Create Me Anew: Hillel Zeitlin and Kedusha Discussion Guide
Create Me Anew: Hillel Zeitlin and Kedusha Moshe Waldoks orn in White Russia in 1871, Hillel Zeitlin ably unique role in the Warsaw community. Bwas murdered by the Nazis in the process His home on Shliska Street became a salon for of liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. He mystics, occultists, youthful Hasidic seekers was, in many ways, the urvater, the progenitor and skeptics, journalists, and writers. Zeitlin of much of the post-Shoah interest in mysti- began to play the role of an independent cism, Kabbalah, and the Zohar. rebbe. In the 1920s and early ’30s he corre- Zeitlin was a combination of scholar, jour- sponded with Rav Kook and others with mys- nalist, poet, polemicist, mystic, and prophet, tical leanings. inspiring Abraham Joshua Heschel (Zeitlin After the Second World War began, Zeitlin was the first to use the term hishtomemut hane- joined his beloved Warsaw Jews in the ghetto, fesh, “radical amazement,” in a 1911 essay) and refusing many offers to be smuggled out. (His Elie Wiesel. He is also a formative figure in the son, the renowned Yiddish poet Aaron Zeitlin, thought of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, was in America at the outbreak of the war.) In the founder of the Jewish renewal approach the ghetto he gathered around him Bratzlaver to post-Holocaust Judaism in the United and other Hasidic mystics, to usher in the mes- States. sianic redemption of shnat Shabbat [taf shin bet], Writing in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic, 1942. At the close of that year in the Hebrew Zeitlin contributed to the most well-read Yid- calendar the 71-year-old Zeitlin, according to dish newspaper in Warsaw, Der Moment, for Hillel Siedman’s eyewitness account, marched over 30 years, as well as to noted Hebrew and to the transfer point in the Warsaw Ghetto Yiddish journals.
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