Exhibit · Plain text
A Court in Cosmopolitan Exile
Vienna, 1919 — 1939
After the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, the Galician Hasidic dynasties that had survived the Eastern Front — Kopyczynce, Sadigora, Husiatyn, Boyan — relocated their courts to post-imperial Vienna. For two decades the city held a society of rebbes, scribes, and Khasidim who lived between Goethe and the shtetl. They cast Tashlich into the Danube, baked matzah on Schiffgasse, married their children in Leopoldstadt, and rode through the streets of the inner city in Habsburg-era carriages. In March 1938 the Anschluss closed this world. By 1942 most of the men in these photographs were gone.
A Court in Cosmopolitan Exile
When the Habsburg Empire collapsed in 1918, Vienna kept on being Vienna. The streetcars ran. The cafés on the Ring kept their marble tables. The opera season opened on schedule. But the city had become the capital of a small republic — German Austria — surrounded by successor states whose borders cut through the geography of Galician Jewry.
The Hasidic courts of the Bukovina and Galicia — fleeing the eastern front, then the new Soviet border, then Polish partition — converged on Vienna. The court of Kopyczynce came. The Boyaner court. The Husiatyner court. The Sadigora court. By 1925 there were two dozen rebbes and a dense Khasidic neighborhood centered on Leopoldstadt — the second district, between the Danube Canal and the river itself. The exhibit that follows is what that twenty-year-long sojourn looked like.
Baden, 1919
In the first year after the war, the great rabbis of Vienna gathered at the laying of the foundation stone for an orphanage in Baden, just south of the city. The Great War had killed something on the order of forty thousand Austro-Hungarian Jewish soldiers. The orphanage in Baden was for their children. The men in this photograph would be the founding generation of Viennese rabbinic life under the new republic.
On the Streets of the Inner City
For twenty years a familiar tableau: the rebbes of the Galician courts riding through Vienna in horse-drawn carriages. At left, Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heshel of Mezhybizh-Ternopil sits in a carriage with his uncle Rabbi Yisrael of Husiatyn — the Husiatyner Rebbe, whose court had moved from the Russian Pale to Vienna in 1914 — and across from them, his brother Rabbi Moshe Heshel. At right, the same uncle and nephew on a different street, a different morning. The carriage was a deliberate anachronism even in 1924. Vienna had electric trams. The rebbes preferred the silence of horses.
A Bar Mitzvah, Vienna 1926
In the family of the Sadigora Rebbe — Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Friedman, the 'Avir Yaakov' — a thirteen-year-old nephew, Yisrael Aharon Wolf, comes to the Torah for the first time. The boy stands between his uncle the rebbe and his other uncle Rabbi Mordekhai Shalom Yosef Friedman. Behind them, the wallpaper, the prayer shawls, the gabbais. This is the photograph the family would have framed and kept on the parlor table for the next ninety years.
The Funeral of Reb Tzvi Pesach, December 1927
Rabbi Heshel of Kopyczynce walks behind the bier of Rabbi Tzvi Pesach Chayat — known to his community as Reb Tzvi Pesach, the Av Beis Din of Vienna — through the streets of Leopoldstadt to the Zentralfriedhof. To his right walks his uncle the Husiatyner Rebbe. To his left, the Husiatyner's son-in-law Rabbi Yaakov. Funeral processions in Vienna's Jewish district during the 1920s could fill streets for a kilometer. Reb Tzvi Pesach had been the chief halakhic decisor of Habsburg-era Viennese Orthodoxy. His death was the end of a generation.
Matzah Baking, Erev Pesach
In the courtyard of a kosher bakery in Vienna — Rabbi Heshel of Kopyczynce stands with his brother-in-law Rabbi Avraham Yaakov of Sadigora and their uncle the Husiatyner Rebbe at the inspection of the matzah baking before Pesach. Three rebbes who have known each other since boyhood, watching the dough rolled and the wheels of the docking cylinder pressed into it. Vienna has the largest Khasidic matzah operation outside Galicia. By 1939 it would be gone.
The Second Great Synagogue, Elul 5689
A service in Vienna's Second Great Synagogue — most likely the Polnische Schul on Leopoldsgasse, which served the Galician immigrant community — during the Hebrew month of Elul, the month of preparation for the High Holidays. September 1929. The synagogue was destroyed during Kristallnacht in November 1938. The men in this photograph would have been there. Many of them survived the night. Few survived the war.
Schönbrunn
Rabbi Avraham Grodzinski of Slabodka — the mashgiach of the Lithuanian yeshiva of Slabodka, whose own story is told elsewhere in this archive — visits the gardens of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna with his brother Rabbi Avraham Pinkhas Grodzinski during a stay in the city for medical needs. The Habsburg summer palace had become a public park after 1918. The Lithuanian yeshiva mashgiach walks its avenues in his black overcoat.
Tashlich on the Danube
On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Khasidim cast bread into living water to symbolize the casting-away of sin — the ritual called Tashlich. Here, Rabbi Heshel of Kopyczynce performs the recitation of the thirteen Attributes of Mercy on a bridge over the Danube in Vienna, attended by a crowd of his Khasidim. The river runs through the photograph. The Khasidim look at the rebbe, the rebbe looks at the water, and beyond the water are the imperial avenues of a city that will be German in three years.
A Wedding, 1937
Rabbi Heshel of Kopyczynce and Rabbi Avraham Yaakov of Sadigora attend the wedding of Rabbi Avraham Yaakov Teitelbaum — the future rabbi of the Young Agudat Israel of America — somewhere in Vienna. The year is 1937 or 1938. The couple in the photograph would emigrate. The two officiating rebbes would emigrate. Of the wedding guests, no one knows.
America, 1939
Rabbi Heshel of Kopyczynce — the man who appears in nearly every photograph in this exhibit — arrives in New York after being smuggled out of Vienna following the Anschluss. He had been arrested by the Gestapo in March 1938 and held for several weeks. He was released. He fled. The photograph at left is the moment he steps off the boat. He would lead a court in the Lower East Side for the rest of his life. The Vienna of his thirty years did not survive him.
