Satmar anti-Zionism

Satmar anti-Zionism is a religious and communal doctrine that rejects the establishment of Israel as a human attempt to bring about redemption before the Messiah. In the young narrator’s Williamsburg, it is not an abstract position: it sends men into the streets with anti-Zionist signs, informs how families interpret the Holocaust, and makes travel to Israel punishable at school. As the narrator learns its claims and rules, she also begins to question who made the commitments that govern her life.

Doctrine and Public Protest

Each May, on Israeli Independence Day, Satmar Hasidim travel from their communities to demonstrate against the State of Israel. The narrator’s grandfather, Zeidy, joins the men heading to a parade in Manhattan. To an outside observer, a visibly Jewish person carrying a sign calling for Israel’s destruction might seem incomprehensible. The narrator, however, has been taught to see the position as consistent: the Satmar Rebbe regarded Zionism as an unprecedented rebellion against Jewish history and religious obligation.

In this account, redemption is not a political project that Jews can accomplish for themselves. Faithful Jews are to wait for the Messiah rather than take up arms or otherwise act to end exile. The Rebbe’s demand that Satmar Jews oppose Israel, even at the cost of martyrdom, follows from that distinction. The parade therefore makes a theological argument in public: Jewish appearance and Jewish opposition to a Jewish state are not contradictions within the community’s own terms.

The doctrine is reinforced in the home through Vayoel Moshe, the Rebbe’s anti-Zionist manifesto, which the narrator says is present in every Satmar household. The book traces Zionism to the early twentieth century, when a small group of Jews pursued a homeland of their own. In the narrator’s account of the manifesto, the Rebbe had foreseen the movement’s eventual power. The Holocaust is then made central to the argument: the text presents Zionist political strength after the catastrophe as a grave misuse of Jewish suffering, not as a legitimate response to it.

Holocaust Memory and Communal Teaching

The narrator encounters anti-Zionist belief not only as doctrine but as an interpretation of family loss. Bubby, her grandmother, tells her that Jews fleeing the Nazis for Israel were turned away by Zionists and sent back to the camps. She also recounts a claim that Zionists wanted a new, educated kind of Jew and took young children to shape them accordingly, separating them from their families. At school, the narrator learns that children were beaten and abused until they renounced their faith and pledged devotion to Zionism.

These accounts are presented as what Bubby and the school teach, rather than as independently verified historical findings. Within the family, they give the doctrine a personal and emotional force. The narrator has seen photographs of Bubby’s dead relatives, including a two-year-old child, and keeps the portraits wrapped in a paper towel in her top drawer. Looking at them brings her to tears. Bubby’s grief and reluctance to discuss her family make Holocaust memory intimate, while the lessons she passes on direct that grief toward opposition to Zionism.

The narrator absorbs a sharp boundary between Jews and Zionists, reasoning that the two cannot be the same and coming to believe that only Hasidim can be real Jews. She would gladly join the protest, although women are excluded, partly out of loyalty to Bubby and the family lost in the war. Her response shows how communal teaching turns mourning into obligation: if others have failed to honor the dead, she feels the effort to oppose Zionism must be redoubled.

Travel, Exception, and Enforcement

The prohibition reaches beyond public protest and historical teaching into the narrator’s movement. The rabbi forbids travel to Israel until the Messiah comes, and the school threatens permanent expulsion even for a student with family there. The rule makes the land central to religious history yet inaccessible in the present. The narrator finds this unfair: teachers speak of the country as the place of her roots, while the community bars her from seeing it.

The boundary is not applied without exception. The narrator knows that some families have taken indirect routes to bring daughters into Israel. She also describes her aunt Chavie’s earlier pilgrimage to Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai’s grave, where infertile women traditionally pray for a son and promise to return for his first-haircut ceremony when he turns three. Zeidy approves of Chavie’s journey for the sake of reproduction, despite the general prohibition. The exception exposes a hierarchy within the rules: a journey condemned in principle can be overlooked when it serves a valued religious and family purpose.

Inherited Authority and Doubt

The narrator’s doubts sharpen when she distinguishes the community’s authority from the covenant it invokes. Zeidy teaches that every Jewish soul was present at Mount Sinai and accepted responsibility for the Torah; on that reasoning, rejecting any law would make a person a hypocrite. But the narrator asks whether an ancient agreement with God is the same as Zeidy’s much later pledge to the Satmar Rebbe.

When the Rebbe announced plans for a community in Williamsburg, Zeidy pledged allegiance before knowing what the commitment would entail. In the narrator’s understanding, that decision bound the whole family and its future generations. She contrasts the resulting life with the family’s earlier life in Europe, where her relatives were educated, lived among wooden floors and Persian carpets, and traveled freely across the Continent. The narrator attributes rules such as forbidding English books and the color red to the Rebbe’s order, and asks why she remains obligated to follow them if she was not present when the pledge was made.

This distinction does not resolve her conflict; it gives it a more precise shape. The narrator understands why a survivor who was frightened and lonely might have sought safety in the Rebbe’s community, yet she resists being expected to follow Zeidy into that allegiance blindly. Satmar anti-Zionism thus appears both as a coherent theology of waiting for the Messiah and as part of a later communal order whose inherited demands the narrator is beginning to examine.