Rav Yoel Teitelbaum

Early years

Rav Yoel Teitelbaum zy"a, the Satmar Rebbe, was born on 13 January 1887 in Máramarossziget (Sighet), then part of Austria-Hungary and today Sighetu Marmației, Romania. He was the youngest of five children and the second son of Rav Chananya Yom Tov Lipa Teitelbaum, the Kedushas Yom Tov, and his second wife, Chana Ashkenazi. Rav Chananya had married her in 1878, after one hundred rabbis agreed that he could marry again, because his first wife, Reitze, a daughter of Rav Menashe Rubin of Ropshitz, was not able to have children.

It is told that before Rav Yoel was born, the Divrei Chaim of Sanz sent the childless Rav Chananya a letter promising that Hashem would bless him with children. The blessing was fulfilled in his two sons, Rav Yoel and his older brother Rav Chaim Tzvi, author of Atzei Chaim, and in several daughters.

Rav Chananya was the Rav of Sighet, the head of its rabbinical seminary and the leader of the local Chassidic community. Rav Yoel was a direct descendant of both the Yismach Moshe and the Chavas Daas, and the grandson of the Yetev Lev. The Yismach Moshe, Rav Moshe Teitelbaum, was a talmid of the Chozeh of Lublin and one of the main figures who brought Chassidus to Hungary. The Teitelbaum rabbonim were known for their firm conservatism and for their opposition to the Haskalah, to Neolog Judaism and to Zionism.

Even as a boy Rav Yoel stood out for his lomdus (depth of Torah analysis), hasmadah (diligence) and tzidkus (piety). At his bar mitzvah he spoke for several hours on a topic in Maseches Shabbos. From his bar mitzvah until the outbreak of the Second World War, a period of forty years, he never slept on a bed except on Shabbos, learning on his feet by day and by night. He was exacting about purity, and he prepared for davening by washing and cleaning himself with great care.

Before his marriage he received semichah from eight prominent rabbonim, among them Rav Moshe Greenwald. In 1904, only days before his father passed away on 15 February, the seventeen-year-old Rav Yoel married Chavah Horowitz, daughter of Rav Avrohom Chaim Horowitz of Polaniec.

Torah and leadership

After his father's passing, Rav Chaim Tzvi took over all three of their father's positions. A small group of chassidim, supported by Rav Yoel's mother, felt that Rav Yoel was the proper heir. He went to live in Radomyśl Wielki, in the home of his father-in-law, and remained for more than a year. His move to Satmar (Szatmárnémeti) came on 8 September 1905. There admirers opened a beis medrash for him despite his youth, and a small following slowly gathered around him.

In 1911 the Jews of Orshiva, at that time in Austria-Hungary, asked him to serve as their Rav. He opened a yeshiva there and brought Chassidus to the townspeople. At the outbreak of the First World War he went back to Satmar, where his beis medrash gradually became a full yeshiva. He walked the path of his father and grandfather in these years, refusing any dealings with Zionists, even the religious Mizrachi, and joining Rav Chaim Elazar Spira in opposing Agudath Israel. With the Treaty of Trianon (1920), Satmar and its region passed to Romania.

When the Orthodox Rav of Satmar, Rav Yehudah Greenwald, passed away on 9 March 1920, some of Rav Yoel's supporters put forward his name. Opposition came from the non-Chassidic majority, from the modernists and Zionists, and from many chassidim as well, and Rav Eliezer David Greenwald was chosen instead. Eight years after leaving, in 1922, Rav Yoel went back to Orshiva, which now belonged to Czechoslovakia. He was named chief rabbi of Carei (Kruly) on 29 March 1925 and moved there during the following year.

On 21 January 1926 his older brother Rav Chaim Tzvi passed away suddenly. Many of the chassidim wanted Rav Yoel to take his place, but custom prevailed and Rav Chaim Tzvi's fourteen-year-old son, Rav Yekusiel Yehuda, was given his father's three posts, with Rav Yekusiel Yehuda Gross of Berbești brought to guide him and to serve as de facto Rav of Sighet. Most of the chassidim nevertheless turned to Rav Yoel, who became the Rebbe of the dynasty in all but name. When Rav Yekusiel Yehuda grew up he gathered a following of his own, but it did not reach beyond Sighet.

