at Reyzl, cackling as she made her way up the stairs, her face and blouse spattered with blood. Feivel looked down. She had bit his penis in half.

Feivel screamed. A pool of dark blood had already spread around him. People came running. Someone called an ambulance. Someone also went to Feivel’s house and told his sister Golda he had been attacked. She raced to Volinska Street, bumping on the way into Reyzl, whose face and neck were flecked with dried blood. “Your brother got stabbed at the whorehouse! He was there to find another bride-to-be!” Reyzl told Golda angrily. Realizing she wore incriminating stains, she quickly added, “I got all this blood on me when I tried to help him.”

Feivel was rushed to the Jewish hospital on Tshista Street. Though emergency-room doctors were able to staunch the bleeding, they were concerned that the young man would contract blood poisoning, which could kill him. Meanwhile, word about the attack spread in Jewish Warsaw, and the hospital was deluged with curious gawkers. The crowd situation became so bad, that doctors were forced to hold an impromptu press conference announcing that Feivel Goldschwartz was expected to survive and although he would have to live with a defective penis, he’d still be able to produce children. What a relief.

The Warsaw police arrested Reyzl and her father that night. He said he didn’t know anything about what transpired and that he was sleeping soundly at home at the time the young man’s tragedy occurred. Reyzl also hotly denied that she had anything to do with the incident, telling the police that she was on her way home when she saw that Goldschwartz had been “done.” While the police released her father from custody, Reyzl was held in the local precinct’s clink.

Adding insult to injury, detectives came to the hospital and charged Goldschwartz with corrupting a minor after Reyzl informed them she was not actually 18. Even worse for poor Feivel, Haynt, one of the city’s Yiddish dailies, published a report that claimed the boy did not bear “any ill will toward Reyzl and still wanted to marry her.” The same paper reported that he was the one who had attacked her that night on the stairs. Infuriated, he was forced to give an exclusive interview to a competing daily, Moment, in which he vehemently refuted these claims.

All of this exhausted poor Feivel and his condition worsened. While he languished in the hospital on Tshista Street, Reyzl sat in jail, though she was occasionally brought to court for hearings. Huge crowds gathered to howl at her during these perp walks. Once, a herd of angry rubberneckers attacked some other female hood who’d been misidentified while being escorted by police to jail. As a result, Moment printed a photograph of the real Reyzl so that people could see her likeness and refrain from attacking random maidens who “might be her.”

While Feivel’s condition vacillated, Reyzl waited fearfully in prison. After all, if he died, she would be tried for murder. Fortunately for her, the penis-repair department at Warsaw’s Jewish Hospital succeeded in saving the young man and she was charged with assault and forced to serve a relatively short sentence.

No one knows what ultimately became of Reyzl Shulkleynot or, for that matter, Feivel Goldschwartz and his defective but working organ. They were but two urban denizens who disappeared into the Jewish urban maelstrom that was Warsaw during the late 1920s.

The reality of Jewish bodies, of course, is that most of them are equally as grotesque as every other ethnic group’s bodies. Jewish bodies range from Auschwitz anorexics to jiggling, morbidly obese noshers. There are Jewish dwarves and Jews who suffer from gigantism. There are so many physical types among Jews that one might briefly consider the notion that they’re actually just like other peoples. But, Jews being Jews, such thoughts are fleeting. Stereotypes die hard. Jokes about the paucity of Jewish athletes still abound, forcing Jews who hope to counter such stereotypes to create odd publications such as encyclopedias of Jews in sports and other books and pamphlets designed to salve the wounds of a people allegedly doomed to physical ineptitude.

The concept of the Jewish nebbish, for instance, might seem like the creation of anti-Semites, but it has also long been abetted by Jews as well, who played down Jews’ physical accomplishments. In reality, while their intellectual tradition decries it, Jews have always been involved in athletics. But most of those who keep the Jewish historical record books—shameless brainiacs that they are—choose to edit athletes out of the picture. Jews were circus performers, too, from the Roman era through the Middle Ages and up to the modern period. But, once again, the people who wrote Jewish texts weren’t interested in such activities, except to try and ban Jews from participating, so they refused to document the reality of Jewish participation. Bit and pieces of evidence crop up in a variety of places. For example, interspersed in published 17th- and 18th-century lists of the few thousands of merchants who attended the months-long mercantile fairs in Leipzig—the only period in which Jews were permitted in the city—are more than 100 Jewish performers, among them acrobats, athletes, magicians, musicians, some with trained animal acts.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish involvement in athletics began to grow as a result of both urbanization and embourgeoisement. Moreover, Jewish political movements began to co-opt athletics as a way to engage the youth—a clever way of tricking Jewish kids into supporting political parties.

