The fiercely anti-Zionist Satmar Rebbe escaped the Holocaust on a Zionist-organised train
Joel Teitelbaum spent his life denouncing Zionism as heresy and forbade any contact with Zionists. Yet in 1944 he survived by boarding the Kastner train, an evacuation arranged by a Zionist group. He went on to rebuild his Satmar Hasidic movement in Brooklyn, where it became a pillar of the post-war Hasidic revival.
Teitelbaum was born on 13 January 1887 into a rabbinic dynasty known for opposing the Enlightenment, reformist Judaism and Zionism. His father led the Hasidim of Sighet, in what is now Romania. The boy was a prodigy who preached for hours on a Talmudic question at his bar mitzvah, and he married at 17, just days before his father's death in 1904. His older brother inherited their father's posts, so Joel built his own following, settling in Satmar, today Satu Mare, in 1905.
Becoming the town's official rabbi was a bruising fight. The non-Hasidic majority, modernists and Zionists blocked him in 1920. When he ran again in 1928, a congregation vote went 437 to 331 in his favour, opponents alleged rigging, and both sides traded lawsuits and pamphlets. His supporters set up a breakaway community in 1929, a deal followed in 1930, and he only moved in in 1934, when his seminary of 334 students quickly outgrew the town's other three combined.
His wartime record is contested. Before the Holocaust he ignored the dangers facing Transylvania's Jews and blocked cooperation between ultra-Orthodox leaders and Zionist groups that might have aided escape, while securing papers for his own circle and urging followers not to emigrate. After a failed bribe-and-ambulance escape he landed in the Kolozsvár ghetto. The Kastner train, bound for Switzerland, was diverted to Bergen-Belsen, where he received special treatment, before he was transferred to Switzerland.
He reached Haifa in 1945 but, after his institutions in Jerusalem went bankrupt within a year, sailed to New York, arriving in 1946 and settling in Williamsburg. There his followers founded Congregation Yetev Lev, naming him supreme spiritual authority rather than a salaried official. He died on 19 August 1979, and the New York town of Kiryas Joel is named after him.
Source: Joel Teitelbaum
