Kindle Notes & Highlights
This is the first generation in the history of Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox education that was universally enrolled in school all the way through the equivalent of 12th grade. (There was not, in fact, any actual twelfth grade, since secular studies for boys usually did not continue past middle school.) There was no such thing as not finishing yeshivoh for boys or high school for girls.
By the late ‘60s it was no longer acceptable for lads to work before marriage.
Growing up in a 1980s NYC milieu, wherein tolerance and diversity were firmly enshrined, this generation of boys twirled their peios and proudly let them dangle.
The Lithuanian method of study (derekh hallimud) came to be perceived as superior to that of the Hungarians, and some parents elected to send their adolescent sons to such yeshivos for a year or two before marriageable age. A few years later, the Hasidim imported the Lithuanian method of study, and yeshivos that mimicked it were established for the Hasidic population.
Yeshivoh attendance for Gen X boys was a highly immersive environment. Nothing else mattered besides learning. Financially secure parents spared nothing in tuition and dormitory expenses in their quest for raising a boy that was highly esteemed in the shidukh market by dint of his scholarly wit. “Learning” was practiced solely for the sake of study —supposedly honing a pupil’s mind— without any expectation that the pupil would ever receive ordination and become a pulpit rabbi, dayyon, or other “holy vessel”.
Girls were expected to learn a trade, so they could provide for their highly-coveted kolel-learning husbands in the first couple of years after marriage.
Nowadays, even the plausibility of having received a dispensation is sufficient to inhibit any potential rumors: after all, no one would risk pouring salt on the wound of a family that may be experiencing fertility problems, by scrutinizing their sex habits. It is implicitly understood, even by close friends and family members, that if a family ceases to have children then it’s either natural or permitted by a rabbi.
Girls in Borough Park schools, including most of the Hasidic schools, speak mostly English to one another, even outside the confines of their secular classes. At home, most Hasidic girls speak English with their mothers and sisters, Yiddish with their brothers, and alternate languages with their fathers (perhaps limiting themselves to Yiddish on holy days such as Shabbos, but resorting to English when discussing secular matters that are more easily expressed in the vernacular). By contrast, Satmar girls in Williamsburg and KJ talk mostly Yiddish with their classmates.
Whereas all Hasidic men talk Yiddish with one another, it is a mixed bag with women: the pious Satmar ones in Williamsburg continue to converse in Yiddish with one another on the phone, in the neighborhood, and at street corners, but such scenes are rare to behold in Borough Park. Ditto to conversations between spouses: Satmar Williamsburg couples rarely speak English, whereas Borough Park couples tend to mix it up.
More commonly, however, Toroh scrolls are privately owned scrolls that are consigned to a shul at the will of its donors.
At large synagogues, donors take great pride if their scroll, among the dozen or so in the ark, is selected for reading, especially if the grand rebbe is given an ascendancy at that scroll.
In this way, there is more redistribution of wealth happening in the Hasidic community (through private initiative) than in society at large.
artist-occupied apartment complex called Castle Braid, formerly The Girdle Factory (which was famous for being the site where characters from the Betty Smith novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn met).
A friendly tip from a fellow Amazonian would be an unlikely occurrence outside the Hasidic community, where merchants in any given field consider each other competitors and are reluctant to share tips. Hasidim, by contrast, are renowned NOT to begrudge one another’s’ business success, even if there may be a fear (justified or not) that such success would undercut one’s own.
Hence, the medieval practice of Jews having to resort to gentiles when seeking an interest-bearing loan, and vice-versa (Christians observed the prohibition too, and they, too, considered Jews strangers). By the time of the Renaissance and the dawn of modern finance, the perverse incentives inherent in the usury ban became apparent: A Jew was disinclined to help a fellow Jew with an interest-free loan, being able to allocate such capital toward interest-accruing gentile-lending instead. The biblical law was having the reverse effect of that intended.
At any given time it employs around 800 Hasidic young men on a revolving door basis, i.e. the men work there as a starter job and then move on to other work after 2-3 years, thus vacating their spot for newer ex-kolelites. The pay is kept low, at around $600 per week, to encourage turnover.
The prominence of organizations such as Bonei Olom that champion the cause of the infertile is better attributed to a social fad that chooses to unduly exaggerate the “problem” of couples not conceiving within a few months after marriage, than to any objective data.
