Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY - Battle For The Soul And Bank Balance Of New York's Most Powerful Hasidic Sect

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY - An extraordinary succession battle is under way in the cloistered world of ultra-orthodox Judaism after the death of the rabbi who headed the world's largest and powerful Hasidic sect.
Grand Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, 91, died on Monday and his funeral in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of New York that is home to the Satmar sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews drew 20,000 followers.

But barely two days after Rabbi Teitelbaum was laid to rest, his two sons fired the first salvos in what is expected to be a bitter and protracted battle to wear his mantle as the rabbi-king of the Satmar, and gain control of property believed to be worth $1bn.

The younger son's side fired his first shot, releasing a will written by his father that declared him the heir. "He shall occupy my position and succeed me without any shortfall, for effective immediately I have granted him the position," the late rabbi was reported to have decreed.

The seeds for fraternal discord were sown in 1999 when the rabbi began making plans for his demise. He appointed Aaron as the sect's grand rabbi in Kiryat Joel, an entirely Hasidic enclave north of New York City. He kept Zalmen by his side in the Satmar base in Williamsburg.
Some observers see the shrewdness of the late rabbi's ways. The Satmar empire in the US was more than big enough for his sons to share. But the sons did not see it that way. As their father succumbed to cancer, the two sides descended into an increasingly bitter feud, obtaining writs from New York state and secular courts to try to enforce what each saw as their birthright.

Jonathan Mark, who has reported on the Satmar for 25 years, believes such succession battles are a feature of Orthodox life. No longer can a rabbi expect to command a following by fiat. He has got to work at the personal relationship between rabbi and flock that is the distinguishing feature of Hasidic sects. "In the last 15 years almost no major Hasidic group has had a clean succession," he said.

The Satmar are the largest and most dynamic of the Orthodox Jewish sects. Taking their name from Satu Mare, a town in in present-day Romania, they claim 65,000 adherents in Williamsburg and Kiryat Joel and several thousand others in Jerusalem, London, Antwerp and Montreal.
Samuel Heilman, professor of Jewish studies at the City University of New York, has a solution. The sect could agree on an amiable split. "The group is much bigger now. It can sustain two rebbes located in different locations. If this was in Europe, one would be called the Kiryat Joel rebbe and one called the Williamsburg rebbe, and there wouldn't be any problem."