The fact is I’ve been haunted for years by a line from Hotel Terminus, Max Ophul’s movie about Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” that went like this: “Only Jews and old Nazis are interested in Jews and old Nazis.” If this is true—and in large part I believe it is—then the audience for Holocaust films is even smaller than the audience for Ukranian imports, one that is yoked together by questionable motives. The pleasure principle, that is, is generally so absent from Holocaust cinema that the only impulse to see a new film is one of masochistic duty to the victims or sadistic reminiscence on the part of perpetrators—and there we are, bound together once again with our tormentors.

I was struck recently by these thoughts when I went to see a screening of Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, which has been nominated as the Polish entry for Best Foreign Film and is scheduled to open in wide release in January. More than two decades after making the much-acclaimed Europa, Europa, and after moving on to such disparate work as The Secret Garden, Washington Square, and the HBO production of Shot in the Heart (based on Mikel Gilmore’s memoir), Holland has returned to the theme of the Holocaust. In her director’s statement, Holland, whose father’s family died at the hand of the Nazis and who had an aunt who survived by being smuggled out of the ghetto in her sister’s coffin, observes in the press notes: “One may ask if everything has now been said on this subject. But in my opinion the main mystery hasn’t yet been resolved, or even fully explored. How was this crime (echoes of which continue in different places in the world from Rwanda to Bosnia) possible? Where was Man during this crisis? Where was God? Are these events and actions the exception in human history or do they reveal an inner, dark truth about our nature?”

The screening took place on a Wednesday night at the comfy Sony screening room at 550 Madison Avenue in New York, where the seats are widely spaced the better for you to stretch out your legs and pretend that you’re Irving Thalberg, chomping on a cigar, checking out the dailies. (Sony Pictures Classics—but who else?—has picked the movie up for American distribution, with limited release in New York and Los Angeles starting Dec. 9.) I could find no one among my friends who wanted to see the movie with me, although I imagine I would have had no such trouble with almost any other offering. No one explicitly said, “Not another Holocaust movie,” but they might as well have. There was a clutch of people waiting for the publicist to arrive when I got to Sony, and by the time we entered there were about 20 of us. I looked around anxiously: No old Nazis as far as I could make out, but no one appeared to be brimming over with anticipation either.

In Darkness is is based on a true story of a Righteous Christian, a sewer worker and petty thief by the name of Leopold Socha, who over a period of 14 months helps hide a small group of Jews, including men, women, and children, in the sewers beneath the Nazi-occupied city of Lvov, Poland. The film’s power derives in part from Robert Wieckiewicz’s brilliant, unsentimentalized performance as Socha, whose empathy is complexly formed and tenuously maintained until the very last moment when it overrides his conflicts, and in part from Holland’s underplayed directing, which includes deft contextual touches that bring the larger brutality taking place outside the netherworld of the sewers acutely home.

Agnieszka Holland. (Photo by Krzysztof Opaliński, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

The Monday after the screening I arranged to meet with Holland at the bar of the Regency Hotel, at 4 in the afternoon. The place was thronged with people who looked pleased with themselves in that way that successful people often do; at the table next to mine I spotted the literary agent Ed Victor, holding forth to an audience of one. Holland, who was born in 1948 in Warsaw, wore glasses, had a short haircut, and was simply dressed. She had been interviewed by Forward columnist Masha Leon right before me and looked a bit weary of the whole process, although she put on a welcoming smile.

Having read in the press notes that Holland had turned down the movie twice before the writer and co-producers, who had initially insisted that the film be in English, agreed to let her shoot it in the original languages (Polish, German, Yiddish, and others), I asked her what drew her so strongly to the story. “What interested me is that the Pole is not so good,” she said in heavily accented but excellent English. “This tension is my aim as a storyteller. You don’t know what he’ll do; he is walking on the wire. It’s not a struggle between good and bad—he isn’t conscious enough for that. This guy doesn’t know what he’ll do next. Everything is in the present. I tried to be behavioristic, not psychological. There is no moralistic issue or sentimental building up.” Holland went on to say that another impetus for her making the film at this moment was her irritation with many of the Holocaust movies that have emerged. “I’ve seen an incredible amount of bad Holocaust movies. Kitschy ones. Life Is Beautiful made me angry. It said, ‘If you really love your child you will save him.’ To try and take a moral lesson from the Holocaust is wrong.”

