The Pious Ones: The Satmar Community
Learn more about the community at the heart of THE WANDERERS
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company September 5 through October 6, 2024, Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers is a story about faith — in a higher power, in ourselves, and in the relationships we build — and about what happens when that faith no longer sustains us. In The Wanderers, this exploration takes place within and outside of the Satmar community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an insular sect of Hasidic Judaism. It is a story of two couples whose separate worlds are more similar than they might at first appear.
In the mid-18th century, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, better known as the Baal Shem Tov, initiated the Hasidic movement within what is now known as Orthodox Judaism. Hasidism is characterized by the search for a personal and intimate connection with God. Hasidic practices include mysticism, music, and study of the Torah, with an emphasis on prayer. They reject modernity, living in ways that honor their traditions and working to keep the modern secular world from clouding their connection to God.
The movement’s adherents, Hasidim — or “pious ones” in Hebrew — are members of distinct and often dynastic courts led by Rebbes. When the movement was at its peak in the 19th century, there were hundreds of individual courts in Eastern Europe, many of which were named after the individual villages they called home. But the Holocaust devastated the movement; before the Holocaust, nearly half of Jewish people in Eastern Europe were Hasidic. After the war, the movement’s few survivors reestablished courts primarily in New York and Israel. Today, an estimated 400,000 Jewish people worldwide are members of a Hasidic community.
One such “pious one” was Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum of Szatmárnémeti, Hungary (in modern-day Romania). His father was the rebbe of the Sighet dynasty; when he died, the position passed to his oldest son, not to Joel. But some felt Joel was the true spiritual leader and followed him, eventually forming the Satmar dynasty with him at its head. When the Hungarian Jewish population was moved first to the ghetto and then to concentration camps, Rabbi Teitelbaum was ransomed and rescued to Switzerland. He eventually made his way to America in 1946 and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he began to build a community anew.
As more survivors traveled to the United States and as the resettled families grew, the Satmar dynasty quickly expanded within their New York City enclave. Today, it is one of Hasidism’s largest courts, with an estimated 100,000 members. While there are small Satmar communities in several cities worldwide, they mostly live in Williamsburg and in Kiryas Joel, a community built by and for Satmars in upstate New York in the early 1970s.
These communities are insular by design — both because of Hasidism’s rejection of modernity in pursuit of a purer relationship with the divine and as a layer of protection against a world that had done the Jewish community great harm. While it is not a sin to interact with non-Jewish people, Hasidic communities like the Satmars primarily rely on their community bonds and the structures within them. Yiddish is the primary language within these communities, offering another common bond amongst these populations. Marriages are usually arranged among families in the community by the parents, sometimes with the help of a matchmaker — or, as one Satmar woman named Pearl described it in an interview, meetings between potential couples are arranged. The marriage itself depends upon the potential couple agreeing to wed.
While there are strictures that are common amongst Hasidic communities at large, each court has its own specifications. For the Satmars, and as manifested by Esther in The Wanderers, some of these differences are sartorial. While all Hasidic sects ask for modesty in clothing, Satmar specifically calls for women to wear opaque stockings along with their long skirts and high-necked, long-sleeved shirts. Many Hasidic sects also call for women to cover their hair, whether with a kerchief, a turban, or a wig; Satmar women use all of these. But Satmar is unique in its tradition of women shaving their hair off rather than just covering it. This first takes place the day after their wedding and continues throughout their lives (or as long as they remain in the community). While some Satmar women who have left the community discuss this as a particular tension in their search for themselves, others who have stayed, like Pearl, derive great meaning from following the tradition and were unfazed about their post-wedding experience.
The community also has its own schools, or yeshivas, which are separated physically and in subject matter by gender: boys study a great deal of religious literature, while girls study religious laws and customs alongside some secular education. This separation extends outside of the yeshiva as well; social events are also separated by gender, and there are strict rules for how men and women may interact in public and in the workplace. Secular entertainment is frowned upon, and internet usage and television viewing are restricted, though not entirely forbidden. Women are often employed but are not encouraged to seek higher education; instead, growing and nurturing their families is considered their most important work.
Many Satmar folks find these and other restrictions to be a source of fulfillment and an expression of the community’s love and care for its members, but disobeying the rules and regulations does carry consequences — for example, a child may be denied admission to school if his parents are found to be violating the rules. And while this devout life brings joy and satisfaction to many, there are those who chafe at the restrictions and leave the community. These people are considered to have gone “off the derech,” or “off the faith path.” For some, this is a wholesale severing from the community; for others, it may be a source of sadness within the family but does not cause a permanent rupture in the relationship.
In The Wanderers, Sophie and Abe might be the more immediately recognizable couple to a broader audience — cosmopolitan, modern, largely secular. But they’re also in a bubble of their own, enclosed in the elite, literate, and hip embrace of the other Williamsburg. Esther and Schmuli come from a world that is deliberately insulated, with rules about how to dress, how the genders can interact, and how to worship that many of us do not practice or even see in our everyday lives. Sophie and Abe’s world has rules of its own, less visible but no less powerful. But at the heart of the play are two complex couples seeking connection, personal fulfillment, and love — reaching out, failing each other and themselves, and trying again. These are human struggles, ones the characters share with each other and with us.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers is onstage September 5 through October 6, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
