Satmar: How a Transylvanian Town Gave Its Name to a Hasidic Movement

Today the name Satmar is associated with Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Kiryas Joel in New York State, but it comes from the town of Satu Mare in north-western Romania. Here Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum served as the town’s rabbi until 1944, and the Hasidic movement he built in the United States after the Holocaust took its name from this town.

A Son of the Sighet Dynasty

Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum was born in Sighet in 1887, the son of Rabbi Hananiah Yom Tov Lipa Teitelbaum, author of Kedushat Yom Tov (the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 1888). For the Teitelbaum dynasty in Sighet, see our article on the Jews of Sighet.

Before coming to Satmar he served communities in the Carpathians and Northern Transylvania, among them Carei (Hungarian: Nagykároly), a town in Szatmár County. According to the biography published by the Orthodox Union, he was invited from Carei to Satmar for a trial Shabbat, and his path was set from there.

Six Years of Struggle for the Rabbinate

Satmar in the 1920s was a large Orthodox community with a long-running struggle between Hasidim and their opponents. When Rabbi Eliezer David Grünwald died in 1928, Rabbi Joel was elected rabbi of the town, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Leo Baeck Institute archive. His opponents did not accept the election, and according to the historian Menachem Keren-Kratz his appointment was preceded by six years of bitter public dispute. Only in 1934 was he finally installed as chief rabbi of Satmar.

The Leo Baeck Institute describes him as a determined traditionalist and anti-Zionist, under whom Hasidic influence in the town grew stronger. According to an account given to AGERPRES by the deputy director of the county centre for traditional culture in Satu Mare, in 1938 King Carol II stopped at the town’s railway station and met the rabbi for about an hour. What they discussed is unknown.

1944: From Satmar to Cluj and the Kasztner Train

According to Keren-Kratz’s research, on 3 May 1944, the day the ghettoisation of Northern Transylvania began, Rabbi Joel left Satmar in a Red Cross ambulance bound for Cluj. In Cluj the passengers were arrested, and the next day they were put into the ghetto set up in the yard of a brickworks. In the ghetto the rabbi kept a separate minyan and largely isolated himself.

In June 1944 a group of about 388 Jews, Rabbi Joel among them, left Cluj to join the rescue train organised by Rezső (Israel) Kasztner, a leader of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, through negotiations with the SS. The train reached Bergen-Belsen on 9 July 1944. About two months later a first group was released, and the remaining passengers, including Rabbi Joel, were freed in early December 1944 and reached Switzerland. Meanwhile, in May and June 1944, the Jews of Satmar and its district had been deported from the town’s ghetto to Auschwitz.

From Jerusalem to Williamsburg

After the war Rabbi Joel tried to establish a Hasidic court in Jerusalem. According to Keren-Kratz the attempt failed, and within about a year he sailed for the United States. Sources differ on the exact dates: one has him arriving in Palestine as early as September 1945, while Keren-Kratz dates his settling in Jerusalem to 1946. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says he settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1947. Shortly before the State of Israel was established, he founded his congregation there, Yetev Lev, named after the book of his grandfather, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Teitelbaum of Sighet.

Within a few years hundreds of Hasidim gathered around him, many of them survivors from Hungary and Transylvania. In 1954 he founded the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, and in Jerusalem he headed the Edah HaHaredit, first as its president and later as its chief rabbinic judge. In the 1970s he founded Kiryas Joel in Monroe, New York.

His teaching was known for its uncompromising opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he argued on halakhic grounds that Zionism violated the “Three Oaths” and delayed the redemption, forbade his followers to take part in the institutions of the state and opposed Hebrew as a spoken language, while not opposing the settlement of individuals in the Land of Israel. These positions provoked fierce controversy across the Jewish world, including within the Haredi world.

After Rabbi Joel

Rabbi Joel died in 1979. He was succeeded by his nephew, Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum (1914–2006), who divided the leadership between his two sons: Rabbi Aaron, rabbi of Kiryas Joel, and Rabbi Zalman Leib, rabbi of Williamsburg. Satmar is today one of the largest Hasidic groups in the world, and it still bears the name of the Transylvanian town.

Satmar Hasidim in Satu Mare Today

The Hasidim have not forgotten the town. According to the president of the Jewish community, Adrian Beșa, interviewed by AGERPRES in 2020, groups of Satmar Hasidim from the United States and Israel — sometimes hundreds of people a year — arrive by coach, pray for about half an hour in the great synagogue, visit the cemetery and move on. Kohanim in the groups pray outside the cemetery. According to the same interview, the visitors bring their own kosher food, such as canned goods from the United States.

In Sighet, Rabbi Joel’s birthplace, the Satmar community acquired a cemetery, a synagogue and a rabbinic residence, and built a large new synagogue that was dedicated in November 2021. In Satu Mare itself we found no reliable source for any institution founded or restored by Satmar, or for a permanent kosher facility for visitors.

Visiting

• The Great Synagogue — Strada Decebal 4, where Rabbi Joel prayed before the Holocaust. The memorial to the victims of 1944 is in the courtyard.
• The Orthodox cemetery — according to the community president, nineteen rabbis are buried here. Visits by arrangement with the community.
• Carei — the community Rabbi Joel served before Satmar, on the road from Satu Mare to Oradea.

Arrange visits in advance with the Jewish Community of Satu Mare, Strada Decebal 4A, tel. +40 261 713 703 (according to the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania). We found no verified kosher food in the town, so plan to bring your own.