Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Growing Haredi numbers poised to alter global Judaism
The Holocaust devastated European Jewry. The most strictly religious among them — the mystical-oriented Hasidic followers of historic rabbinic lineages and the mitnagdim, Hasidism's more intellectually focused religious critics — suffered some of the worst losses.
Their insularity and suspicion of the larger world served them poorly at a time when maneuverability and adaptability might have helped them flee Nazi Europe for safety. Instead, they turned their noses up at non-Orthodox Jews and avoided dealing with non-Jews as much as possible.
This was true for both Hasidic and mitnagdim Jews, who are often lumped together by outsiders under the rubric "ultra-Orthodox."
It's a label many of them reject; they argue there's nothing "ultra" about them and that they're only adhering closely to what they think of as "normative" rabbinic Judaism.
In Hebrew, they're called Haredi or Haredim, the plural. That's how I'll refer to them in this post.
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