ABSTRACT
The most important traditionalist communities of Eastern Jews before the First World War lived not only on the territory of the former Russian Empire (today, a part of Poland, the Baltic states, etc.), but also in other parts of Europe. A large pre-First World War community of Orthodox Jews could be found in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially in Hungary. 1 As in the case of the former Tsarist Russia, many regions of the former Hungary are now parts of other states. Thus tens of thousands of Jews changed their citizenship after the war. For ethnic Hungarians and for many Hungarian Jews, one of the most painful losses was that of Transylvania, which became part of Romania after the Treaty of Trianon (1920). In Transylvania were the significant centres of Hungarian (in Yiddish: Ungarish) Orthodox Jewry – regions such as Szatmár and Máramaros and cities like Cluj (Klausenburg/Kolozsvár). Let us now focus directly on the town of Szatmár (today the Romanian town of Satu Mare), 2 where a number of prominent rabbis lived. One of the most important rabbinic families there was the Satmar Hasidic dynasty, of which one of the most prominent members in the twentieth century was Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum.
