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Anti-Zionist polemic collected from various writings of R. Michael Dov Weissmandel (d. 1957), rabbi and Jewish resistance leader. An Orthodox rabbi, son-in-law and close associate of Rabbi Unger of Nitra, Weissmandel began his public and social activities during the Nazi period when Jews were deported from Slovakia, engaging non-Jewish emissaries to send food, clothing, and money to the deportees temporarily "settled" in the territories of the General Government in Poland. Weissmandel belonged to the core of the underground "Working Group" and was the initiator of the Europa Plan to rescue the remnants of European Jewry. His letters, addressed to the Jewish leadership of the free world "in the style of the Marranos," castigated indifference and begged for action to save the Jewish remnants from extermination. In April 1944, he warned Hungarian Jewry of the impending deportations. A month later, he implored world Jewish leaders to demand that the Allies bomb the murder installations at Auschwitz. In the autumn of 1944, he jumped from a deportation train on its way to Auschwitz. After the war he lived in the United States, where he died. His book of memoirs, Min ha-Mezzar ("From the Depths") was published posthumously in 1960.
Neturei Karta (Ha-Edah ha-Haredit), group of ultrareligious extremists, mainly in Jerusalem, who regard the establishment of a secular Jewish state in Erez Israel as a sin and a denial of G-d, and therefore do not recognize the State of Israel. Their name, which is Aramaic for “guardians of the City,” derives from a passage in the Jerusalem Talmud (Hag. 76:3) stating that religious scholars are the guardians and defenders of the city. Neturei Karta broke away from Agudat Israel in 1935, when the latter attempted to restrain extremist demands for an independent ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem community completely separate from the rest of the Zionist community. The group first adopted the name Hevrat ha-Hayyim, after R. Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld. It aimed at creating “a circle free from the influence of the contemporary spirit and its fallacious opinions,” and a condition of membership was “the education of sons and daughters in the traditional Jewish manner, without any change (girls’ schools which teach Hebrew do not provide education in the traditional Jewish manner).” The last phrase alluded to Agudat Israel's Bet Ya’akov girls’ schools, where the language of instruction is Hebrew. |
