The Rapping Hasidic Jew and Hypocrisy

A book has just been released, “Neehaz ba-Svakh: Pirkei Mashber u-Mevucha be-Toldot ha-Hasidut” (“Caught in the Thicket: Chapters of Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism”), by David Assaf, chair of Tel Aviv University’s Jewish history department.

This book by one of Israels leading historians documents the truth of Hasidism.

Some examples are:

Many Americans were shocked earlier this year by the revelations of intense intra-Hasidic violence that accompanied the battle for leadership of Satmar Hasidism between the respective followers of rabbis Aharon and Zalman, after the death of their father, Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum.

In addition to their anti-Bratzlav activities, Assaf recounts the general tendency of the Talner and Skverer Hasidim to use intimidation and a variety of violent means, including death threats, rock throwing, home invasions and hostile synagogue takeovers, to “conquer” a string of shtetls in the southern Ukraine in the mid 1860s. The violence got so bad that the tsarist government was finally compelled in 1868 to issue a law prohibiting Hasidic rebbes in the Ukraine from extending their leadership beyond their own towns. But as Assaf documents, the persecution of Bratzlaver Hasidim continued even after the Holocaust, in Jerusalem and Brooklyn in the 1970s and ’80s.

Unfortunately the book has only been published in Hebrew. If and when an english edition is released, it will dispel the myth of Orthodox Judaism as a religeon of strict moral rectitude.

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