Unterlander Jews Erotic

Unterlander Jews are the Jews of the Unterland, the northeastern counties of the old Kingdom of Hungary. These include Szatmár, Máramaros, Bereg and Ung and the Carpathian valleys around them, land now shared by Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary. The name is easiest to understand next to its opposite. The Oberland in the west, around Pressburg, was home to Jews of Moravian and Austrian descent. They followed the non-Hasidic Orthodoxy of the Chatam Sofer and leaned toward German. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Unterland filled up with Jews coming over the mountains from Galicia. They brought Hasidism and an Eastern Yiddish that set them apart from western Hungarian Jews in speech, dress and outlook.

Hungarian Hasidism starts here. Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Taub of Nagykálló, remembered as the Kaliver Rebbe, took Hungarian shepherd songs and turned them into sacred melodies. One of them, Szól a kakas már, is still sung at Hasidic tables. Towns like Munkács, Sighet and Szatmár grew rabbinic courts whose names now travel the world as dynasties. When Hungarian Jewry split into Orthodox, Neolog and Status Quo camps after the 1868 congress, the Unterland went Orthodox almost without a fight. Religion shaped the whole week, not just the Sabbath: Yiddish at home, Hebrew in prayer, and a rebbe whose advice counted in marriages and business. Most families were poor and rural. They kept shops and taverns in villages alongside Rusyn, Romanian, Hungarian and Slovak neighbors.

In the twentieth century the region was broken apart twice. The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 divided it among Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary. In Czechoslovak Munkács a Hebrew-language Zionist high school opened even though the town's fiercely anti-Zionist rebbe opposed it. Hungary took the land back between 1938 and 1940. In 1941, thousands of Jews who could not prove Hungarian citizenship were expelled across the border and murdered at Kamianets-Podilskyi. In the spring of 1944 the Unterland was among the first regions emptied in the deportations to Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel was taken from Sighet in that sweep.

What survived did so somewhere else. Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum of Satmar reached New York and rebuilt his court in Williamsburg. It became one of the largest Hasidic communities anywhere, and later founded Kiryas Joel upstate. Other Unterland dynasties, among them Munkács, Spinka and Sighet, rebuilt in Brooklyn and Israel. Almost no Jews live in the old counties today. The Unterland lives on in the prayers, songs and Yiddish of their grandchildren.