We moved on to talk of other things. Holland, who has directed episodes of television series like David Simon’s The Wire and Treme, is set to direct the premiere episode of the second season of the much-acclaimed detective drama series The Killing. She told me she divided her time between Los Angeles, France, and Poland. Inevitably, though, we returned to In Darkness and the subject of the Holocaust. Holland wanted the film to be seen by “as many people as possible” although she admitted it was not as “entertaining” as Europa, Europa. “Not everyone can go to such a painful place,” she said. She noted that the last 10 years had brought “unpleasant facts about Polish history post-Holocaust” to light that had shattered the Poles’ image of themselves as innocent victims of the Germans and “allowed Poles to grow up.” She thought Americans, on the other hand, had adopted the Holocaust as part of their history “because of movies and TV” but that they “haven’t done their homework yet, haven’t accepted their own guilt for doing nothing.” Holland attributed the growing power of anti-Semitism in Europe to Israeli politics, which “angers leftist intellectuals” and “allows them to feel that the burden of guilt can be thrown away.” Holland was also convinced that if ever there were a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, its moment has all but passed: “We are at the point where people forgot it.”

Actually, the feelings might be even more negative. As Holland spoke, I thought back to the aftermath of the screening I had attended at Sony. On my way down in the elevator a Jewish literary agent I knew said to her husband and the couple with her: “Now, that was relentless.” I turned to her and asked her what other people—those who had nothing at stake—were going to think if this was her response. I felt like a schoolteacher, especially since no one had solicited my opinion, but I nevertheless added that I had found the film compelling and moving. The two couples looked dutifully abashed, but I had the feeling they couldn’t wait to get out of the elevator and leave me and my reprimanding tone behind them.

That night, I kept thinking of the last scene in the film, when the Jews make it out of the sewers, looking dazed in the light of the day as around them Polish passersby laugh uneasily to see these strange, forlorn apparitions suddenly appear in the middle of their street. “These are my Jews,” Socha says delightedly. “My Jews,” finally taking credit for his own unsung acts of heroism. There are no brass bands, no memorials, just an extraordinary Polish man who could not bring himself to see Jews as repugnantly Other. It is a deeply stirring moment that closes the human circle of warmth—bringing into focus the surprising sense of kinship that motivated otherwise ordinary people such as Socha—but I found myself wondering how many people will ever get to see it, or be receptive to it after two and a half hours spent in a dimly lit sewer.

For this is the hard (or maybe too-easy) truth: At some point, there will be no more old Nazis, and no more Holocaust films. Until then, I suggest that, come January, you elect to spend some time with Leopold Socha and his Jews, down in the darkness, with the rats, the stench, and the internecine bickering. At the end of the tunnel is a dazzling burst of daylight that is worth the wait.

Today we celebrate Dovid Bergelson, who was born on this date in 1884 and executed on the very same day 68 years later. The confident writer, who at 23 tracked down I.L. Peretz in Warsaw (from Kiev!) and wowed him with his literary tales of shtetl life, embraced the Yiddish language and used it to skillfully describe the multitude of changes facing Jews in the Pale of Settlement. When the English translation of Shadows of Berlin, a collection of Bergelson’s short stories, was published in 2005, Boris Fishman declared it a “distinctly cerebral pleasure.”

Reflective of the disconnect Bergelson felt living in the vibrant yet isolating metropolis, the stories emphasize the similar tensions between old and new, familiar and foreign that Bergelson’s work had come to embody. “This atrophy was the lifeblood of Bergelson’s fiction. He portrayed it like no Yiddish writer before him,” Fishman wrote. “His language was Yiddish, but his style was Russian. Like the nouveau riche Jews of the period, their social climbing arrested by the new repression, Bergelson looked beyond rather than within; his writing recalled Tolstoy’s plotting, Chekhov’s introspection, and Andrei Bely’s Symbolist experiments of perspective. The result was a modernist style informed by an anxiety about the degeneration of the familiar world.”

Unfortunately, the very pessimism and critical apprehension of change that informed Bergelson’s work would ultimately presage, eerily so, his untimely death. Though he lived peacefully and prolifically upon his 1934 return to the Soviet Union, Bergelson was among the dozen Yiddishists arrested in January 1949 and shot dead on his birthday in 1952.

Read Back from the Shadows, by Boris Fishman

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.

American Jews are, for the most part, quite happy to share in this present-mindedness. Yet, as so often happens, the Jewish case is not quite the same as that of other groups. Jewishness is not only an ethnicity, it is a religion, which means that practicing Jews automatically maintain a connection to the whole of Jewish history, as it is recorded in scripture, the liturgy, and the calendar. Perhaps even more important in dictating American Jewish attitudes toward Jewish history, however, is the way the Holocaust profoundly altered the course of that history.