Successful Jews athletes were far more popular than politically and culturally engaged Jews of the same period. In their time, people like the boxer Benny Leonard and the circus strongman Zishe Breitbart were far better known and more beloved by Jews than a jurist like Louis Brandeis or a thinker like Mordecai Kaplan. In 1925, the Yiddish daily Der nayer varhay noted, “When Einstein visited America, thousands of people knew about it. But (Jewish boxer) Benny Leonard is known by millions.” And it is also of no small significance that such activity boosted the confidence of a socially and politically disenfranchised people. But historians and communal leaders pretend that athletics never mattered to Jews and retroactively turn the intellectual celebrities into bigger stars.

The bodies of athletes have been of interest to viewers for millennia. As Jews entered the mainstream, the strong and beautiful among them also became interesting, not necessarily because they were Jews, but because they were hot. Superior athleticism also played a major role. On the other hand, to Jewish spectators, it was simply a trifecta of “hot, Jewish, athlete” that served as a modern antidote to “crusty, bearded, rabbinic.”

During the final decade of the 19th century, a man known variously as the Mahatma, and the “apostle of the Kabbalah and the Emissary of the 37 masters” traipsed around the Western United States prophesizing about catastrophes in Paris and future civil wars in the United States. With a leonine shock of gray-streaked black hair, he would stand before journalists and spectators and nonchalantly comment, “I’m going to shake the foundations of your world.” Whether or not his predictions shook those foundations is unclear, but he was popular enough to draw large audiences to his occult performances throughout the 1890s.

Before all that, he was a Hebrew poet and scholar known by the somewhat less exotic name of Naphtali Imber. Born into a Hasidic family in 1856 in Zlotshev, Poland, the same Galician shtetl that gave us the great Yiddish writer Moyshe Leyb Halperin, Imber was alleged to have been deaf, dumb, and paralyzed until the age of seven, when he underwent what could only be called a miraculous recovery and subsequently became known as a brilliant talmudic and kabbalistic prodigy. He also dabbled in poetry—a matter that might strike any Hasidic parent as boding poorly for his future as a scholar—and, in his teens, he wrote a poem on the occasion of Bukovina’s joining the Austrian empire that earned him an award from Emperor Franz Joseph.

A peripatetic young man, Imber broke out of Zlotshev while still in his teens and traveled throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire before leaving for Palestine in 1882, where he published Morning Star, his first book of poems. To earn his keep, he served as the secretary to the English adventurer Sir Laurence Oliphant, a Christian millennialist who, in an attempt to hasten the apocalypse, developed a plan in 1879 to lease the northern portion of Palestine for resettlement of the world’s Jews. Oliphant’s mystical beliefs influenced Imber, who left Palestine in 1887, returning briefly to Europe before leaving for India and, finally, the United States.

His American sojourn was marked by itinerancy and an increasing obsession with the occult. During a short stay in Boston in 1894, Imber married a local Brahmin named Kate Davidson, whom writer Israel Zangwill referred to as an “American Christian crank.” The couple went west, seeking audiences with other mystics, rivals whom Imber denounced as “bluffers.”

Dressing in a white gown, Imber offered remarkable predictions. In an 1896 report in the San Francisco Post, he warned Americans to stay away from Paris, where a disaster would soon occur. Within six months, an enormous fire broke in Paris’s Bazar de la Charité, the result of a film exhibition during which a projector set a pile of highly flammable film alight, killing hundreds and destroying many city blocks.

In 1897, at an event in Los Angeles, he predicted that in 50 years’ time, a Jewish state would violently come into existence in Palestine, and that, in the future, power from the sun’s rays would provide energy to heat homes and power transportation. A serious drinker, Imber also prophesized that California wines would one day rate among the best in the world.

Whether his prophecies always turned out remains to be seen. In October 1897, the Los Angeles Times reported on one of his visions: in 2010, he said, a new civil war would break out in the United States. Imber’s claim was that the ultra-liberal state of Kansas, whose female governor will have declared “the West for Westerners,” will secede from the Union. Kansas will be joined by Illinois and Missouri, prompting the Eastern states to launch a war against all of the Western states, which will have supported the secessionists. The West will rout the East, and the two sides will remain separate. The East, which will wage war with Canada and annex most of it, will be governed by what Imber called “the Manhattan Empire,” and the West, which will take on Mexico and annex most of it, will be governed by Chicago. Meantime, he said, California will split in two, with Los Angeles as the capital in the south and San Francisco as the capital in the north. Farfetched as Imber’s prophecy seems, its major question right now seems to be how quickly Kansas can become ultra-liberal.

