THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER focused on changes in the education and roles of women in early twentieth-century eastern Europe and on later developments in the West. We considered the women and girls of Satmar, Bais Yaakov, and Habad, with some attention to the Habad sheluḥah, the empowered woman who, with her husband, was sent by Rabbi Menachem Mendel to strengthen Judaism and create a Habad outpost in a locale often far from the organized hasidic or haredi community where she was brought up.

In this chapter I examine some of the details of this process, in which young hasidic women are transformed into charismatic sources of Jewish inspiration for their communities and sometimes further afield.

Tradition and Empowerment

As illuminated by Chava Turniansky, Glikl of Hameln provides a famous paradigm of a woman who balances different roles: pious and loving wife and mother, and at the same time energetic businesswoman, empowered by a considerable degree of knowledge in an early modern German Jewish setting. In a post-Holocaust western context, centred on the last two rebbes in Brooklyn, the Habad-Lubavitch activist woman also provides an example of the balancing of roles, or even the combination of contrasts, which this chapter seeks to explore.

Given that twentieth-century Habad-Lubavitch began in eastern Europe, with its spiritual leadership centred first in Russia, then briefly in Latvia, then Poland, and finally moving to New York, it is no surprise that in the move to the West in the mid-twentieth century there was indeed change, possibly radical, combined with deliberate attempts at continuity and traditionalism. Indeed, the same can be said of any Orthodox or haredi society in the modern period as regards both men and women. The noteworthy innovation in the case of the women of Habad-Lubavitch is the union of two disparate and seemingly contrasting goals: on the one hand, the creation of an empowered, Jewishly learned, and often charismatic activist, and on the other, the retention of the idealized traditional concept of the Jewish woman: mother of a large family, modest wife, and welcoming hostess. We will try to focus on a few points in the history and workings of this process.