Rav Eliezer David Greenwald of Satmar passed away on 20 May 1928, and Rav Yoel stood for the rabbinate again. An election committee of the Orthodox community chose him on 11 June by nineteen votes to five, with two abstentions. A vote of the whole congregation followed on 9 August, which he won by 437 to 331, and a second vote on 27 September, in which 779 supported him and one opposed. His opponents did not accept the results and charged that the voting had been unfair, and both sides took their case to rabbinical courts and to the civil authorities. Each side also published a pamphlet in 1929 to present its position: Milkhemes Mitzve haKhudosh and Sfas Emes.

On 10 December 1929 his supporters set up an independent community where he could serve as Rav. An agreement with the other side was reached on 11 June 1930 and he was invited to become the chief Rav of Satmar. He declined to accept until he was sure of enough support on the community board, which came about three and a half years later. He arrived in Satmar on 27 February 1934. His yeshiva, which enrolled 334 students, became the largest in the city, bigger than the other three put together. It is told that when he was first invited to spend a Shabbos in the city, his command of Gemara far surpassed what people expected of a Chassidic Rav, who was thought to be an expert more in Kabbalah and davening. The community flourished under his leadership, and his yeshiva drew bachurim from across Hungary.

He paid a visit to Yerushalayim in August 1932. After Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld passed away, a few people there sought to make him the city's Ashkenazi chief rabbi, but the position went to Rav Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky. On 29 January 1936 Rav Yoel's wife Chavah passed away. On 20 August 1937 he married Alte Faige Shapiro, the 25-year-old orphaned daughter of Avigdor Shapiro of Czestochowa.

In the winter of 1936 King Carol II of Romania visited Satmar, and the city's religious and civic leaders were gathered on a platform to greet him. Rav Yoel stood among them with his son-in-law, Rav Chananya Yom Tov Lipa Teitelbaum, Rav of Szemihály, and the community leader Shmuel Rosenberg. The king looked over the whole group and walked straight toward Rav Yoel, ignoring two priests who came toward him. Rav Yoel, suddenly noticing, saluted and recited the berachah for seeing a king, Shenatan MiChvodo LiVnei Adam. The king shook his hand, a Jewish photographer captured the moment, and it was printed in the Romanian press. Asked afterwards why he had gone to the Orthodox rabbi first, the king said that his heart had been drawn to a rabbi whose face shone with spirituality, and his reply was published in the Jewish press.

The war years

The Second Vienna Award of 1940 returned Satmar to Hungary. When the Germans invaded Hungary, Rav Yoel's closest chassidim tried to smuggle him to safety. For a payment, two junior officers who drove a Red Cross ambulance agreed to bring a group to Kolozsvár (Cluj). Rav Yoel's family went along with several wealthy families, who bore most of the expense. The attempt failed and Rav Yoel was arrested and held in the Kolozsvár ghetto. Conditions there were harsh, and he asked his chassidim to arrange his transfer, either to Budapest or to the Satmar ghetto, but they could not.

Baron Fülöp von Freudiger, head of the Orthodox community in Budapest, chose eighty rabbonim and prominent figures and paid for their places on the Kastner train, which was to take its passengers to a neutral country. Rav Yoel was among them. On 30 June 1944 the passengers boarded a freight train meant for Switzerland, which was diverted to Bergen-Belsen. The group was kept in a special section under better conditions than other prisoners. The group's doctor excused Rav Yoel from roll calls, and volunteers carried out the duties that were imposed on him.

There he ate nothing that was not kosher, living mostly on potatoes, and fasted as often as four times a week. He kept his beard hidden under a kerchief, as if he suffered from a toothache. Rudolf Kasztner and the SS officer Herman Krumey worked out the last arrangements, and Rav Yoel reached Switzerland with part of the group, where the authorities received him with respect. He chose to settle in Eretz Yisroel. In August 1945 several hundred of the Kastner passengers, Rav Yoel among them, travelled from Switzerland to the Italian port of Taranto. They boarded the ship Ville d'Oran on 30 August, and it docked at Haifa on the morning of 2 September. In Eretz Yisroel he lived in Yerushalayim in the home of his nephew and son-in-law, Rav Lipa Meir Teitelbaum.