Around the time Imber made his second civil war prophecy, he and his young wife attempted to settle in San Francisco, but, perhaps unable to compete with the memory of the city’s most famous Jew, Emperor Norton, and afflicted with the disease known as shpilkes, he left his wife, never to return. According to the Los Angeles Times, he resurfaced shortly thereafter in a Los Angeles police lineup after having been arrested for disorderly conduct in a flophouse where he was staying. Another resident had tried to hold him down and cut off his hair. Molested and mocked by onlookers, Imber went wild and, stalking the hallways of the place all night, screamed about cutting out his assailant’s heart. Imber stood with a black eye before the judge, the Times reported, and explained, “Conzidering ze zituation zat I was hit by a drunken man and called a little sheeney only to show ze anti-semitic feeling, is it any wonder zat I got angry, Your Honor?” He was found guilty and fined $20.

Imber then made his way to New York City, leaving his work as a seer behind and cementing his reputation as a poet, writer, and aspiring alcoholic. In their memoirs, Yiddish writers like Aaron Davidson commented on Imber’s infamous pub crawls. As an intellectual, he impressed philanthropist and judge Mayer Sulzberger, who became his benefactor and gave Imber a stipend of a dollar per week, doled out by the head of the New York Public Libraries Jewish Division, Abraham Freidus, a bug-eyed fat man, known to patrons as “the hippopotamus.” Freidus, a brilliant bibliographer who suffered from a glandular disorder, would stick Imber’s dollar in a book and have it delivered to Imber at his table at the library. Imber apparently spent more time at the library than at home: on his 1905 passport application, he gave his address as “New York Public Library.”

But hard drinking and hard schnorring had taken their toll. After Imber’s death in 1909 at the age of 54, one of the eulogies in the Yiddish newspaper commented that he was the only true Jewish bohemian. A few days later, a letter appeared noting this fact was wrong, that Imber was not a Bohemian at all and, in fact, from Galicia.

Although his history as a clairvoyant and knife-wielding drunk is not particularly well known, Naphtali Herz Imber was never an unknown quantity. He became famous, after all, as the eminent author of “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, a ditty he first wrote while on the road in Romania in 1877. He tweaked it when he got to Palestine, publishing it as the poem “Tikvateinu” (“Our Hope”).

These Yom Kippur Balls, organized initially by anarchists in the mid-1880s, started in London and migrated to New York and Montreal. Smaller nosh fests and public demonstrations were also celebrated by Jewish antinomians in other locales. Unorthodox Jews in interwar Poland could pull hundreds of locals into small venues on Yom Kippur in shtetls like Kalish and Chelm; in larger cities like Warsaw and Lodz, they could sell out 5,000-seat circuses. Heresy was big business; tickets for early 1890s Yom Kippur events cost 15 cents for anarchists: capitalists who deigned to attend paid double.

Advertised in the Yiddish press, Yom Kippur balls, lectures, and nosh-fests were decidedly communal events created by and for an alternative community. You had to be a Jew to avail yourself of a blintz given out by a Jewish organization in Warsaw on Yom Kippur. Otherwise, it just wasn’t heresy. Yet it was not just provocation that motivated people to engage in what critics would consider a supremely obnoxious activity. Some people partook to spite a god they don’t believe in. Others to antagonize their parents. Still others to harass the religious establishment. In fact harassment may have been the biggest draw.

Plus, it was often a way to get free publicity. New York’s Herrick Brothers Restaurant caused a riot on Yom Kippur in 1898 when it became apparent they were staying open for the holiday. As the sun went down on the Lower East Side and a good portion of its denizens made their way to shul, hundreds of them fell upon diners at the packed Division Street restaurant with fist and nail.

And some revelers were motivated to attend Yom Kippur balls for political reasons, as an excerpt from Haynt, one of Warsaw’s daily Yiddish papers, made clear the day after Yom Kippur, 1927:

In the non-religious sector everything went according to tradition. The Independent Socialists organized a Kol nidre evening in which various “cantors” and “cantorettes” performed in a Jewish fashion. And there was rejoicing in the house.

