Memories of old Pupa

Hirshel:

I saw this yesterday in a Satmar shul. This is a book published by a Jew Ortner; (originally from Galicia) its in back of his sefer of sermons. He can quote from Reb Chatzkel Sarna to Rav Amiel, and everything in between. Looks like a cool jew who davened in meor hagolah Montreal by the Reb Shaye Yakov thé son of the Skulener, who gives a haskoma.  These 3 pages I send you say a whole lot. He and his brothers learned in Pupa. They were from Preshov, by the Galicia border. 280 boys learned there.  They had a list who goes to mikvah, and you didn't get hot soup if u did not go. Pupa Ruv gave שיריים then already, lit Chanukah licht like a real Rebbe, meaning very late, 2.5 hours after the z'man, with a few hundred boys looking on - more than he had in NY. Not before he went to an icy lake to toyvel beforehand. It seems that Ortner had no personal relationship with the Pupa Rebbe, Look at the schedule: 4:45am wakeup time. 5:30am by the גמרא already שוין נאך די מקוה. I don't see why they woke up the boys so early; The learning was not so great and important that they needed so many hours.  In Poland Jews were already almost all exterminated r"l, and in the Hungarian Yeshivos they served chicken and sometimes beef with shmaltz.   Not bad. The old Badansky bachi looked like a generous person, gave good food. Hungarian women may have been holy, but spoke no yiddish. But we knew that. All in all it seems like in the holy town of Pupa they emphasized chasidus more than Torah.

Click to enlarge. Read and enjoy!

....גודמאן'ס סקווערע מצות

זעהט אויס אז אמאל האט מען אין סקווער געגעסן מאשין מצות אויך

Photo Source

Noam Elimelech 1942 edition censored

"Dear Tzig,

I recently came across an edition of the Noam Elimelech printed in New York in 1942 by Joshuah (Osias!) Wagschal. Interestingly it also contains letters of recommendation by the RAYATZ and Rav Herzog. Needless to say that later reprints of this specific edition ( I also have one from around 1980) have these letters deleted." - end of email.

The two letters both address him as הרה"צ, yet the emailer calls him Joshua (Osias!). Maybe that's what his stationery said? I'm kind of at a loss here. I should ask him, I know. Maybe he'll chime in in the comments. Is it the קארטשינער-פריסטיקער רבי? hard to tell. Let me see what we can learn from our readers.

How do these meeting minutes shtim with conventional Satmar wisdom re: what the Zionist leadership did and didn't do during WWII?

Yitzchak Gruenbaum, 1948

Minutes of Meeting May 25, 1944

I linked to the meeting minutes a few days ago but this deserves its own post

I have a hard time remembering all the rhetoric, but every Satmar kid knows the words "רק בדם תהיה לנו הארץ" which was said to have been said by Nathan Schwalbe, a low-level shnook in the Jewish Agency. The source was HaRav Michoel Ber Weissmandl in מן המצר. There is no other source. Which means that the Zionist leadership, David Ben-Gurion and friends, didn't care about the millions dying in Europe, since it would help them gain sympathy from the nations of the world and ultimately their coveted Jewish State. (Then there's the infamous Yitzchak Gruenbaum quote about a thousand Jews in Europe not being worth one cow in Palestine.) So therefore we need to oppose the מדינה. The problem is, that despite the fact that the Jewish Agency kept thousands and thousands of pages of minutes and other documents there is no mention of any such statement. But does the fact that there is no source for that statement keep thousands of otherwise semi-intelligent people from parroting it as the ultimate conspiracy? No. And if Schwalbe did say it, who is he anyway? From the minutes we see here it would seem that they acted pretty soon after the Nazis marched in to Hungary. We won't discuss whether or not the plan of giving trucks to Eichmann in exchange for Jews was a real and feasible one

Here's my predicament:

I'm not here to defend DBG or his buddies. Maybe if it was Begin I'd defend him. (just kidding) But what happens is that the other side, the zealots, start to believe the rhetoric, no matter the lack of sources or evidence. Not only do they believe it, but if YOU don't believe it you're a revisionist. You're somehow a traitor to the Jewish People. Read the Satmar Yiddish forums and you'll see the "כידוע האבען די ציונים געשטערט אז מ'זאל ראטעווען מיליאנען אידען און זענעם ערגער ווי כאמאס" discussions in abundance. Most of it based on R' Michoel Ber. It's not a question of if anymore. It's ידוע already. That would not be such a problem in and of itself, were it not for the fact that somehow wanting a strong Israel today is somehow dependent on what DBG did or didn't do some 70 years ago... or what Teddy Herzl had in mind over 100 years ago. Or the religious persuasion of TH's children. Or what Stephen Wise or Abba Hillel Silver did or didn't do. It almost sounds like those remind us every year what an awful country America is because of what Columbus did to the natives. It would be א האלבע צרה if al the quotes they attribute to them are true! But if they're the figment of somebody's imagination, am I required to believe it and act upon it? Am I missing something?

Nathan Schwalbe Source: USHMM

כ"ב סיון - שבעים שנה

Here and Here