The Satmar Rebbe and history in hindsight

Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, was a flawed personality; arrogant, ambitious and fear-ridden. An article in the Tablet by Menachem Keren-Katz gives a hostile, critical account of a narrow-minded, intransigent man, who abandoned his congregation, was quite unable or unwilling to cooperate with other leaders of the Jewish world, and by not warning his followers of the plans of the Nazis to annihilate the Jews of Europe responsible for their murder. He was a staunch anti-Zionist, who blamed the Zionists for the Holocaust, for provoking the enmity of Hitler and for forestalling the coming of the Mashiah. But the article was written with hindsight. In the 1930s and the 1940s the Rebbe could well have been aware of the dangers, and did at times do whatever he thought appropriate to save himself, but he had to make his judgement on the basis of what he knew. He knew that the Hassidim could live a religious, uncompromising  ultra-observant Jewish life in Sighet. He also knew of the dangers of assimilation and the likely abandonment of such life away from the natural environment of his Hassidim in America, Palestine and the rest of the world. He saw surviving in Sighet, even if it meant accommodation with hostile governments less of a threat than leaving their  habitat and trying to pursue their traditional way life away from there. Compromising with the enemy and bribing them was the way Jewish communities had coped with  threat in the past. No one, not the Rebbe, not anyone could have foreseen the irrational, single-minded persecution of Jews on a huge industrial scale. The Rebbe is depicted in the article concealed behind a curtain in the back of the cattle train on his way to Bergen-Belsen, not talking to anyone, ashamed and humiliated. He was just a flawed human being and should be judges as such.