Building Satmar in America

A year later Rav Yoel sailed for America aboard the Vulcania and reached New York on 27 September 1946, the second day of Rosh Hashanah. During a fundraising mission he met many people from his former community, who urged him to stay and help them recover from the trauma of the war. His decision to remain was historic, for it laid the foundation for the growth of Satmar in America. Together with a small band of followers he made his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and in time the Yetev Lev congregation rose on American soil with Rav Yoel at its head.

In late April 1948 the chassidim registered Congregation Yetev Lev, named for his grandfather, as a religious corporation. Its regulations, adopted in April 1952, stated that Rav Yoel did not hold a salaried position but was the supreme spiritual authority of the members. In 1951 he was named head of the Congregation of God-Fearers (the Eida Hachareidis), the anti-Zionist community of Yerushalayim, though he did not live in Eretz Yisroel. When Rav Zelig Reuven Bengis passed away on 21 May 1953, Rav Yoel took over the leadership of its beis din as well. He travelled to Eretz Yisroel every few years. In 1955 he founded the Central Rabbinical Congress and led it for the rest of his life.

In the 1950's the community kept growing. Williamsburg saw inspiring Chassidic gatherings and public tefillos, such as on Hoshana Rabbah, when the Satmar shul was a sea of lulavim and esrogim. By the 1960's the Rebbe had gained many new followers from immigration to the United States, and thousands sought his opinions and berachos. From the early 1960's his emissaries looked for land for a rural community where the chassidim could live apart from the surrounding world. In the 1970's the property in Monroe, New York, was purchased and Kiryas Yoel was built, its first families settling there in 1974.

He founded Yeshiva Yetev Lev and the Bais Rochel school for girls, both following the pre-war Satmar curriculum. The yeshiva stressed a quick pace of learning, wide familiarity with many topics and practical halachic application, and the girls' school followed a set Hebrew curriculum. Rav Yoel was well aware of the wider yeshiva world. Soon after arriving in America he gave shiurim at Mesivta Torah Vodaath in Brooklyn and at the Telshe yeshiva in Cleveland, at the invitation of their leaders. When the mashgiach of Bais Medrash Elyon in Monsey, Rav Yisroel Chaim Kaplan, who was proud of his kollel, asked why Satmar had none, Rav Yoel replied that Rav Kaplan was raising an elite of gedolei Yisroel, while he hoped to build a broad Klal Yisroel and would not give up the average student for the sake of a rare individual.

Still, he saw the need for expert talmidei chachamim. From a few young men learning privately in his home he built a full kollel, with an emphasis on psak halachah. It was announced that he would examine candidates himself, only after their weddings. The first candidate came in expecting a hard test in Gemara. Instead the Rebbe asked how many guests he had invited, at what cost per couple, and what his furniture had cost, and then told him that a man who spent so much and wanted the community to support him was not for the kollel. Yet he never expelled a boy from his schools, for how, he asked, could one expel anyone from the Jewish people?

When he first settled in Williamsburg, he found a handful of chassidim sitting in the beis medrash all day, saying Tehillim, learning Chok and spending their days at the Rebbe's court. He called them in and insisted that they find work to support their families, adding that if he had the strength, as a man in his sixties, he would go to work himself. He was aware of the pressure that material needs place on a person in American society, and recalled the saying that poverty can draw a man away from his loyalty to his Creator. A community could stand, he felt, only if it supported itself at the level of its neighbours. At the same time he taught his followers to give tzedakah generously and without hesitation. Today members of the community work in all areas of business and in many professions, and the community runs many social services, most famously a bikur cholim network whose cars and vans carry hundreds of volunteers to hospitals around New York throughout the day.

The Satmar kehillos have a system in which the community directs the shul, kashrus, education and often social welfare. In Brooklyn this includes schools for 5,000 students, from nursery through kollel and a complete girls' school, as well as a tzedakah and medical network and a wide bikur cholim organization led by the Rebbetzin. The same structure, on a smaller scale, exists in Kiryas Yoel. By the time of his passing the Rebbe led a tight-knit and disciplined community of thousands, with major centres in Williamsburg, Kiryas Yoel, Monsey, Montreal and Yerushalayim, where he was Rav of the Eida Hachareidis. He also guided his community to hold firm in its way of dress, in style and in modesty, so that the shtreimel became a familiar sight in many communities.