Infidelity could be a trigger for divorce, especially if word gets out. If a man is caught going to a strip club or consorting with a prostitute, the woman may be subject to pressure from her peers and family to reject him, so as not to appear to be a pushover. Other transgressive or devious behavior (such as profaning the sabbath) may also ignite an impulse for the spouse to reject the transgressor, if the transgression is known widely or it is feared that it will become known widely. The driving force here is the sheer scandal that such behavior generates or is feared to generate —not the
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It is worth noting, though, that in recent years it is becoming more common for non-believing spouses to remain in the community as “marranos”, with the full cooperation of the believing spouses, thus salvaging their marriage.
The origin of a written divorce is in Deuteronomy, where it is meant to document and solemnize the dissolution of a marriage, so that the man may not recant later, should he seek to claim his woman back from her new suitor after his fury abates.
It’s also possible to launch a name-and-shame poster and flyer campaign, which can nowadays be augmented through social media.
The traditional practice when a subject’s family senses that his or her end is near, is to invite a quorum of ten adult males (preferably descendants of the subject) to bear witness to the subject’s confession and repentance prior to his expiration. The subject, along with those present, recites the acrostic Confession (viduy, from the daily Supplication): oshamnu, bogadnu, gozalnu (“we guilted, we betrayed, we robbed”), etc., the nishmas kol hai, and the Shema, among other passages. Ideally the subject would exhale his last breath upon uttering “ehod” —the last word of the Shema verse.
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Big rebbes are usually immersed in their shul’s regular men’s mikveh, which prompts an avalanche of immersers for about 24 hours following his death, by adherents and admirers wishing to come in contact with the water that has purified their holy leader.
The deceased’s prayer shawl is then wrapped around his body after rendering it invalid by gumming up the knots (since the dead are exempt from performing commandments). A clump of earth from the land of Israel is placed on the corpse’s mouth and eyes8.
A corpse requires guardianship at all times. Thus, if a person dies late in the afternoon, or if for another reason the funeral is postponed to the next day, the funeral home hires a bachelor member of the community to sit watch in the presence of the corpse through the night.
A gravestone monument costs a couple of thousand dollars. In all (including the cost of a funeral home) it costs about ten grand to die; those who cannot afford it, don’t die.
Abstention from dance and music poses a fair challenge in the event that the mourner is marrying off a child or is invited to a niece or nephew’s wedding. Some effort is made to accommodate such concerns when scheduling weddings, but it’s not always feasible or practical to do so. There are ways around it: uncles that are in mourning can sit together and be served the meal in a special room in the hall where they are not exposed to music and dancing. Another artifice is for mourners to perform banquet serving chores at the event, thus nominally rendering them workers instead of guests.
If one dies without any surviving male sons, one or more of his sons-in-law says Kaddish in his behalf. If that’s not possible, a nephew or other relative can be requested or hired to do so.
coupled with a wish not to embarrass the “one who has had an occurrence” by the conspicuity of him being the only one doing the immersion that morning.
After the introduction of cantillations by the Masoretes around the ninth century, this additional aspect of the reading job rendered it the domain of the professional (who could memorize the prescribed notes, even as the text remained unannotated). Thus, even though the tradition of appointing the prescribed number of readers (depending on the occasion) remains, such “readers” no longer do any actual reading aloud. Rather, they recite the pre- and post-benediction on reading/studying Toroh aloud18 and let the professional baal koreh do the reading while they mutter along quietly.
One way of cheating the system is to intimate to a priest to leave the room when the Toroh is being withdrawn (by telling him “there’s a hiyyuv today”); the Gabbai can then declare ein kan kohen, and have three available ascendancies for the hiyyuvim.
A more legitimate way to banish the detested Supplications is to find out if there’s a circumcision at the shul that day and invoke that as the pretext. Better yet, seek out a groom, pull him in off the street, the mikveh, another minyon, or whatever else he may be doing at the time, and have him enter the room briefly at the critical juncture. “Nu, nu, hoson, yisgadal” —the voices are heard crying, and that drives the nail in the Supplications coffin.
A stuff hat pegs them as Satmar-aligned, which they don’t necessarily feel cool about, whereas a high beaver hat is popular with so many different sects as to be generic and non-committal.
