פארוואס איך בין א מעריץ פונעם היינטיגן בעלזא רב שליט"א

Hasidic lore and also non-Hasidic visitors were struck also by his close relationship with his wife, Malka, known as a pious woman of high rank, and credited by her husband as the reason he attained his own spiritual level. The public intimacy between them was highly unusual for Hasidic leaders: she would sit beside him even when Hasidim came to receive his blessing. A Hasid from another group, who protested to his rebbe about “the behavior of the new leaders,” received the explanation that “all of Shalom’s behavior with the rebbetsin [his wife] is like that of Adam and Eve before the primordial Sin”

Even more remarkable in terms of challenging traditional gender roles in the Belz court was Eydel, the second daughter of Shalom. Hasidic sources and references to her in other memoirs attest to her special status as a religious mystic, the great esteem with which she was held by her father and the fact that he viewed her as his true successor. Shalom was believed to say that “she is not a daughter to me but rather a son and all that is missing is a spodek [the fur hat worn by Hasidic men].” After the death of her father, she began to behave like a rebbe in every respect: Hasidim would bring her kvitlekh with requests and seek her blessing. She married Yitshak Rubin, grandson of the tsaddik Naftali of Ropshits, moved with him to Brody, and from there sharply criticized the leadership and practices of her younger brother Yehoshua, who became the second tsaddik of Belz. Eydel was incensed that, in contrast to their father, who lived modestly, the “money from the poor, which streams from all quarters to his table, goes to waste in his court on extravagances, such as fancy clothing, silk garments and mineral spas"

A severe depression evidently came over Eydel as a consequence of her brother’s succession and her own failure to continue acting as a rebbe. This depression was understood as possession by a dybbuk, which caused her to lose her mind. A ceremony was enacted to exorcise this dybbuk in the town of Krasna, symbolically located midway between Belz and Brody. The Israeli scholar Dov Sadan, a native of Brody, related, based on family traditions, that Eydel’s brother Yehoshua conducted the ceremony, in the course of which she quarreled with him and challenged his authority. While non-Hasidic Jews of Brody regarded these stories as historical, the Belz Hasidim sought to deny and suppress them. Eydel’s story — like Hanna Rokhl Werbermacher, the Maid of Ludmir, and several women of the Chernobyl dynasty — challenge the norms of the Hasidic system — or the patriarchal system of Judaism altogether — from a gender perspective. Indeed, so unusual are these stories in relationship to medieval Jewish tradition that we must count them as constituting aspects of Hasidism as a modern movement. At the same time, though, the failure of these women to establish themselves as Hasidic leaders beyond short periods demonstrates that Hasidism’s form of modernity was defensive or reactionary