Satmar (Hasidic Dynasty) - Satmar and Politics

Satmar and Politics

The Satmar Hasidic movement has become known for its social isolation from all forms of secular culture and for its opposition to all forms of religious, secular, and political Zionism. After the Six-Day War in 1967 Reb Yoel told pious Satmar Hasidim not to approach the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, feeling it would show support for the secular government that claimed to have liberated it. This is true of other so called "holy places" that Satmar Hasidim do not visit, partly in protest of the secular Zionist government, which they view as an abomination. Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum visited the Wall before the founding of the State and fainted from its holiness, but his adherents still do not visit it. Satmar Hasidim also refuse to take any social benefits from the Israeli government, and often view negatively other Haredi groups that do so. Their institutions in Israel are funded by private donations solicited abroad.

Some of Satmar's more conservative and isolationist tendencies have resulted in long-standing feuds and enmities with other Haredi groups and Hasidic groups, particularly Chabad Lubavitch, Ger, Klausenberg, Bobov, Breslov and Belz, in part because of the different groups' positions towards Zionism, the State of Israel, and differences of opinion on how to relate, if at all, to the Israeli government. There have also been conflicts in New York between Satmar and Lubavitch Hasidim, in particular over the latter's alleged proselytizing in Satmar areas. Some of these disputes can be originally traced to specific conflicts between small groups of rabbis and thinkers in Eastern Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in New York and Israel in the twentieth century that later developed into larger ones between the respective communities. However, in recent times, the feuds and enmities have mostly cooled down, even as the political views have remained the same.