A father to his community

Thousands of Satmar chassidim mourned the Rebbe as a child mourns a father, some tearing their garments in kriyah. The community grew from several dozen families in the late 1940s to many thousands, and its remarkably low rate of defection is credited in large part to the Rebbe himself. Shortly after arriving in America, he spent a long time with a young chassid who could not decide whom to name his newborn son after, going back and forth between a grandfather and a father-in-law. When another visitor asked why the Rebbe involved himself in such small matters, he answered with a sigh that in the old country he was a father at home and a Rebbe in the city, but here he had to be a father to his community and a Rebbe at home.

People came to him in a stream. He asked questions, listened closely, seemed to carry the burden of each one, and davened for them. He examined each kvittel for clues, and sometimes noticed that the name of the mother of a complete stranger was written incompletely, and told him to write it in full. He always had an encouraging word. It is told that more than once, after hearing someone's troubles, he swept the pidyon gelt of the entire day off his table and gave it to the visitor.

He also had a way of showing great honesty about himself. He fasted often and, even when he did eat, his first meal was usually a cup of coffee at three or four in the afternoon. He said, “A Jew doesn't eat because he wants to. He eats because he must.” He urged his followers to earn well and give generously, and to spend on themselves what they needed, but he spent little on himself. When someone gave him a new garment, his first reaction was to ask who needed it. He was strict about cleanliness, partly so as to be fit for davening and learning, and thought nothing of changing clothes several times a day. Even in Bergen-Belsen, he had traded food for tissues.

He was also precise about the timing and manner of mitzvos. His Shacharis was usually late only because of his long preparations. When illness delayed his Pesach Seder until after eleven, he still ate the afikoman before midnight, and he asked a halachic authority at the table about the exact size of his matzos and maror. He guarded his knowledge of Kabbalah from the curious and waved away talk of miracles and kabbalistic activity in our times, though the way he ate and the depth of his davening hinted at hidden meaning. He enjoyed company and made himself available to everyone, yet he carried himself like royalty. When he walked down Bedford Avenue from his home to the beis medrash, the sidewalk cleared ahead of him. Until his last years his face seemed to shine with a purity that made onlookers step back in awe.

Teachings and seforim

It seemed that he never needed to prepare a shiur or drashah. In Europe it was the custom at Shalosh Seudos for someone to open the Midrash Rabbah and read three passages at random. The Rebbe would then speak at length and quote the Midrash word for word. In America he would walk into the yeshiva's beis medrash, ask where the bachurim were holding, open the Gemara and begin a long, intricate shiur. Rav Yaakov Breish of Zurich, who had worked for years on the section of his sefer Chelkas Yaakov that deals with the laws of ribbis, once visited the Rebbe unannounced and discussed several difficult points in his sefer with him for hours. He later marvelled at how thoroughly the Rebbe knew the subject.

Rav Yoel wrote his Torah commentaries at two or three o'clock in the morning and loved every minute. He once said that he could imagine doing this for the rest of his life, but he had a directive from his father that a person must be ready to give away his own Torah, if need be, to help another Jew. He was involved in chessed around the clock, and though his Torah knowledge was vast, it is said that Klal Yisroel may have lost greater treasures that he could have shared had he been able to continue the diligence of his youth. Every day after davening, still wearing tallis and tefillin, he learned Chumash with Rashi.

He was known for his firm stand against Zionism and refused to accept the State of Israel, differing sharply with the gedolim of Agudas Yisroel, and he also opposed the very idea of an organized Orthodoxy built on coalitions, as Agudas Yisroel was. He based his position on the Gemara in Maseches Kesubos (111a), which learns from the verse in Shir HaShirim repeated three times, “I have bound you in oath, O daughters of Yerushalayim,” that Hashem bound Israel and the nations with three oaths. The Jews are not to breach the wall and enter Eretz Yisroel by force, they are not to rebel against the nations, and the nations are not to oppress the Jews too harshly in exile. The Gemara adds that if the Jews break the oaths, Hashem will bring great harm upon them. Rav Yoel taught that the Zionist movement, by violating these oaths, had brought the Holocaust upon the Jewish people. In 1948 he drew worldwide attention by speaking against the newly founded State, and over the years he was often alone in condemning the State as the embodiment of a secular ideal. He opposed mass aliyah, settling the land against the will of the nations, and any participation in the government, even voting, as recognition of an unacceptable idea. The schools of the Eida Hachareidis, which is within the Satmar orbit, do not take funding from the Israeli government.

