Judaism advises us to follow the doctors

AuthorLEVI COOPER
Date07 January 2021
Published date07 January 2021
Publication titleJerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)
Guttmacher would go on to be a unique leader in the hassidic landscape. He did not come from hassidic stock and he was based in Greiditz in Prussia (Grätz in German; today Grodzisk Wielkopolski, Poland) rather than in the hassidic heartlands further east.

Guttmacher received many kvitelach – notes by petitioners containing requests for prayers for health, livelihood, marriage or other needs.

His collection of kvitelach was discovered in 1932 in an attic. From there the trove was taken to YIVO in Vilna. During the Second World War parts of the collection were buried in the Vilna Ghetto. Most of the kvitelach, however, were expropriated by the Nazis and brought to Frankfurt. After the Holocaust, the US Army returned the collection to YIVO, now based in New York. The buried kvitelach were recovered and also brought to New York.

Today the collection is partly held in the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in New York and partly held in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. This is the only known surviving collection of kvitelach in the world.

In his recently published Historical Atlas of Hasidism, Professor Marcin Wodzinski mapped the YIVO collection of over 6,000 kvitelach. As Wodzinski explained, the map demonstrates how most of Guttmacher's correspondence came from Russian-occupied Poland to the east. We can also learn from the map that people in places nearer Greiditz tended to send more kvitelach than those far away. Overlaying the data with the network of railroads indicates that rail connections to the Greiditz region also contributed to the likelihood of sending a kvitel from afar to Guttmacher.

Guttmacher was also a forerunner of Zionism. A political realist, he called for agricultural settlement in the Land of Israel. Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, founded in 1939 by refugees from Nazi Germany, bears his name.

IN 1831, faced with the spread of cholera, Guttmacher turned to his venerable teacher, Rabbi Akiva Eger, for counsel as to how to react to the spreading disease.

We do not have the student's original question before us, but from his teacher's response we can reconstruct that he had inquired about appropriate synagogue protocol in the shadow of a plague.

Eger responded, addressing three points: synagogue attendance, additional prayers, counsel on how to combat the plague with medical and with mystical means.

Regarding synagogue attendance, the rabbi of Posen confirmed that considering the contagious nature of cholera, overcrowding was indeed a...

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