Mystic, Teacher, Troublemaker: Shimon Engel and the Challenges of Hasidic Yeshiva Education in Interwar Poland

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture in Polish Jewish Studies The Aleksander and Alicja Hertz Memorial Fellowship and the Samuel and Flora Weiss Research Fellowship Admission: Free

Prior to the interwar period, yeshivas were virtually unknown among Polish Hasidim, who preferred a less formal educational paradigm centered on a shtibl (a small house of study). Following the First World War and an increase in secularization, however, the shtiblekh emptied out and Hasidic yeshivas were designed as an emergency measure to retain the young people within the Hasidic fold. Paradoxically, this educational revolution depended to a great extent on people like Shimon Engel Horowic of Żelechów (1876-1943) – elite scholars educated in traditional shtiblekh, who often looked on modern yeshivas with suspicion, if not outright enmity.

This talk will explore Engel’s idea of Hasidic education as an alternative solution to the interwar crisis that befell the Hasidic communities. This controversial idea an idea that put his life on a collision trajectory with the modernizing endeavors of Hasidic leaders in Poland and eventually ended his career when his conflict with the administration of the famous Yeshivat khakhme lublin resulted in violent riots.

About the Speaker

Wojciech Tworek is a postdoctoral fellow at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Previously, he held a postdoctoral position at the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wroclaw. His doctoral thesis explored the teachings of Shneur Zalman of Liady, the founding rebbe of Chabad. His current research projects concern Chabad in interwar Poland.