Gerer Youths in the Holocaust: A Representative Blind Spot in Holocaust Research

The holocaust has been one of the most intensely researched topics in recent decades, both within the field of Jewish history and in various other fields of research, such as the study of Nazism, genocide, and the Second World War. However, scholarly analysis of wartime Orthodox Jews, as individuals and as members of communities, has remained at the margins of historical enquiry and has not so far been integrated into the general scholarly discourse about the period. Moreover, although this gap in scholarship was identified many years ago, the Orthodox community, in all its diversity, has not been studied in-depth within the context of Holocaust studies.¹

An initial examination of life patterns within this highly diverse community raises some very fundamental questions that are as yet to be answered. For example, to what extent did religious communities maintain their pre-war mode of existence during the Holocaust? Were there individuals who, alongside those who abandoned their Orthodox communities, actually first joined them at that time? How did men and women contend with religious challenges that required them to make decisions in spheres of life for which they previously had no responsibility and over which they had had no control in the past? Within the scope of the present chapter, I do not propose to answer all these important questions but only to draw attention to a single sequence of events that occurred within the Gerer hasidic community, which has not been adequately addressed in scholarly research. Through this episode I hope to demonstrate how important it is to consider the experience of the Orthodox community in Poland during the Holocaust not only in order to understand the Holocaust itself but also for the sake of gaining a fuller understanding of earlier periods.

Initial attempts to incorporate gerer hasidic youth groups into holocaust research

One of the leading contributors to haredi Holocaust discourse was Rabbi Moshe Prager.² A descendant of Rabbi Isaac Meir Alter, the founder of Gerer hasidism, Prager was a journalist, actively involved in haredi public affairs and one of those who helped smuggle the Gerer Rebbe out of Poland’s German-occupied territories during the war. In May 1940 he left Warsaw with the rebbe’s entourage and arrived in Palestine after a harrowing journey: his wife and only daughter were left behind and perished. In 1941 Prager published the first work to come out in Palestine that dealt with the Holocaust in Poland.³ In 1964, following his searing critique of the way in which Eichmann’s trial was orchestrated—the deliberate silencing, as he argued, of episodes that were of essential significance to the haredi public⁴—Prager established an archive which he called Ganzach Kidush Hashem, a documentation, research, and memorialization project that has continued to this day. One of his most influential books was Those Who Never Yielded. First published in 1963, it has since seen several editions,⁵ and has also been used as a source by several Holocaust researchers.⁶ The first part of the book describes a hasidic underground movement, whose members engaged in Torah study and observance of the hasidic way of life throughout the war, while the second part discusses various expressions of religious observance during the Holocaust. The book presents scores of testimonies that show how Jewish youngsters throughout Poland managed to maintain strict religious observance and thus vanquished the Nazis in both actions and speech. According to Prager, they operated as a veritable underground movement, which used messengers to maintain communication between centres and was headed by an impressive young man named Mathias Gelman. Prager states that Gelman had been born into an assimilated family in Vienna but, following a chance encounter with Rabbi Meir Shapira, decided to run away from home and go to Poland. Despite the opposition of his father, Gelman joined Yeshivat Hakhmei Lublin and, thanks to his devout religiosity and personality, became a role model for Gerer hasidic youngsters even before the war. Thus, for example, he is described as a komandant, a commanding...