The Irish and the Italians and the Chinese have an “old country,” which can be visited and nostalgized over. But for most American Jews, most of whose ancestors came to this country from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the old country was destroyed in the Holocaust. For a Jewish tourist, going to Poland means a tour of concentration camp sites, not a visit to distant relatives. And the destruction of that Jewish civilization means, paradoxically, that its American descendants cannot let it go, the way other immigrant groups can let their history go, knowing that the mother country is pursuing its own story in parallel to the American story. Because there is no more old country, it is up to us to keep it alive in memory, or else it will totally cease to exist.

This predicament helps to explain why American Jewish historical consciousness proceeds on two tracks. On the one hand, Jewish history is constantly being written and investigated, with great ingenuity and passion: Not only is there a thriving field of academic Jewish studies, there is a robust lay readership that buys large numbers of books on Jewish history. On the other hand, most of us take our images of the lives our great-grandparents led from the lyrics of Fiddler on the Roof, the photographs of Roman Vishniac, and movies like Schindler’s List: the whole doomed romance of the shtetl, conceived as a sepia-tinged world of simple piety and lost authenticity. (Alana Newhouse, the editor of Tablet, wrote about how the Vishniac photos, in particular, help to construct a mythic past.) And that synthetic image, because it seems so totally different from the world we live in now, only increases our sense of alienation and guilt toward the East European Jewish past. This guilt—the guilt of the survivors, of those who flourished toward those who perished—is responsible for much of our sentimentality about “the world of our fathers.”

It is for this reason that a book like The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume II: 1881 to 1914, by Antony Polonsky (Littman Library), is so important. It is a big, dense survey, reading at times like a textbook, and it makes up the middle third of an even bigger work. (Polonsky’s first volume covered the years 1350 to 1881, and his third will cover 1914 to the present.) For these reasons—and because of its hefty cover price, $59.50 for the hardcover edition—it would ordinarily be read only by specialists or students. But any reader who invests the time and money to read the book, or read in it, will find it very rewarding—and not just because of the wealth of information it contains. What Polonsky’s book brings home, in a way that a narrower study could not, is the sheer complexity and vitality of Jewish life in that time and place. Far from inhabiting a slower, simpler “old world,” the Jews of Eastern Europe, in the period Polonsky discusses, were feeling the full force of modernity—politically, culturally, socially, and economically—and were struggling urgently to cope with it.

The period 1881-1914 is especially interesting to American Jewish readers because it was in exactly these years that most of our ancestors came to this country. Starting in 1880, Polonsky writes, some 2.2 million Jews left the Russian Empire, which included most of the Polish Jewish heartland, and 1.75 million of them ended up in the United States. The exodus of Jews was so massive that, by 1920, by far the largest Ashkenazi Jewish city in the world was New York, with 1.8 million Jews, compared to just 350,000 in Warsaw, the next largest.

Naturally, millions of people do not flee a country where they are happy, and the scale of Jewish emigration offers a sense of how desperate the Jews of Russia and Poland were becoming. Indeed, the first paragraph of Polonsky’s book offers a grim summary of its whole story: “During this period the crisis caused by the deteriorating position of Russian Jewry was the motor which drove world Jewry.” That crisis began abruptly in 1881, when the relatively liberal Czar Alexander II was assassinated by a revolutionary group. His successor, Alexander III, was a reactionary with a particular animus toward Jews, and the beginning of his reign was marked by a wave of deadly pogroms—more than 250 over three years, which took 45 lives and caused much material damage.

At the same time, the new czar approved the infamous May Laws, which prohibited Jews from living in villages or buying land. This “legislative pogrom,” in the words of the pioneering Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, had the effect of concentrating the Jewish population in desperately poor towns and cities, causing an economic crisis. It also marked an end to the previous Russian policy of trying to assimilate the Jews into the Russian empire. From now on, the Jews were treated more or less openly as enemies by the Czarist government. Polonsky writes that “when advised to end the repression of the Jews, [the Czar] had observed, ‘But we must never forget that the Jews crucified our Lord and shed his precious blood.’ ”

Things were somewhat better in Austrian Poland, where millions of Jews lived in the province of Galicia, and even better in the small Prussian-ruled section of Poland, where Jews achieved the greatest degree of equality. (Indeed, reading Polonsky brings home the terrible irony of the fact that it would be Germany that ended up committing a genocide of the Jews, while Russia, under Soviet rule, was effectively their best defender; from the vantage point of 1900, exactly the opposite might have been predicted.) But in each territory, Polonsky shows, the Jews energetically debated the best ways to adapt to the pressures of the modern world.