This year, the Free-thinkers also fulfilled their “holy mission” and held a meeting during Kol nidre at the Worker’s House on 23 Karmelitska Street in which religion, Yom Kippur and atheism was discussed.

And if the meeting itself went without incident, they went out onto the Jewish streets the morning of Yom Kippur and hawked old issues of the magazine “The Freethinker” while people were on their way to shul. On account of this, a number of fights occurred between religious Jews and the “holy rollers” that sold the magazines.

A few incidents also occurred during the day, when a group of Free-thinkers came out onto Karmelitska, Dzika and Nalevkes, some with lit cigarettes, and others with apples in their mouths.

On account of this provocation, a serious battle occurred between the “demonstrators” and the religious passers-by. Water was dumped from a window on Karmelitska Street onto the heads of the Freethinkers.

Also, a free lunch was organized at the Worker’s Home at 23 Karmelitska Street for those who weren’t able to eat at home because of their parents or wives.

The number of takers for this free lunch was so large that the line for tickets stretched all the way to the front gate of the building, where a large crowd gathered. Some protested against those eating, others in defense of them. Occasionally, the arguments became so heated that the police had to intervene.

Similar scenes also occurred at the Bundist “Worker’’s Corner,” on 9 Pshiazd Street, where the struggle for lunch was so great that the screams and yells could be heard all the way in the street. In addition, some of those eating showed off their big appetites in front of the windows, bringing forth much anguish among the religious Jews who were passing by.

The “struggle for lunch” was indeed intense. Yom Kippur battles broke out between religious and anti-religious Jews worldwide as a result of these annual provocations. Released from communal religious obligation, contemporary American Jews might find these events to be quaint little political-religious convulsions of yesteryear. In Israel, where religious influence in political and daily life is more of an issue, such provocations might seem more understandable. But perhaps Israelis don’t need another dispute on their plate. Packed beaches in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur are an indication that the “struggle for lunch” has been transformed, in the Jewish state, into the “struggle for rest and relaxation.”

Click for translation

New Yorkers sometimes complain that the city stinks. They have no idea. When New York was a horse-powered town, the stench of manure and urine was gag-inducing, especially in the dog days of summer. It was on one of those steaming days near the end of August 1871 that a rickety trunk was delivered to the baggage room at the Hudson River train depot. It sat undisturbed until a baggage agent noticed an odor so pungent emanating from it that even the city’s general putrid stink failed to mask it.

The contents of the trunk horrified the workers who jimmied it open. Crammed into the 2-foot-8-inch box was a comely, naked young blond. Even while decomposing, the girl was a stunner, if we’re to believe the words of a news pamphlet which described the body. “A tangled mass of the most beautiful golden hair fell in waves over her shoulders, which must have been white as Parian marble, and eyes of blue, that even death’s horrors cannot pale,” it said. “The limbs were white and shapely and the feet tiny and delicate. The arms and hands were faultless in their symmetry, and every feature showed refinement and grace.”

The morgue report was less forgiving. The coroner estimated the girl had been dead for three days. Thought to be around 20 years old, the body showed no signs of having sustained blows. But her “lower parts” were “swollen.” More to the point, the doctor discovered a placenta stuck in her uterus, a sign that she was the victim of metro-peritonitis, hemorrhaging from an abortion gone wrong. He was puzzled over how the 5-foot-2-inch young woman had been pretzeled into the trunk. Rigor mortis would have forced perpetrators to break her limbs to make the corpse fit, leading to the conclusion that the woman was forced in while still alive.

While the hows of her death were solved, the police went about trying to identify the corpse. They tracked down the wagon driver who delivered the trunk to the station. And the driver, in turn, led the police to a 2nd Avenue basement belonging to Dr. Jacob Rosenzweig, who was promptly arrested. A known abortion provider who sometimes operated under the name “Dr. Ascher,” Rosenzweig denied knowledge of the whole affair.

In the meantime, the body was put on ice while a parade of curious gawkers attempted to identify her. A seamstress from Paterson, New Jersey, whose daughter had gone missing a week before, was too upset to see if the festering corpse was her beloved Alice. Instead she dispatched the family’s doctor and dentist, who identified the girl by an unusual vaccination scar and a missing eye tooth.

Everyone in Paterson considered Alice Augusta Bowlsby virtuous, and wondered what kind of malevolent lothario could have possibly put her in this situation. The answer became apparent when Walter Conklin, the son of a well-off alderman and silk mill owner, was denounced by his own mother as Alice’s seducer. In response, Conklin shot himself in the head; in his pocket was a note with the address of one of Rosenzweig’s offices, this one on East 24th Street.

