Satmar

Satmar is a Hasidic sect formed in the United States around survivors of the destruction of European Jewish communities. Its name, religious revival, and opposition to Zionism are bound to memories of persecution and loss; in Deborah Feldman’s account, those commitments organize communal life while also exposing conflicts over authority, education, and personal identity.

Origins and postwar reconstruction

Satu Mare, whose Hungarian name means Saint Mary and whose Yiddish name is Satmar, lies on the border of Hungary and Romania. The author’s note traces the sect’s name to a rabbi from that city whose life was saved during World War II by Hungarian Jewish lawyer and journalist Rudolf Kasztner. The rabbi later emigrated to America, gathered other survivors, and named his following after his hometown. Other surviving rabbis likewise named their groups for the communities they had left behind, preserving the names of places destroyed in the Holocaust.

The account presents Satmar’s American revival as a deliberate return to a heritage that had nearly disappeared. Hasidic Jews adopted traditional dress and spoke Yiddish, practices associated with their ancestors. The effort to rebuild was also demographic: the community sought to replace those killed and increase its numbers. The author describes continuing growth as a form of revenge against Hitler, linking the survival and expansion of the group to the history of mass death that preceded its establishment in America.

Anti-Zionism, memory, and religious identity

Satmar’s opposition to the State of Israel is a defining political and religious commitment in the memoir. On Israeli Independence Day, men from Satmar communities travel to Manhattan to demonstrate against the state. The Satmar Rebbe teaches that Jews must not seek redemption through political action: redemption belongs to the awaited messiah, and the attempt to establish a Jewish homeland is treated as rebellion against religious expectation. His manifesto, Vayoel Moshe, is described as a text found in every Satmar home and as the sect’s account of the history and religious danger of Zionism.

Within the family, these doctrines are transmitted through explanations of the Holocaust. Zeidy presents Zionism as a deadly sin and objects to survivors’ suffering being used to justify the creation of Israel. Bubby tells Devorah that Zionists turned away Jewish refugees and sought a different, more secular kind of Jew; she also recounts the separation of children from their families so they could be remade. At school, Devorah learns accounts of children being abused until they renounced their faith. These claims appear as lessons and inherited family testimony, not as neutral historical adjudication. Together they teach Devorah to distinguish Jews from Zionists and to regard assimilation as incompatible with authentic Jewish identity.

That teaching makes political commitment intimate. Devorah keeps photographs of Bubby’s murdered relatives, including a child who died at two, and looks at them when she feels able to face the family’s losses. The portraits make the dead present to her, while Bubby’s reluctance to discuss her family leaves Devorah to carry the images and grief largely in silence. She says she would join the protest for Bubby’s sake, although women are not permitted to attend. The community’s public opposition to Israel is thus shown not only as doctrine but as a response shaped by family bereavement and the remembered destruction of European Jewish life.

Authority, education, and communal boundaries

Satmar authority reaches into schooling and defines which forms of knowledge deserve respect. Mrs. Friedman, a teacher with rabbinical ancestry, introduces Devorah’s class to derech eretz, the codes of conduct expected in Hasidic society. The classroom lesson requires students to address an elder in the third person rather than use the word you. The rule makes deference a practiced feature of everyday speech, and the teacher’s status helps demonstrate how religious lineage reinforces institutional authority.

Secular education occupies a lower and carefully limited position. Devorah’s English period is described as a brief, government-required interval within the school day. The teachers come from Borough Park and are regarded by the Satmar school as insufficiently authentic and overly influenced by secular learning. Their classes receive less severe discipline than Yiddish lessons, while reading materials may arrive with most of a story blacked out by school censors. The contrast establishes both the restrictions placed on secular knowledge and Devorah’s unusual fluency and appetite for reading within that system.

Religious practice is also shaped by competing interpretations of law. Zeidy has studied the Brooklyn Eruv extensively and believes it is religiously valid, valuing a rabbi’s ability to find flexibility in the law rather than reflexively choose the strictest position. Yet he warns Devorah not to use it. Other people may consider its use sinful, and public use could appear to endorse wrongdoing or invite angry confrontation. Some young Hasids shout at women pushing baby carriages on Shabbos; Zeidy reports that some throw stones. His position distinguishes his private legal judgment from his concern about communal perception and the risk of hostility.

Factional division and regulation of women

The sect is not presented as politically or institutionally uniform. When Devorah meets Eli’s family, she recognizes the wide, flat velvet plotchik hat as a sign of allegiance to Aaron, the rabbi’s eldest son. Her own family supports Zalman Leib, the rabbi’s third son, as successor. The dispute has reached secular courts, which Zeidy regards as a public religious embarrassment. Devorah, by contrast, questions whether Satmar is part of her essential identity at all; she considers it a label she might remove. The succession conflict therefore reveals both an actual division in communal leadership and the distance opening between inherited affiliation and her sense of self.

Rabbinical authority also governs married women’s appearance. Shortly before Devorah’s wedding, rabbis temporarily prohibit the sale of human-hair wigs after learning that much of the hair used for them comes from Indian temples, where it is offered as a religious sacrifice. The rabbinical court permits synthetic wigs while the community seeks a source it considers acceptable. For Devorah, the ruling has an immediate, material consequence: her grandfather will buy inexpensive synthetic wigs rather than the luxurious human-hair ones she had expected, and she knows that the latter can cost more than three thousand dollars. A communal ruling about religious purity thus alters the practical terms of a young woman’s marriage preparations.

Narrative significance

Satmar appears in the memoir as a community sustained by remembrance and disciplined by boundary-making. Its return to Yiddish, its postwar growth, and its anti-Zionist commitments express a determination to survive; its schooling, public norms, and religious rulings also regulate what members can learn, say, and wear. The narrative makes these tensions visible through ordinary encounters: a lesson in how to address a teacher, a dispute over an Eruv, a hat that discloses a family’s faction, or a wig ruling that changes what a bride can buy.

Devorah’s perspective is shaped by the very inheritance she begins to question. Family stories and photographs make Satmar’s account of history emotionally persuasive, while her observations of women’s restrictions, political divisions, and constrained education complicate her belonging. The sect is therefore not simply a backdrop to her life: its institutions and memories supply both the language through which she first understands the world and the boundaries against which she tests the possibility of a self beyond communal labels.