When advisers begged him to leave out of his writings his directive against going to the Kosel, fearing that it would alienate many of his followers, he answered that even if only one minyan of followers remained, he would not hold back what he believed. Once a close associate told him not to get so upset. He replied that there are a thousand reasons not to reveal the truth, and if a man becomes upset he forgets himself for a moment, and then at least a little of the truth comes through. His ideas are set out in two seforim, VaYoel Moshe and Al HaGeulah V'Al HaTemurah, which were written with vast scholarship and great care, and in his many public addresses.

Most of the Torah leadership did not accept his approach to the Israeli government. Even those most opposed to the State's outlook accepted that it existed and, at the least, felt they had to deal with it as with any government ruling a land where Jews live. At times they were deeply troubled by his firmness. Rav Aharon Kotler was upset that the Rebbe publicly opposed the Chazon Ish, Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, the Belzer Rebbe and the Tchebiner Rav, all of whom held that voting in the Israeli elections was the duty of every Torah Jew who cared for the needs of the yishuv. Yet even those who disagreed were always aware of the Satmar position and weighed their own against it.

Later years and passing

On 23 February 1968 Rav Yoel suffered a stroke that left him partly paralyzed. On 26 Av 5739 (19 August 1979), in the early hours of the morning, he complained of pain and was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. A heart attack followed, and he passed away at about eight o'clock. All three of his daughters had passed away during his lifetime, and he left no children.

He was succeeded by his nephew, the second son of his older brother, Rav Moshe Teitelbaum. The funeral took place in Kiryas Yoel and was attended by a crowd of some 100,000 people. They included followers and admirers, chassidim and misnagdim, Europeans and Americans, and many from other chassidic groups and yeshiva circles who came to honour a giant of scholarship. A week after his passing, at the unveiling of the matzeivah at his kever, Rav Yaakov Kamenetzky spoke.

Legacy

Rav Yoel had taught and led his people as a Rav for seventy-five years. Rav Yitzchok Hutner, the Rosh Yeshiva of Mesivta Rabbi Chaim Berlin, once explained why he came to honour the Rebbe. Noach, he said, was left with a limp for being late once with the lion's meal in the Ark. A lion is king of the beasts and deserves to be served without exceptions, and above all this lion, which was the last of its kind. The same was true of the Satmar Rav: “I am here to honor him because he is the last of the lions.” Many at the funeral came to pay tribute to the last lion, the last leader of his kind.

Rav Yaakov Kamenetzky spoke of the special gift that Hashem had given the generation through the Rebbe's presence for over nine decades. When an era ends, he said, there is a danger that those who come after will forget the values and character of those who came before. So Hashem often grants long life to one outstanding person of the earlier era, to teach the next generation how the old generation lived simply by being present. Rebbi Yehudah HaNasi, who closed the era of the Tannaim by writing the Mishnah, was said to continue to visit his home for decades after his passing, and Rav Yochanan, who compiled the Talmud Yerushalmi, he said, lived for hundreds of years. In the same way the Satmar Rav graced the generation with a greatness in Torah and piety that belonged to the days of old.

Rav Aharon Kotler, though he differed with the Rebbe in Torah study and in public matters, said that he was a giant in Torah and a giant in midos. The Rebbe spoke at Rav Aharon's funeral, weeping, and quoted Rashi on the words that Aharon did not deviate, applying it to Rav Aharon, who stayed faithful to his tradition. When Rav Reuvain Grozovsky was ill after a stroke, the Rebbe wished him a refuah sheleimah, so that they could battle each other once again. After Rav Reuvain's funeral he came home deeply troubled and told the Rebbetzin that the world had lost an ish emes, a man of rare integrity.

His influence reaches beyond his own community. The Satmar kehillos in Williamsburg, Kiryas Yoel, Monsey and elsewhere stand as a living monument, and in many ways the way he taught has shaped others who follow other paths. His insistence on the highest religious standards helped change the face of a large part of Orthodox life in America, where Holocaust survivors and their American-born grandchildren, whatever their occupation, walk proudly in traditional dress. After all, who can live in the same community as a tzaddik, or even in his time, without being affected by his presence?