Those Who Escaped, and Those Who Remained

European Orthodoxy faces the Holocaust

As the storm clouds gathered, most Hasidim made the fateful decision to stay, fearing the spiritual dangers of liberal, integrated societies more than physical danger. Their fears were reinforced by their rebbes. Nevertheless, once the true scale of the danger became evident, Hasidim were ready to use every possible resource to enable their rebbes to flee. Most rebbes complied. Martyrdom, a subject which both the Hasidic historian Simon Huberband and the renowned Gerer Hasidic scholar Menachem Ziemba wrote about at length, was only to be embraced after attempts at flight, concealment, and aid to loved ones.

R. Ben Tzion Halberstam, the Bobover Rebbe, exemplified the Hasidic approach to martyrdom. He had often sought to dissuade his followers from leaving Poland for lands of spiritual-intellectual “drought.” When the bombing began, however, he fled to Soviet territories with his son-in-law R. Moses Stempel, who owned an automobile. When the automobile was confiscated by Polish soldiers, they continued by horse and cart until they arrived in Lwów. Halberstam now learned that his son Hayyim Yehoshua had been deported to Siberia. When offered the chance to flee abroad, he asked, “How can I leave this place, from which I can still save my son?” When the Nazis entered the city in July 1941, he asked, “Can one really hide from the birth pangs of the Messiah?”

On July 2, 1941, as Ukrainian militia members beat him in the prison courtyard on Łącki Street, Halberstam calmly and repeatedly placed his shtreimel back on his head until he was finally shot down. Other rebbes managed to escape. The Belzer Rebbe, Aaron Rokeah, changed his name to Aaron Singer, moved to the Bochnia ghetto, and ultimately fled to Palestine by way of Hungary in 1943. His departure was explained as necessary for the “complete redemption” that would follow the current triumph of “the egotistical culture of might-is-right.” Several devotees decried his flight and later criticized his reluctance to sufficiently warn Hungarian Jews about the scale of Nazi danger and depravity. Those rebbes who managed to flee earlier were evidently less subjected to criticism. When the Germans entered Warsaw, the Gerer Rebbe went into hiding, removed his Hasidic garb, donned a Russian peasant hat, and moved to a new location each day. Toward the end of 1939, he escaped to Trieste via Krakow with the financial and diplomatic help of American Jews and, apparently, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn. He sailed to Palestine in April 1940.

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