The Saga of Gerrer Hassidim

The Vistula, Poland’s longest river, snakes 660 miles north from the Tatra Mountains past Warsaw to the Baltic Sea. Some 20 miles upstream from the capital, the river flows past Góra Kalwaria (Mount Calvary). Today, it’s a dormitory suburb of burgeoning post-Communist Warsaw – which has evolved into Eastern Europe’s hub for hi-tech, skyscrapers, and high-speed trains. Polish Catholics revere the town (population 12,100) as Nowa Jerozolima (New Jerusalem). For world Jewry, it’s the now destroyed center of the Ger Hassidim.

Medieval Góra, located on the escarpment above the Vistula’s flood plain, was destroyed in 1666 during the devastating Swedish invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Reconstruction began in 1670, inspired by a Crusader map of Jerusalem. The street grid forms a Latin cruciform hallowed with churches and monasteries. Those remaining buildings are a place of pilgrimage for the Catholic faithful.

A 20-minute walk along Marianki Street brings one to Góra Kalwaria’s Jewish cemetery, located just behind the Catholic necropolis. Though not as popular a pilgrimage destination as the Ukrainian gravesite of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Uman, haredi visitors are not uncommon at the ohel (literally “tent” in Hebrew but meaning a “mausoleum”).

Jews settled there after 1802, when Napoleon abolished the medieval “de non tolerandis Judaeis” law restricting residence by religion. Yiddish became the predominant language in the multilingual town. Called Gur in Hebrew, the shtetl grew rapidly after 1859 when Hassidic Grand Rebbe Yitzchak Meir Rothenburg (1799-1866) settled there. Known affectionately as Reb Itche Meir, he established the powerful dynasty following the death of his brother-in-law, R. Menahem Mendl of Kotzk (1787-1859).

R. Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (1847-1905), the third grand rebbe of Ger, is known as the Sfas Emes (the Language of Truth). His seminal five-volume collection of homilies remains a key work of Hassidism. All of Ger’s dynastic leaders are his descendants.

Since 1996, the sect has been led by its eighth grand rebbe, Yaakov Aryeh Alter (b. 1939). Brooklyn’s The Jewish Press estimates his personal worth to be some $100 million. That wealth comes from real estate investments made by his father, the Imre Emes. Despite the current rebbe’s wealth, he lived in an ordinary apartment in Bnei Brak until 2011, when he moved to Jerusalem.

In 1877, the Vistula River Railroad opened, linking Warsaw to Kovel, Ukraine, and benefiting Jewish and Catholic pilgrims en route to Góra Kalwaria. As Czarist Russia slowly modernized, so, too, the town began to prosper. In 1921, 2,691 Jews made it their home – 48.9 percent of the population. Most toiled in petty trade and crafts or provisioned the grand rebbe’s court. Wagoneers transported Hassidim to and from the train station, porters carried their luggage, and landlords rented out rooms during the holy days, when thousands flocked to the town.

Parisian journalist Albert Londres described Góra Kalwaria in his 1929 travelogue, “The Wandering Jew Has Arrived”: “Two thousand inhabitants, but one of the navels of Eastern Jewry. Here, the famous zadick [sic] Alter, successor to Baal Shem Tov, the one who took the Zohar across the Carpathian Mountains in a car, sought contact with God, just like our fans of wireless radio seek the airwaves.”

A decade later, the airwaves were silenced.

When the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, they immediately targeted Góra Kalwaria’s Jews. Ewald Jauke, the town’s newly appointed ethnic German mayor, banned Jewish residents from engaging in trade. A 100-man forced labor corvée was conscripted daily.

In June 1940, Góra Kalwaria’s 3,500 Jews were restricted to a ghetto, which was liquidated on Feb. 25-26, 1941. Survivors were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto. Hundreds died of starvation and disease. The remainder were gassed in the summer of 1942 in the Treblinka death camp. The handful of survivors never reestablished the Jewish community.

The sect’s fourth Grand Rebbe, Avraham Mordechai Alter (1865-1948), known posthumously as the Imrei Emes (“Sayings of Truth”) after his key text, dodged the Nazi Angel of Death. Together with his son-in-law, three sons, and a grandchild, he fled to Warsaw on Sept. 6, 1939, two days before the Wehrmacht occupied Góra Kalwaria.

Removing his Hassidic garb, the rebbe went incognito. Toward the end of 1939, he and some family members escaped Nazi-occupied Warsaw and traveled to neutral Italy’s Adriatic port of Trieste via Kraków.

When the Imre Emes died in 1948, Jerusalem was being besieged by Jordan’s Arab Legion. Unable to bury their sage in the historic Mount of Olives Cemetery – where the pious have been laid to rest since biblical times – his followers turned the modest courtyard of his shtiebl into a tomb.

Named the Sfas Emes Yeshiva in honor of his father, the prestigious institution closed in 2016 when the group’s headquarters moved to Geula. In the late 1990s, the Great Beit Midrash Gur was inaugurated on Yirmeyahu Street.

Today, Ger constitutes Israel’s largest, wealthiest, and most influential Hassidic group, numbering more than 100,000 members concentrated in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, and Ashdod.

Gil Zohar is a journalist and licensed tour guide in Jerusalem.