Even that much may not be within reach, and pupils are not ejected if parents come up short despite their best efforts to pay their share —as long as the parents are loyal members of the sect, in good standing. Parents who are not loyal to the sect are scrutinzed and treated more harshly. The administration is loathe to accomodate such folks —essentially subsidizing their tuitions— if they aren’t toeling the party line and “giving back” in some way. If the parent is an Aaronite but doesn’t pray at an Aaronite shul on Shabbos, the woman’s wig is a bit longer that what R. Aaron would ahve liked,
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Kittoh Vov, Zayyin, and Hes
teacher training. The objective is for the school to qualify for certain government programs that hinge on the “effectiveness” of the teachers —a criterion that is virtually always defined by a teacher’s education credentials.
Students can eventually graduate with Master’s degrees in Special Education or speech therapy —positions that Hasidic school systems utilize to exploit government programs while simultaneously offering employment to its own.
His argument was not from the point of view of a haredi dropout; rather, he attempted to persuade school leadership that it was the right thing to do from a religious standpoint. His Williamsburg billboard, in Hebrew, “one is obligated to teach his son a trade”,
In a congregational school, any parent who is a member in good repute of the congregation is “entitled” to send his kids to its schools, i.e. the congregation sees it as its obligation to provide schooling to all its members’ children, even to those that are poor or otherwise undesirable.
“Menza” was a meal club to which enrolled students contributed financially. Thus, the typical bohur before the war did not owe any tuition to his yeshivoh but he was obligated to pay for the meals provided by the menza committee. To this end, bohorim “went after money”, i.e. solicited for donations, when they had a chance. This was also a primary function of the “between the seasons” hiatus: it was an opportunity for lads to clamber about town raising money for their menza expenses.
Not to worry: the toil and anguish of prepping for a pshettel is mostly in vain. Nobody in the audience is interested in listening to a pshettel, nor would they allow the lad to deliver his pshettel in its entirety if he truly wished: the custom is for the assembled to begin singing ureei vonim levonekho soon after the lad begins his pshettel.
Hasidim still do not throw bas mitzvoh parties for girls who turn twelve. The bas mitzvoh celebration practice started with R. Mordechai Kaplan (founder of Reconstructionist Judaism) about a century ago. From there the practice diffused to other Jewish denominations, including the Modern Orthodox; even the Lithuanians celebrate it to some extent.
blessed is he who exempted me”) is used idiomatically to refer to anything undesirable that one is no longer responsible for.
Even more problematic, and therefore rare, is a match between a Hungarian Hasidic sect and a Galician or Polish one. Not only must the families overcome sectarian cultural differences and learn to mingle in new social circles, but the couple also must agree on a fixed set of religious customs. (The
The traditional appetizer, that of fish, is still common for the first course, but so is something more edgy such as an eggplant dish, a liver puree, or even tacos.
The pianist plays loud fast-tempo music as a prelude to the couple’s entry. He begins playing the classic od yishoma beorei yehudoh song at the moment that the couple, holding hands, enter the hall. This is the second time in the evening that they display public affection. There will be one more such instance, at the mitzvoh dance, and then the PDA will be barred for life.
A very recent audacious innovation is to serve cheap buffet food for all. R. Yoel Roth’s disciples are now (as of the last year or two) having their weddings celebrated in his shul, with buffet-style fare of chicken nuggets
Until recently, the jester was a jester first and an emcee second. He had a copious repertoire of Jewish Hasidic-specific jokes by which to regale the newlyweds and crowd —often randomly interjected among the callings-up.
Nowadays that the younger generation is apt to have living great grandparents, the great grandparents are called up first —and there can be up to eight; hence the trending prolongation of the mitzvoh dance: many of them do not finish until four in the morning.
Grand synagogues have a bema (from a Greek word meaning “platform”) in the center of the sanctuary, upon which a large lectern is stationed for the public reading of the Toroh scroll. Behind the lectern on the bema is a bench where the person performing the Toroh lifting sits while the scroll is being rolled and covered. The bema and its lectern are also used for certain public speeches, such as when an appeal for fundraising is made. The bema must be in the center: this is an important plank in the Hungarian Orthodox platform, meant to oppose the Neolog innovation of placing the lectern near
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