Bolwsby’s seducer, Walter Conklin

Rosenzweig was publicly excoriated. In papers ranging from The New York Times to The Milwaukee Sentinel, journalists referred to him as a “miscreant,” “devil,” “fiend,” “monster,” “murderer,” “slaughterer,” and, perhaps most devastatingly, a “pirate of human happiness.” Many of these writers had followed the abortion issue for some time—then, as now, it was a hot topic. Less than a week before the trunk’s discovery The New York Times published “The Evil of the Age,” an exposé about the abortion industry in New York City. The crusading reporter, Augustus St. Clair, visited a number of providers, including Rosenzweig, whom he described as “a fat, coarse, and sensual-looking fellow, without any traces of refinement in person or manners and [who] does not bear the faintest appearance of the educated physician. None but the wretched creatures, who, driven to desperation by their condition and the fear of discovery by friends, would place any confidence in his skill.” It probably didn’t help Rosenzweig that when St. Clair interviewed him, the doctor, increasingly agitated by his questions, attacked the journalist, who pulled out a revolver to ensure that he could escape unharmed.

Short and fat, Rosenzweig had curly light brown hair and searing blue eyes; a treacherous, diabolical Jonah Hill. He claimed to have attended medical school in Warsaw (an unlikely possibility for a Jew at that time) and to have received a diploma from an unnamed medical college in Philadelphia, though it was subsequently reported in the Times that Philadelphia was the center of the country’s bogus diploma industry.

Covering Rosenzweig’s arrest, Augustus St. Clair reported that Rosenzweig “claims to be a Russian, but his voice has the twang of a German Jew,” and proceeded to quote him in dialect: “These other fellows are all humpugsh; they bromish to do somting vot they don’t do. I poshitively do all operashunsh widout any danger, and as sheap as anybody.”

In reality, Rosenzweig hailed from Plotsk, a shtetl 60 miles from Warsaw in Russian-ruled Poland. He was married with four children and lived in a house on Second Avenue and 22nd Street. He arrived in the United States in 1865, though it’s unknown what work he did when he got here or how he became an abortion provider. Five years later, the 1870 census lists him as a doctor. As for his nom de travail, Dr. Ascher, Rosenzweig had bought his main office on Amity Place (now 3rd Street) from a man of that name, whose sign Rosenzweig kept intact, leading him, at that office anyway, to answer to the name Ascher. In building a case against Rosenzweig, the Manhattan District Attorney suggested the intermittent ersatz alias was proof this man was the Jekyll and Hyde of abortions.

Advertisements in The New York Times, September 1868

It’s not clear why Rosenzweig got into the abortion racket. Medicine in the 1870s was fairly sketchy and anyone who put up a shingle reading “Dr.” and paid a $10 “physician revenue tax” was legally recognized as such by the state. This allowed all manner of quacks to present themselves as medical experts and advertise all manner of elixirs, curing everything from cancer to scrofula. One of Rosenzweig’s ads in The New York Herald promised, “Ladies in trouble guaranteed immediate relief, sure and safe; no fees required until perfectly satisfied; elegant rooms and nursing provided.”

Abortion in the 1870s was perfectly legal. Accidentally killing a patient, stuffing her body in a trunk, and shipping it out of state was not. Rosenzweig was tried for medical malpractice and manslaughter. It took a jury less than two hours to convict him and a judge sentenced him to seven years hard labor. Rosenzweig appealed; the court had been swayed by public opinion, he argued, and had disallowed evidence in his favor. After serving a year and a half in Sing-Sing, Rosenzweig won a new trial. Unfortunately for him, in the interim his case had spurred the state legislature to pass a law criminalizing abortion, which meant that now Rosenzweig would be tried for murder.

His attorney William Howe, a man described in the press as “indefatigable,” cried foul, and rightly so, as Rosenzweig’s malfeasance occurred before the new law was passed. In the end, though a second trial never took place; double jeopardy applied and Rosenzweig went free, apparently leaving the country without a trace while journalists like St. Clair were left to hound other well-known practioners like the Grindles and the van Buskirks, two married teams of abortion providers, and the legendary Madame Restell, nicknamed “the wickedest woman in New York.”

