The City of Rzeszów: Two Hassidic Leaders at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Author
Zvi Lehrer

The paper discusses the history of Hassidism in the city of Rzeszów (rayshe in Yiddish) and elaborates a little on two figures from the Hassidic world who lived in a period of change for Jewish life. We will learn about their activity as Hasidic leaders and their responses to those changes, which perhaps share certain features in common. Through a description of these two personalities we will obtain a general overview of Jewish life in Rzeszów, spanning a period of some fifty years, from the eighties of the 19th century to the Holocaust years. These individuals represent different aspects of the city’s Jewish community, in an era of profound cultural and religious transformations, which entailed dramatic changes in the traditional structure of the congregation, alongside civil and political turnovers.

Published in
Lecture at the 'Jews in Galicia' conference. Rzeszów, June 2017
Subject
Hasidism

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