The establishment of the State of Israel is presented through the opposition it provokes in the Satmar Hasidic community, rather than through an account of the founding itself. For the narrator’s family, the new state is not an uncomplicated answer to Jewish catastrophe: Satmar teaching casts Zionism as a rejection of religious waiting for the Messiah, while family memories connect the debate to the lives lost in the Holocaust and the survival of religious communities afterward.

Postwar Context

The memoir’s author’s note places the Satmar movement in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Rudolf Kasztner rescued the rabbi from Satu Mare, who later emigrated to America and gathered survivors into a Hasidic sect named for his hometown. The note describes a wider return among American Hasidic Jews to Yiddish and traditional dress, alongside opposition to the creation of Israel among many who believed that assimilation and Zionism had brought divine punishment. Rebuilding the community through reproduction was another response to the mass loss of life.

This context makes the state’s establishment more than a political question in the narrator’s surroundings. It becomes part of a struggle over how Jewish survival should be understood: as recovery through a sovereign homeland, or as the preservation of religious life while awaiting redemption. The memoir presents that conflict through the beliefs and recollections of the people around Devorah, not as a neutral history of Israel’s founding.

Religious Opposition and Public Protest

Each May, Zeidy joins men traveling to Manhattan for the Satmar Hasidic community’s anti-Zionist parade on Israeli Independence Day. The demonstrations bring members from different communities together to oppose the state. In the teaching Devorah recounts, the Satmar Rebbe regarded Zionism as an unprecedented rebellion: redemption from exile, he insisted, was not something Jews should bring about through political action or force, but something for which faithful Jews should wait for the Messiah.

The parade’s signs can appear contradictory to an outside observer: visibly Jewish demonstrators publicly opposing a Jewish state. Devorah, however, says the message makes sense within the beliefs she has absorbed. Her response shows how thoroughly the community’s account of Israel has shaped her understanding, even before she begins to question the world that formed it.

Doctrine, Memory, and the Holocaust

The Satmar Rebbe’s manifesto, Vayoel Moshe, is kept in every Satmar home, according to Devorah. As she describes it, the book traces Zionism to the early twentieth century and presents the movement’s pursuit of a Jewish homeland as a religious transgression. The Rebbe’s interpretation, as relayed in the memoir, holds that Zionists gained sufficient political and social power only after the Holocaust. Zeidy objects to using the catastrophe to win sympathy for Zionism, treating that appeal as an affront to those who died.

Bubby’s account adds a family memory to this ideological argument. She tells Devorah that Zionists turned away ships carrying Jews fleeing the Nazis and that children were separated from religious families so they could be shaped into a different kind of Jew. These are Bubby’s claims as the memoir reports them; the passage shows how she understands the history, not an independent verification of each allegation. Her bitterness makes the argument intimate: the founding of Israel is filtered through stories about refuge denied, children separated, and the religious communities that survived.

The Event’s Place in the Narrative

The establishment itself remains offstage. The memoir instead traces its continuing presence in a May parade, a household religious text, and arguments repeated across generations. This focus shifts attention from the mechanics of statehood to the meanings assigned to it within Devorah’s family and community.

The contrast between public demonstration and inherited memory is central to that portrayal. For the Satmar community as Devorah encounters it, opposing Israel expresses a religious position about exile and redemption; for Bubby and Zeidy, it is also inseparable from their accounts of the Holocaust. Devorah’s early acceptance of the protest’s logic shows how communal teaching can make a contested political stance feel self-evident, while the memoir’s presentation of competing memories leaves the historical and moral dispute visible.