The biggest change in this period was the eclipse of the old-fashioned, assimilationist liberals, who had hoped that the Jews—by learning Russian or Polish and joining the surrounding culture—might lose their outsider status. This idealistic view ran up against the evident persistence of anti-Semitism and the seeming impossibility of finding any political allies among Russians or Poles. As a result, many Jews turned in these years to Zionism or Communism, or one of the many offshoots or hybrids of these movements. Polonsky shows that Jewish life in these years was thoroughly politicized, to a much greater degree than it is in America today. In fact, the major effect of the Zionist movement, up to 1914, was not felt in Palestine but in Poland, where the emergence of Jewish nationalism transformed the ways Jews thought about themselves and their fate.

Not surprisingly, however, this new assertiveness, provoked by anti-Semitism, spurred even more anti-Semitism. One of the most famous Hebrew poems, “In the City of Slaughter” by Chaim Nachman Bialik, was a ferocious rebuke to the Jews of Kishinev for failing to fight back during the pogrom of 1903. Bialik imagined “the heirs of Hasmoneans” hiding from their attackers in outhouses and allowing their wives to be raped. But later that year, Polonsky shows, when 200 members of the Bund, the Jewish socialist party, took up arms in self-defense during a pogrom in Gomel, the Czarist government accused them of organizing an “anti-Russian pogrom,” and the army ended up firing on them. In the ensuing trials, 12 non-Jews, and 18 Jews, were sent to jail. The notion that the Jews were enemies of the state went on to become a staple of government and right-wing propaganda, especially after the abortive revolution of 1905.

The first half of Polonsky’s book deals with this kind of political history. But the second half, where he turns to internal Jewish developments in the areas of family life and religion, literature and theater, is perhaps more important and rewarding. Here, too, the conflicts were very intense, sometimes even bloody: When some Jews in Lvov established a “progressive” synagogue in the 1840s, its first rabbi was poisoned, along with his family, by an “Orthodox fanatic.” As this story shows, Polonsky is happy to violate the chronological bounds of his subtitle when necessary, and sometimes—as in his detailed discussion of the spread of Hasidism—he goes back as far as the 18th century.

But this broader picture is needed to make sense of the social changes that were accelerating by the late 19th century—above all, in the situation of women, the subject of one of Polonsky’s best chapters. He notes the irony that the most advanced Jewish reformers, the maskilim, were usually the most misogynistic, blaming Jewish backwardness on superstitious and aggressive women (many maskilim, Polonsky writes, had a lot of trouble with their mothers-in-law). On the other hand, the fact that Jewish girls were forbidden to study Hebrew and Talmud left them freer than the boys to learn secular languages and literature, resulting in frequent culture clashes. The “cultured” girl forced to marry an unworldly yeshiva bocher became a favorite plot for novels and plays.

And it was in this period that secular Jewish literature began to thrive. In addition to examining the mass-circulation newspapers (Haynt, the Warsaw Yiddish paper, sold 150,000 copies daily) and the Yiddish theater, Polonsky offers an excellent survey of the classic Jewish literature of the period, from the Yiddish populist Sholem Aleichem to the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky, who used the language of the Bible to praise the pagan god Apollo: “I am the Jew: your adversary of old!/I come to you, before your statue kneeling,/your image—symbol of life’s brightness.” No picture of our ancestors that doesn’t have room for this kind of paradox can be true to life. Polonsky’s panoramic book, which packs so much vivid detail and statistical information into its 500 pages, helps to show just how rich, and how difficult, that life really was.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

First, a new program requires Polish prison inmates to take part in the rehabilitation of Jewish sites throughout the country. Hopefully this gig will be an improvement on whatever prisoners were forced to do before—otherwise the plan might be creating a new population of future ex-cons with a bone to pick against the Jews.

Meanwhile, in the latest attempt to repurpose something Nazi-related, the mayor of Jaslo, a southeastern Polish town, has decided to cut down a 67-year-old tree originally planted to mark Hitler’s birthday and replace it with a tree commemorating Polish soldiers killed by Soviet forces. It’s unclear whether honoring the dead by killing a tree is an act of vengeance or merely a misguided gesture.

And over in Warsaw, provocative Israeli film artist Yael Bartana has started construction on a mock kibbutz, as an attempt to “revive the Jewish spirit again.” (As opposed to the socialist spirit, which, presumably, is long past rekindling.) And elsewhere in town, a Reform synagogue has hired Poland’s first openly gay rabbi, Aaron Katz. The remarkable Katz has made quite an evolution, from a bearded Orthodox rabbi with a wife and kids in Sweden, to a clean-shaven man hosting dinner parties with his partner, Kevin Gleason, a convert and former reality-TV producer. Mazel tov!

And that’s all from Poland.

Polish Convicts to Renovate Jewish Sites [JPost]
Hitler’s Tree to Get the Axe [Arutz Sheva]
Israeli Artist Builds Mock Kibbutz in Heart of Polish Capital [AP]
Poland Gets 1st Openly Gay Rabbi [Fox News]