The Center of Hasidism: Galicia, Sometimes in Ukraine, Sometimes Poland.

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

                                                1886: Jews and peasants of Galicia

                       Religiously, Galicia was: predominantly Christian. Catholicism was practiced in two rites. Poles were Roman Catholic, while Ukrainians belonged to the Greek Catholic Church. Judaism represented the third largest religious group, and notably, Galicia was the center of Hasidism. It brought happiness and joy into the Sabbath services.  It was uplifting and fun, yet was made up of the ultra orthodox people.  

Hasidism was started by the Rabbi, the Israel Baal Shem Tov (1699-1761) in places we haven't heard of, Yothynia and Podolia.  It was the outgrowth of the depressed state of Eastern European Jewry of the 18th century following the Chmielnicki massacres and Church

persecutions.  Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov or as the Besht, was a Jewish mystic and healer from Poland who is regarded as the founder of Hasidic Judaism. "Besht" is the acronym for Baal Shem Tov, which means "One with the Good Name" or "one with a good reputation".

Their antagonists, my Lithuanian ancestors, perhaps, were the Mitnaggedim, led by the Gaon of Vilna who regarded their teachings as heretical and reminding them of the reasoning by which Shabbetai Tzevi justified his apostacy.                             

This opposition was intensified after Shneour Zalman of Lyady who died in 1813, became leader of the hasidim.  

He founded the Chabad, a current, philosophical and rationalizing movement within Hasidism, which attracted the scholars of White Russia and Lithuania.  

In 1772, Galicia, which had 225,000 Jews (9.6% of the population), was annexed to Austria.  

In 1773, Galicia had about 2.6 million inhabitants in 280 cities and market towns and approximately 5,500 villages. There were nearly 19,000 noble families, with 95,000 members (about 3% of the population). The serfs accounted for 1.86 million, more than 70% of the population. A small number were full-time farmers, but by far the overwhelming number (84%) had only smallholdings or no possessions.

Galicia had arguably the most ethnically diverse population of all the countries in the Austrian monarchy, consisting mainly of Poles and "Ruthenians"; the peoples known later as Ukrainians and Rusyns, as well as ethnic Jews, Germans, Armenians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Roma and others. 

In Galicia as a whole, the population in 1910 was estimated to be 45.4% Polish, 42.9% Ruthenian, 10.9% Jewish, and 0.8% German. This population was not evenly distributed. The Poles lived mainly in the west, with the Ruthenians predominant in the eastern region ("Ruthenia"). At the turn of the twentieth century, Poles constituted 88% of the whole population of Western Galicia and Jews 7.5%. The respective data for Eastern Galicia show the following numbers: Ruthenians 64.5%, Poles 22.0%, Jews 12%. Of the 44 administrative divisions of Austrian eastern Galicia, Lviv (Polish: Lwów, German: Lemberg) was the only one in which Poles made up a majority of the population. Anthropologist Marianna Dushar has argued that this diversity led to a development of a distinctive food culture in the region.                         

Linguistically, the Polish language was almost equally used with Ruthenian in Galicia. According to the 1910 census 58.6% of the combined population of both western and eastern Galicia spoke Polish as its mother tongue compared to 40.2% who spoke a Ruthenian language. The number of Polish-speakers may have been inflated because Jews were not given the option of listing Yiddish as their language.

The Jews of Galicia had immigrated in the Middle Ages from Germany. German-speaking people were more commonly referred to by the region of Germany where they originated (such as Saxony or Swabia).

For inhabitants who spoke different native languages, e.g. Poles and Ruthenians, identification was less problematic, but widespread multilingualism blurred the ethnic divisions again.

In 1772 with the partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the south-eastern part of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was awarded to the Habsburg Empress Maria-Theresa, whose bureaucrats named it the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, after one of the titles of the princes of Hungary, although its borders coincided but roughly with those of the former medieval principality. Known informally as Galicia, it became the largest, most populous, and northernmost province of the Austrian Empire, while after 1867 part of the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary, until the dissolution of the monarchy at the end of World War I in 1918, when it ceased to exist as a geographic entity.

