Exhibit · Plain text
Marienbad. Elul 5697.
The Third Great Assembly of Agudath Israel — Mariánské Lázně, August 1937
In the summer of 1937 — two years before the war — five hundred rabbis, halakhic scholars, and lay delegates of Orthodox Jewry converged on a Bohemian spa town. They came from Vilna and Lublin, from Kovno and Łódź, from Tel Aviv and Antwerp and New York. They came to Marienbad to debate, to vote, and to study together for three days. They left in September 1937. Most of them were dead by 1942.
Marienbad
Mariánské Lázně, in Bohemian German called Marienbad, was a hot-spring spa town in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. Goethe took the waters here. Edward the Seventh of England came every summer. Mark Twain wrote a piece for the New York Sun titled 'Marienbad, A Health Factory.' By the early twentieth century the town had also become a summer retreat for the rabbinic courts of Galicia and the Bukovina — for the Sadigora court, the Husiatyn court, the Kopyczynce court, the Boyaner court — the Khasidic dynasties bringing their entourages of attendants, scribes, and gabbais to take rooms in the kosher hotels along Goethe Strasse.
In August 1937 these summer visitors converged on Marienbad for a different purpose: the Knessiah Gedolah HaShlishit, the Third Great Assembly of Agudath Israel — the world organization of Orthodox Jewry. Five hundred delegates. Three days. The world they had built was about to end.
The Summer Court
For decades the rebbes of the Galician courts had taken the waters at Marienbad. Here, Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heshel of Kopyczynce — descendant of the Apter Rav, of the Mezhybizh line that traced itself to the Baal Shem Tov — sits with his gabbai. The photograph could be from any summer between 1929 and 1939. The hotel is in the background. The wood is stacked for fires that would not be needed until autumn.
The Khasidim of Bayyan in Marienbad
Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Friedman of Bayyan-Lemberg — head of one branch of the Boyaner dynasty — surrounded by his Khasidim and other rabbis at the Marienbad hotel. The Boyaner court had originated in the Bukovinian shtetl of Boyany under Rabbi Yitskhok Friedman. By the 1930s its rebbes were living in Galicia and traveled annually to Marienbad with retinues that filled the kosher restaurants of the resort.
The Generations
At left, Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Friedman of Sadigora-Tel Aviv — the 'Avir Yaakov' — stands with his cousin Mordekhai Shalom Yosef Friedman of Sadigora and the Modzhitser rebbe Rabbi Shaul Yedidya Elazar Taub. At right, the same rebbe in childhood — known by the title 'Akvei Abirim,' the heels of the mighty. The Friedmans of Sadigora belonged to a dynasty that within fifty years had moved from the Russian Pale to Habsburg Vienna to British Mandate Tel Aviv. The boy in the right-hand photograph would lead his court through the war.
Preparing the Great Gathering
The planning for the Knessiah Gedolah began two years before the assembly itself. In this photograph from 1935 or 1936, the inner council of Agudath Israel meets at the preparatory synagogue in Marienbad to set the agenda. The questions before them: how to respond to the Polish state's Sunday-rest legislation that closed Jewish shops on the Sabbath; how to organize relief for the Jews of Germany; how to take a position on the Peel Commission's plan to partition Mandate Palestine. These are the questions a religious civilization sets for itself when it is about to lose the world.
Three Days in August
The Presidential Table
The inaugural session of the Knessiah Gedolah HaShlishit. The presidium included Rabbi Avraham Mordekhai Alter of Ger — the 'Imrei Emes,' leader of the largest Hasidic community in Poland — alongside Rabbi Aharon Kotler, soon to lead the Lakewood Yeshiva in America; Rabbi Khayim Ozer Grodzinski of Vilna, the de facto chief halakhic decisor of the diaspora; Rabbi Elkhanan Wasserman of Baranowicze, who would be murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in Kovno in 1941; and Rabbi Yitskhok Zev Soloveitchik, the Brisker Rov, who would escape Lithuania days before the German invasion.
The Sessions
Two views of the same dais — different sessions, different days. At left, the formal procedural opening. At right, a working session of the council. Behind the row of bearded faces sits a tablecloth, a pitcher of water, and the simultaneous knowledge — written into every speech recorded by the assembly's stenographers — that this gathering was both the largest of its kind and possibly the last.
Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah
The Council of Torah Sages of Agudath Israel — the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah — convened in private session during the Knessiah. Their decisions on questions of Jewish law and policy bound the world organization. The sages photographed here had been making such decisions since the founding of Agudath Israel in 1912 at Kattowitz. By 1942, more than half the men in this photograph were dead.
The Avir Yaakov, 21 August 1937
Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Friedman of Sadigora-Tel Aviv attends the closing of the Third Great Assembly. He had emigrated to Mandate Palestine three years earlier — one of the few major Hasidic rebbes who had relocated his court to the Yishuv before the war. From 1939 onward he would be one of the few Sadigora rebbes left to lead. The dynasty would survive him, though most of its Hasidim, who remained in Galicia, would not.
