The Scroll of 19 Kislev and the Construction of an Imagined Habad Lubavitch Community in Interwar Poland

Introduction

On 3 december 1936 Habad hasidim gathered in synagogues around the world. They came to celebrate 19 Kislev, as they did every year. This date, referred to by the hasidim as the Festival of Redemption, marks the anniversary of the release of the founder of Habad, Shneur Zalman of Liady (1745–1812), from incarceration in the Petropavlovsk fortress in 1798.¹ The celebrations in 1936, however, were different from those in previous years. In the past, the rebbe, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn (1880–1950), leader of Habad and direct descendant of Shneur Zalman of Liady, would send out seasonal greetings, sometimes adding a copy of his new ma’amar (discourse) for the hasidim to study together. This time the rebbe had a particular request. From his new home in Otwock he sent out a short pamphlet in Yiddish, which would become known as the ‘Scroll of 19 Kislev’, together with instructions concerning its public reading. The pamphlet was accompanied by a small financial contribution, symbolically marking the rebbe’s participation in his hasidim’s farbrengens (gatherings).² The rebbe, separated from the majority of his hasidim by state borders and having limited contact even with his small community in Poland due to a debilitating illness, was symbolically inviting them to his farbrengen.

The Scroll of 19 Kislev was part of a broader top-down strategy aimed at constructing, in Benedict Anderson’s term,³ an imagined Habad community, with its new centre in Otwock. The Habad elite used schooling, the press, literature, and invented traditions to construct a community that would be distinct from all others, hasidic or non-hasidic, sharing a collective memory, united by a common purpose, and defined by kinship ties that transcended state borders and actual local or familial affinities. This imagined community would be immune to the detrimental effects of the rebbe’s physical frailty, his constant wanderings, and the socio-political upheavals of the 1930s. While some of the modern practices implemented by Habad at that time had precedents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the short period of the Habad centre’s residence in Poland saw an intensification of all these endeavours, which resulted from its precarious situation in interwar Poland. The pamphlet takes pride of place among other community-building initiatives, as it integrates in one collective performance the novel literary, doctrinal, ritualistic, and institutional aspects of Habad’s rapid modernization.

From lubavitch to otwock: habad hasidism in the interwar period

Habad faced severe challenges in interwar Poland. Originated and developed in eastern Belarus, the Habad movement cultivated a distinctive ethos based on idiosyncratic teachings and rituals.⁴ The war, revolution, and anti-religious persecutions by the communist regime stifled Habad communities in the new Soviet state and forced many hasidim to emigrate.⁵ Some, including Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, resettled in Poland hoping to rebuild their communities there. The process of reconstruction was complex, as Habad was only a marginal hasidic group in the new Polish state. The majority of Habad communities were concentrated in and around the Vilna voivodship, with pocket communities in several other cities (including Warsaw and Łódź) that often consisted of no more than a few families who had established their businesses there.⁶ In several cases, these successful individuals would organize and partially bankroll local Habad institutions, such as shtiblekh and yeshivas. The latter were of particular importance, as they turned out to be a successful recruitment tool. The Habad yeshiva Tomkhei Temimim in Warsaw, which opened in 1921 with a very modest class of twelve students, boasted, towards the end of the 1930s, a total enrolment of seven hundred students distributed between the central yeshiva (by then already transferred to Otwock) and several branches throughout Poland.⁷ The majority of students had no prior exposure to Habad and needed to be educated to become Habad hasidim.⁸

The yeshiva in Warsaw continued to grow in the 1920s as a branch of the central Lubavitch yeshiva operating temporarily in Rostov in the Soviet Union. Soon, however, the decline...