Life in a Hasidic Court in Russian Poland toward the End of the 19th and the Early 20th Centuries

Ita Kalish

1965

Rabbi Simkha Bunem of Warka Departs for the Holy Land

Rumors of my grandfather’s plan to depart for Palestine reached his wife and children shortly after the Russian revolution of 1905. [ . . . ]

The motive for his journey to Palestine was—in the narrative of my grandmother—as follows: Rabbi Mendele of Warka had died after nineteen years in the…

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Creator Bio

Ita Kalish

1903–1994

Because she was the daughter of a Hasidic rabbi in Poland, Ita Kalish’s secular education was undertaken in secret, conducted against her father’s wishes. After his death when she was sixteen, Kalish left her husband and daughter behind to live in Warsaw with her sisters. There, they became active in secular and Zionist circles. In 1923, she moved to Berlin; when the Nazi Party assumed power in 1933, Kalish immigrated to Palestine, where she worked for the Jewish Agency and, eventually, for the Israeli civil service. Despite her withdrawal from Hasidic life, Kalish’s memoirs vividly depict the atmosphere of her father’s court.

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