One particularly interesting feature of these publications was their coverage of Hasidic life. Far more important in Warsaw, where Hasidim made up a large proportion of the population, than in New York, Hasidic news was provided by journalists who had grown up in Hasidic families or who had a foot in both the Hasidic and secular worlds, but still lived and looked like traditional Jews. With around a third of Warsaw’s 350,000 Jews claiming membership in one of the 50 or so Hasidic sects based in the city, Hasidic newsgathering became a significant component of the Yiddish press. In the wake of World War I, dozens of Hasidic rebbes made their way to Warsaw, which had become the Jewish cultural capital of Eastern Europe. Leaving their shtetls, they retained the names of their locales: from Porisov, the Porisover rebbe; from Aleksandrov, the Aleksandrover rebbe; from Ger, the Gerer rebbe; and so forth.

What follows is a small window on such Yiddish press reporting. The event in question took place in January 1926; three articles from different newspapers are condensed here:

Just as the rebbe’s home in a shtetl functioned as his office, so did his new home in the city. His disciples would come to ask advice and request divine intervention, in close proximity of other Hasidic sects and their rebbes, making inter-sect disputes far more in-your-face.

Such disputes occured for a variety of reasons: within the sects themselves, they usually had to do with rabbinical succession. Between them, anything went. Disagreements could arise over when to start praying, which nigunim (melodies) to use, or what kind of kugel to eat on Shabbos. Certain sects suffered from such long-term feuds, for example that between the Sandzer and the Sadagurer, or between the Belzer and the Munkatcher Hasidim, that nobody remembered what initially set off the antagonism. These were essentially the Hasidic variants of the Hatfield and the McCoys. It was similar with the Porisover rebbe (Yeshoshue Osher Hurvitz-Shternfeld) and the Kolibyeler rebbe (Uri Yehoshue Osher Elkhanan Ashkenazi), whose disagreement had an unknown cause that resulted in bad blood between both of their followers.

In early 1925, the Porisover, a widower, had remarried. A year later, his first child, a son, was born. In an attempt to bury the hatchet with the Kolibyeler rebbe, the Porisover rebbe invited the Kolibyeler rebbe to the newborn’s bris. Moreover, he designated the Kolibyeler to serve as his sandek, the godfather who cradles the child as the circumcision takes places and holds the child still while the mohel performs the circumcision. This was a beautiful gesture. The Porisover, however, neglected to inform his own followers of his changed attitude toward the Kolibyeler. After having no doubt heard censorious homilies from their rebbe against the evil Kolibyeler, the Porisover Hasidim were flabbergasted by his largesse and didn’t quite know how to react.

The bris was huge. Rabbis packed the Porisover’s apartment; all of Hasidic Warsaw was in attendance. Wine poured like water. The Porisover Hasidim got drunk, and courageous; protesting their rebbe’s decision to reconcile with his former arch-enemy, the Kolibyeler, they defied their leader’s call to join in the opening prayers beginning the bris ceremony.

Taking note of his followers’ silence, the Porisover rebbe then invited the Kolibyeler rebbe to recite a blessing, further infuriating the Porisovers. “Raboysay, mir veln bentshn” (“Gentlemen, let us make a blessing”), the Kolibyeler intoned. The Porisover Hasidim couldn’t take any more and met the call to prayer with hysterical laughter. Their rudeness was shocking, but given the number of celebrants and the noise, their ruckus died down and the ceremony soon continued.

One of the Porisovers chimed in with the Harakhmones section of the ceremony and was joined by his peers. But a guest, the son of the Zvoliner rebbe, refused to let their outburst pass without incident, and blurted out, “it’s more appropriate to laugh at your singing than at the Kolibyeler’s.”

Their patience already thin, the drunken Porisover Hasidim were quick to react. One particularly inebriated fellow, Avremele Gritser, stuck his face into that of the Zvoliner’s son, called him a brat, told him to shut up, and cursed him as a “villain of Israel.” (Like their clothing, Hasidic cussing is relatively modest.)

Seeing his son berated infuriated the Zvoliner rebbe, who grabbed Avremele Gritser and warned him that if he didn’t stop insulting his son, he’d get punched—twice for good measure. Gritser looked at the Zvoliner and replied, “Oh yeah? And you’ll get four punches.”

With that, the Zvoliner rebbe’s son dropped Avremele with two blazing fists.

The crowd jumped on the Zvoliner rebbe and his son, beating them mercilessly. They did what is known in Yiddish as “taking out a mortgage on someone,” which entails holding someone down with a sheet while others pummel him. This was most likely performed with the men’s prayer shawls.

