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INTRODUCTION
Hasidism in the interwar years (1918-39) saw intensive development on both the doctrinal and the organizational levels. One of the novel features of Hasidism was a change in its educational paradigm. Responding to the dramatic challenges of the post-world war i reality, Hasidim began to develop networks ofyeshivas. With a frequently strict code of conduct, onsite dormitories for students, and permanent control of the staff, these schools were meant to provide an institutional framework for Hasidic youth and to keep them off the streets, literally, until they could get married.1 The new yeshiva gradually replaced the shtibl, Hasidic house of prayer, study, and gathering, as the community's flag ship educational institution.2 This essay examines this turning point in Hasidic education in interwar Poland through the example of a now neglected yet once controversial figure: Avraham Shimon Engel Horovits of Zelechow (1877-1943?), known primarily as an educator and spiritual supervisor3 of the yeshivas Tomkhe Temimim in Warsaw and Yeshivat Hakhme Lublin (hereafter: Yohel).
Shimon Engel's life exemplifies the paradoxes of the educational transformation in the interwar Hasidic community in all its problems and solutions. Engel grew up in the late nineteenth century, a member of a Hasidic community that was losing its youth to secular ideologies.4 He feared the impact of modernity on Jewish orthodoxy, and yet he is remembered for his work in Yeshivat Hakhme Lublin, a modern institution par excellence. He scorned official titles and honors and esteemed Torah study for its own sake,5 and yet he prepared a number ofyeshiva students to take on rabbinical positions. Finally, though not a Hasidic rebbe, he gathered a loyal following who treated him as such.6 His biogra phy illustrates the emergence of a new source of authority in Hasidic society that derived from the institution of the modern yeshiva, an authority in competition with the established rebbe and his court.
Engel was not merely a relic of the old, pre-First World War Hasidic community. He was himself to a degree convinced of the inadequacy of the yeshiva model, which he accused of blurring the boundary between Judaism and non-Jewish culture. At the same time he was acutely aware of the failure of the old closed model that seemed to push so many young Jews to...