page_title: Satmar (Hasidic dynasty)
section_title: Ideology
hierarchical_section_title: Satmar (Hasidic dynasty) / Ideology
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Het boek nl:Vayoel Moshe. Zelf gemaakt.
context_page_description: Satmar is a Hasidic group originating from the city of Szatmárnémeti, Hungary, where it was founded in 1905 by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum. Following World War II, it was re-established in New York, becoming one of the largest Hasidic movements in the world. After Rabbi Joel's death, he was succeeded by his nephew, Moshe Teitelbaum. Since the latter's death in 2006, the dynasty is split between his two sons, Aaron Teitelbaum and Zalman Teitelbaum.
  Satmar is one of the largest Hasidic dynasties in the world: The estimated number of affiliated men, women, and children ranges between 65,000 and 75,000. It is characterized by extremely strict religious adherence, complete rejection of modern culture, and fierce anti-Zionism. Satmar sponsors a comprehensive education and media system in Yiddish, and its members use Yiddish as a primary language. The sect also heads the Central Rabbinical Congress.
context_section_description: The ideology and principles of Satmar reflect Joel Teitelbaum's adherence to the Hungarian ultra-Orthodox school of thought (similar to, but also fundamentally different from, "Ultra-Orthodox Judaism"). This school was founded by Rabbi Hillel Lichtenstein and his son-in-law Akiva Yosef Schlesinger in the 1860s, on the eve of the Schism in Hungarian Jewry. Faced with rapid acculturation and a decline in religious observance, Lichtenstein preached utter rejection of modernity, widely applying the words of his teacher, Moses Sofer: "All that is new is forbidden by the Torah." Schlesinger accorded Yiddish and traditional Jewish garb a religious status, idealizing them as a means of separation from the outside world.
  To reinforce his opposition to secular studies and the use of a vernacular, Akiva turned outside of Jewish law, and based his rulings on the non-legalistic Aggadah. The ultra-Orthodox believed the main threat did not come from liberal Jews Neologs, who advocated religious reform, but from the moderate traditionalists; they directed their attacks chiefly against the modern Orthodox Azriel Hildesheimer. Their power base lay among the Unterlander Jews of northeastern Hungary—roughly present-day eastern Slovakia, Zakarpattia Oblast, and Northern Transylvania—where modernity made little headway, and the local Galician-descended Jews were poor, unacculturated, and strongly influenced by Hasidism. Sighet, as well as most other Hungarian Hasidic dynasties, originated from these regions.
  Lichtenstein's successors were no less rigid; the leading ultra-Orthodox authority in the Interwar period, Chaim Elazar Spira of Mukačevo, regarded the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel as a demonic force, as much as both religious and secular Zionism. He demanded complete political passivity, stating that any action to the contrary was akin to disbelief in divine providence. While Aguda opposed Zionism for seeing it as anti-religious, Spira viewed their plan for establishing an independent state before the arrival of the Messiah as "forcing of the end", trying to bring Redemption before God prescribed it. In addition, he was an avowed anti-modernist: He sharply denounced Avraham Mordechai Alter, Rebbe of Ger, for introducing secular studies and allowing girls to attend school, and criticized modern medicine, believing the treatments recorded in the Gemara to be superior. Though personal relations between Spira and Joel Teitelbaum were tense, his ideological stance had a strong influence over the younger rabbi. Aviezer Ravitzky believed it remained unacknowledged in the latter's writings due to the personal animosity between both.
  Already firmly anti-Agudist and anti-Zionist in the inter-war period, Teitelbaum had to contend with the issues which baffled world Jewry in the aftermath of World War II: the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel. In 1959, he enunciated his theological response in the book Vayoel Moshe (Hebrew: וַיּוֹאֶל מֹשֶׁה‎, romanized: va-yo'el moshe, lit. 'and Moses was content'; the title is from Exodus 2:21). The book contained three segments; the first was devoted to Teitelbaum's interpretation of an Aggadatic text from the Ketubot in the Talmud, the Midrash of the Three Oaths. It discusses the meaning of a phrase quoted thrice in the Song of Solomon (2:7, 3:5, 8:4): "I adjure you [...] that ye awaken not, nor stir up love until it please." The passage explains it as a reference to three oaths forced by God; two on the Children of Israel—that they "shall not go up" (migrate en masse) to their land before redemption, and neither rebel against the Gentile nations among which they are exiled—and the third upon all nations, "that they shall not oppress Israel too much".
  Teitelbaum argued that the first two are binding and eternal, and that their intent was to keep the people in divinely decreed exile until they would all fully repent their sins and earn solely miraculous salvation, without human interference. He sought to demonstrate that Rabbinic sages of the past were all aware of the Oaths, and even those 
caption: The book Vayoel Moshe, where Teitelbaum lays out his opposition to Zionism.
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