Hearing the inhuman yelps of the Zvoliner father and son, neighbors came running. They rushed into the rebbe’s apartment and found the Zvoliner rebbe and his son lying immobile on the floor, their clothes torn to shreds.

The two pummeled men were dragged out of the building by a gaggle of Porisovers and thrown into the street. Only with the help of two passers-by were they put into a droshke (horse-drawn carriage) and taken home. Inside, the party continued as if nothing was amiss: the bris was completed and merry-making and dancing followed.

Shortly thereafter, the daughter of the Zvoliner rebbe burst into the apartment with a policeman. The officer asked the owner of the house, the Porisover rebbe, to step outside. His followers, however, would not allow the policeman to approach the rebbe and the daughter—described by one Yiddish press reporter as “a girl with a sharp tongue”—began to howl that her father was beaten and stomped on and that she demanded satisfaction. After a tense standoff, the Hasidim relented and the policeman returned to the station house with the names of the rebbe and the other brawlers.

The Zvoliner’s daughter told the group of Yiddish journalists that had assembled to report the story that they had not heard they end of her. She would press charges. But like many of the small, internal convulsions in the Hasidic world, this episode would ultimately be dealt with internally. Charges weren’t pressed; the incident was smoothed over. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Zvoliner rebbe didn’t at least hold a grudge.

One of the items that historians have done a neat job of obscuring as irrelevant to the modern Jewish experience is the role of performance psychics in Jewish life. Legitimized as “prophets” in the ancient period, they have become, in subsequent eras, excused as products of their times or categorized as special “mystics.” But even by the time the Renaissance was in full swing, science and mysticism still mixed in weird and uncomfortable ways: mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton, for example, was a big fan of alchemy and divination, among other matters of the occult. (Apparently, rationality has never been beholden to the laws of motion and gravity.) In the modern period, where science and reason begin to edge out the occult, the terms “fraud” and “charlatan” are bandied about as terms to describe those who work as palm readers, phrenologists, and telepaths. But that didn’t make them disappear or make people any less interested in their abilities, including some with top flight educations.

Khokhmes hayad is an 1882 reprint of a 1799 reprint of a Hebrew palm reading manual that dates to the 16th century. This is just one of many examples of such Jewish occult manuals. The frequent reprinting of such manuals over many centuries is but one indication of their popularity.

Indeed, Jews have worked in the occult for as long as they have been Jews. Instances of necromancy and other occult activities are peppered throughout the Bible and the Talmud, as well as later rabbinical texts. Indeed, prophesying is hardwired in the tradition. Joshua Trachtenberg’s 1939 monograph, “Jewish Magic and Superstition,” for example, regales the reader with an excellent exposition of the history of Jewish occult activity.

With the advent of the Enlightenment and political and social emancipation it brought in its wake, Jews were expected to have abrogated this silliness. But shtetl superstitions simply migrated in variant form to cities, where—in an attempt to slap a veneer of sophistication on their ancient crafts—occultists often presented themselves as “scientists” or “professors.” They could be found in Jewish neighborhoods in Warsaw, Krakow, and New York City plying their trades.

One such specimen, a man named Abraham Hochman, came to prominence in mid-1890s New York, following the 1895 publication of Fortune Teller, a popular booklet reprinted several times—as were his subsequent Yiddish publications on astrology and fortune telling. Operating out of a building he owned at 169 Rivington Street, Hochman was a Lower East Side fixture who told fortunes, read palms and foreheads, and found lost spouses and kin for people in the neighborhood. He kept innocent men out of prison, found lost property and, occasionally, knew which horse would come in at the track. When business flagged, he contacted journalist friends and pulled stunts, most of which were reported upon assiduously in the Yiddish press, to attract customers.

Occasionally, when Hochman did something really dramatic, news of his exploits would appear in the general press. The New York Sun, among other outlets, reported on an episode in May 1904, when a bushy-haired Hochman waltzed into the Essex Market Police Court and inexplicably paid the bail for Abie Langener, who’d been arrested with seven other youths on a burglary charge. The magistrate asked why Hochman was paying bail for someone he didn’t know.

“I can read the future,” he replied. “I have read this man’s mind and know he is innocent. I can also read your mind. You will discharge him when the case comes up before you tomorrow. If he were guilty, I would know it and I would not bail him out. I will be here tomorrow to show you that my predictions come true.”

Hochman did, in fact, show up the following day. And, sure enough, when Langener and another suspect were brought before the court, the magistrate released them due to lack of evidence.

“What did I tell you?” said Hochman.