In 1782 to 1789, Joseph II introduced legislation aimed at the forced assimilation of the Jews S(sabolition of communal autonomy and the validity of rabbinical courts, liability to military servie, compulsory education in government schools, tax on kosher meats, etc.  )  

In suceeding years, the Austrian government tried to integrate the Jews by turning them to agriculture and ending their isolation.  The policy failed owing to the Jewish masses' loyalty to tradition.  This period was marked aby a flourishing of rabbinic scholarship and by a severe struggle between the Hasidim and the Mitnaggedim ending with the victory of the former and the consolidation of Galicia as a Hasidic citadel.

In the mid 1800's, a conflict developed between Hasidism and Haskalah.  from 1849, the Jews of Galicia began to receive equality of political rights and these were embodied in the Austrian constitution of 1867.  Galicia was an important center of non-Hebrew literature during the 19th and 20th centuries.  Many scholars worked there and many Hebrew periodicals were published in Galicia. The problem was Maskilim displayed which pronounced tendencies to assimilation, first in German, later to Polish and the culture.  The Jewish national movement in the late 19th century appealed to the Jews of Galicia, which was the birthplace of Hibbat Zion.  A Jewish workers movement started in Galicia.  At the same time, the Poles and Ukrainians began to push the Jews out of the economic sphere and their general plight always depressed, and deteriorated.  this led to extensive emigration, especially to the USA.  

In WWI, many Jews fled from Galicia to Hungary, Austria and Bohemia.  Galicia was again part of Poland from 1918 on.

Siege of Przemyśl in 1915

During the First World War, Galicia saw heavy fighting between the forces of Russia and the Central Powers. The Russian forces overran most of the region in 1914 after defeating the Austro-Hungarian army in a chaotic frontier battle in the opening months of the war. They were in turn pushed out in the spring and summer of 1915 by a combined German and Austro-Hungarian offensive.

In 1918, Western Galicia became a part of the restored Republic of Poland, which absorbed the Lemko-Rusyn Republic. The local Ukrainian population briefly declared the independence of Eastern Galicia as the "West Ukrainian People's Republic". During the Polish-Soviet War the Soviets tried to establish the puppet-state of the Galician SSR in East Galicia, the government of which after a couple of months was liquidated.

The fate of Galicia was settled by the Peace of Riga on 18 March 1921, attributing Galicia to the Second Polish Republic. Although never accepted as legitimate by some Ukrainians, it was internationally recognized on 15 May 1923.

The Ukrainians of the former eastern Galicia and the neighbouring province of Volhynia made up about 12% of the Second Polish Republic population, and were its largest minority. As Polish government policies were unfriendly towards minorities, tensions between the Polish government and the Ukrainian population grew, eventually giving rise to the militant underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

             Hasid and IDF taking a break to smell the roses.both speaking Hebrew and Hasid also speaking Yiddish.in Israel.....

As for Hasidism, it is still widespread.  Its teachings have become widely known in the occidental world, mainly through the works of Martin Buber, both through his retelling of Hasidic anecdotes and through his philosophy which has been termed "neo-Hasidic."

Martin Buber, Martin Buber (Hebrew: מרטין בובר;  February 8, 1878 – June 13, 1965) was an Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship. Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy.  

Martin (Hebrew name: מָרְדֳּכַי, Mordechai) Buber was born in Vienna to an Orthodox Jewish family. Buber was a direct descendant of the 16th-century rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, known as the Maharam (מהר"ם), the Hebrew acronym for “Our Teacher, the Rabbi, Rabbi Meir”, of Padua. Karl Marx is another notable relative. After the divorce of his parents when he was three years old, he was raised by his grandfather in Lvov. His grandfather, Solomon Buber, was a scholar of Midrash and Rabbinic Literature. At home, Buber spoke Yiddish and German. In 1892, Buber returned to his father's house in Lemberg, today's Lviv, Ukraine.

This same area was fought over just as it is today with Russia attacking Ukraine.  Lviv, Ukraine keeps popping up. Russia hasn't given up wanting this land.  You'd think they'd get the message.  It's for the Ukrainians, the old land of Galicia. it's right in Central Europe and north of the Carpathian Mountains.    

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Eastern_Europe)