Nadene Goldfoot
Shneur Zalman of Liadi (Hebrew: שניאור זלמן מליאדי; September 4, 1745 – December 15, 1812 O.S. / 18 Elul 5505 – 24 Tevet 5573) was a rabbi and the founder and first Rebbe of Chabad, a branch of Hasidic Judaism. He wrote many works, and is best known for Shulchan Aruch HaRav, Tanya, and his Siddur Torah Or compiled according to the Nusach Ari.
Shneur Zalman was born in 1745 in the small town of Liozna, Grand Duchy of Lithuania (present-day Belarus). He was the son of Baruch, who was a paternal descendant of the mystic and philosopher Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel. According to Meir Perels of Prague, the Maharal was the great-great-grandson of Judah Leib the Elder who was said to have descended paternally from Hai Gaon and therefore also from the Davidic dynasty; however, several modern historians such as Otto Muneles and Shlomo Engard have questioned this claim. Shneur Zalman was a prominent (and the youngest) disciple of Dov Ber of Mezeritch, the "Great Maggid", who was in turn the successor of the founder of Hasidic Judaism,
Yisrael ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov.(1700-1760) He was born in Podolia, studied Kabbalah, a children's teacher. Disciples flocked to study his doctrines, and had 10,000 followers. He also was shochet-ritual slaughter for meat; teaching based on Isaac Luria and his school.
Isaac Schneersohn (1882-1969) a French Jewish public figure born in Kamenetz Podolsk, was the crown rabbi in Gorodnya from 1906 and eventually settled in France. He had to hide in 1943 but founded the Centre de documentation Juive Contemporaine, and later launched the project of the "tomb of the unknown Jewish martyr."
1. Orthodox Judaism
He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century. As leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, he took an insular Hasidic group that almost came to an end with the Holocaust and transformed it into one of the most influential movements in religious Jewry, with an international network of over 5,000 educational and social centers. The institutions he established include kindergartens, schools, drug-rehabilitation centers, care-homes for the disabled, and synagogues.
Chabad, also known as Lubavitch, Habad and Chabad-Lubavitch, is an Orthodox Jewish Hasidic dynasty. Chabad is one of the world's best-known Hasidic movements, particularly for its outreach activities. It is one of the largest Hasidic groups and Jewish religious organizations in the world. they believe in teaching about Judaism, including how to use tefillin as this soldier already has done. Founded in 1775 by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the name "Chabad" (חב״ד) is an acronym formed from three Hebrew words—Chokhmah, Binah, Da'at, the first three sefirot of the kabbalistic Tree of Life: חכמה, בינה, דעת, "Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge"—which represent the intellectual and kabbalistic underpinnings of the movement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBgZfJprIys
Orthodox Judaism is what we called Judaism. Jews all over the world were following the same codes, with everyone reading the same pages wherever we lived in order to finish the Tanakh in one year and then start over again. It was comforting to know that we could walk into any synagogue, and the only difference might be the people's clothing. Men sat separated from women. All attention, then, was on the prayer on hand, not on women. People in eastern Europe spoke Yiddish. You could tell from what country they came from by their accent. Those from Spain, etc, spoke Ladino and those from Egypt, the Mizrachi, etc, spoke Arabic.
2. Reform Judaism
Politics change everywhere all the time. Germany was affected and we have people that broke away from our traditional methods and started Reform Judaism. It was a reaction to Napoleonic Emancipation. Israel Jacobson in Germany started it in his small synagogue by shortening the service, and used an organ like Christian churches were doing. His sermon was in German, not Hebrew. Samuel Holdheim and Abraham Geiger advocated drastic changes. the first congregation in US was in Charleston, South Carolina's Beth Elohim in early 1800s.
Isaac Mayer Wise founded the Union of American Hebrew Congregations by 1873, a college 2 years later, and conferences in 1889. The said that the externals of Judaism may be altered to strengthen its eternals, and that historic Judaism adapted itself to its environment in order to strengthen its impact upon society, and modern Judaism should make similar modifications to correspond to the current situation. Many debates by the orthodox didn't even accept them as Jews anymore. Men and women sat together.
I may interject that this was a first experience in living in freedom and not in confining shtetles. They were rubbing elbows with people other than Jews. They experienced quickly, Hellenization. Perhaps they wanted to present a people like others in their presence.
Interestingly, it was Rabbi Rose (changed from Orthdox) of the Reform Temple in Portland who sponsored a group of Zionists to defend Israel via debate and gave me a long list of books to read in preparation for it. They were barely tolerated at the time in Israel but here they were, defending it more than all the others. Rose was not my rabbi nor the Temple my synagogue, but I learned a lot by teaching there.
3. Conservative Judaism
Well, they changed so much that it became scary to their parishioners so Conservative Judaism was born out of this movement. Nathan Krochmal, Zacharias Frankel, and Heinrich Graetz saw that Judaism was responsive to the changing religious, moral, social, and economic needs of the Jewish people in its original form as it was. The influence of social and economic factors bore upon the growth of halakhah. Judaism, in its periods of vitality, far from being a static self-contained datum, was the developing religious culture of a people that could assimilate influences from other cultures and yet retain its distinctive ethos.
Solomon Schechter (1850-1915) born in Romania, spent his youth within the orbit of the traditional Judaism of pre-world War I in Europe studying in Vienna and Berlin. He and others insisted that Judaism was true to its own nature, and was realistic about Zionism. They opposed extreme changes in traditional observances. They permitted certain modifications of halakhah, in the text of the traditional ketubhah, and the sitting of men and women together during worship. He became president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, father of Conservative Judaism.
Our ancestors came to the USA in the late 1800s from Europe, and we make up 2% of the population. World-wide, we are 0.02 % of the population, an endangered species of homo sapiens ever since WWII and the Holocaust, and even though 6 million of us live in Israel these days, we've been persecuted there as well by the neighbors. As of 2022, the world's core Jewish population (those identifying as Jews above all else) was estimated at 15.2 million, 0.2% of the 8 billion worldwide population. Israel hosts the largest core Jewish population in the world with 6,983,000, followed by the United States with 6,000,000.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chabad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Mendel_Schneerson
https://www.geni.com/people/Menachem-Mendel-Schneerson-The-Lubavitcher-Rebbe/6000000001484129751
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Mayer_Wise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shneur_Zalman_of_Liadi
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