The psychic was mobbed outside the courthouse by hundreds of friends of the accused who, according to press reports, practically tore off his clothes. It’s not clear why this would be necessary and, in any case, the courthouse bailiffs came outside to rescue him from his demonstrative well-wishers.

But Hochman was usually surrounded by a mob, though typically of what they called “wildly gesticulating women.” The stoop of his Rivington Street studio was frequently crammed with flailing ladies, often accompanied by children all desperately trying to find missing husbands and fathers. These men ranged from immigrants who had conveniently “forgotten” about their families in the Old Country, to guys who couldn’t tolerate the cramped quarters of their 300-square-foot tenements and their half dozen screaming kids, to jerks who ran out of money and disappeared. The situation was so bad, the Jewish Daily Forward, the largest-circulation Yiddish daily in the world, began running the “Gallery of Missing Men,” a page full of mug shots and descriptions of these nefarious characters to help locate them and bring them to justice. (The National Desertion Bureau was also founded to help women and children whose husbands and fathers were on the lam.)

Forverts’ Gallery of Missing Men, 1909

Locating missing husbands was a Hochman specialty. He gained quite a bit of fame for this ability when, in 1903, the press reported on the predicament of Minnie Cohen, whose her husband went missing for a month. Minnie decided to avail herself of Hochman’s services. With a dollar in hand, she made her way through the labyrinthine snarl of panhandlers and pushcarts to Hochman’s office. He informed Minnie that her husband would be up to no good at the corner of Pitt and Grand Streets at exactly 10 o’clock that night. So sure was he of his prophecy that he promised to give her 50 dollars if he turned out to mistaken. With unshakable faith in the Hebrew Seer of Rivington Street, and hope in the possibility of getting a wad of cash if her runaway husband didn’t show, Cohen pulled a cop out of the Essex Street Station and told him what Hochman had said. When they got to the corner of Pitt and Grand, Minnie’s truant husband was there, scratching his back on a lamppost. Officer O’Grady arrested Cohen’s husband and brought him into the station, where he was held on a $100 bond and instructed to begin paying his wife Minnie two dollars a week alimony. “Venus is ascendant—husbands beware!” Hochman asserted to the women gathered on his stoop.

News of his exploits made Hochman realize that he could expand his psychic constituency further than the local Hebrews. He went straight for the top: one day in the spring of 1905, Hochman went chugging into the Grand Street clubhouse of Tammany Hall thug Florrie Sullivan, grabbed the local strongman’s hand, and told him that he dreamed that the horse King Pepper was going to come in first, paying eight to one. Sullivan, who forswore belief in the occult, nevertheless took a bet on Hochman’s advice. King Pepper won, making Sullivan a small fortune. Hochman’s gambit worked; he became the Sullivan gang’s official mind-reader and phrenologist. Hochman was so successful that his son Frank’s 1906 bris, which brought out a full police battalion and included performances by Yiddish theater actors, was besieged by thousands of well wishers, who devoured 320 pounds of chicken and six crates of fruit. On account of this sumptuous affair, an entire block of Rivington Street was closed down for two days.

Even The New York Times was not immune to the lures of Abraham Hochman. Tongue in cheek as it may have been, the Times still reported on the 1904 story of how Hochman’s psychic abilities helped to locate Jacob Greenberg’s (of the Essex Street Greenbergs) missing horse, cart, and load of grapes.
Unlike most clairvoyants, Hochman was happy to share his secrets, publishing his prophetic techniques in books and articles. He based his method on what he called his “Astro-biblical chart,” which anyone could use to answer questions like “will I fall in love?”; “should I take dance lessons?”; “does my husband know I’ve been bad?”; “should I get a job as a tailor?”; “is my landlord in love with me?” Determining the answer required readers to hold some herbs or nuts in the right hand, count backwards by sevens with the left hand, add whatever remained to the number of the question, and find the corresponding number on the astro-biblical chart, which provided the name of a Hebrew symbol and a natural element. Then, inquirers were to take the Hebrew symbol and the element and consult Hochman’s system of charts for another number which led to the answer chart, whereupon a person would punch in the original number subtracted after the initial step of nut-holding and backward counting. That is your answer. How could it miss?

Hochman disappears from the papers around 1910. Nobody seems to know what became of him, though Yiddish-speaking clairvoyants, palm readers, and psychics continued to hold Jews in their thrall. In 1933, for example, a dybbuk was exorcised in a Harlem tenement. But that’s a story for another time.

Eddy Portnoy, a Tablet contributing editor, teaches Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University.