Journal articles on the topic 'Schneersohn'

This article examines Fischl Schneersohn’s (1887–1958) “science of man” as a psychotherapeutic approach situated between modern psychology and Chassidic mysticism. While almost forgotten today, Schneersohn was a prolific writer, well-known in Yiddish-speaking circles as a psychologist, educationalist, novelist, and psychotherapist. As a descendant of an important dynasty of Chassidic rebbes, he grew up inside the Chabad movement, but followed a secular career. The first part of this article traces Schneersohn’s biography from the outskirts of the Russian empire to Germany, Poland, the United States, and Palestine, and shows how his upbringing and historical experiences shaped his psychological works and his self-understanding as educationalist and psychotherapist. The second part examines Schneersohn’s main work, Studies in Psycho-Expedition, which blended Chassidic mysticism and contemporary psychology in a way that was both idiosyncratic and unique. The psycho-sociological “science of man” was a modern psychological and psychotherapeutic approach, using specific methods to gain knowledge about the human mind, and to counteract and treat mental disorders, neuroses, and nervousness. At the same time, however, it was deeply influenced by Chassidic mysticism; revolving around the assumption of a universal human need for spiritual ecstasy. Schneersohn universalised, secularised, and reframed elements of the Kabbalah as a modern psychotherapy. By examining an almost forgotten psychotherapeutic approach outside the mainstream in its specific historical context, this article contributes to the history of the connection between religion and the psy-disciplines, as well as to ongoing debates about the role of spirituality and ecstasy in psychology and psychotherapy.

This article discusses the biographies of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the Rebbe) within the broader context of Chabad historiographic lore, in particular the quasi-historical writings of Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn from the 1930s and 1940s. Described by Ada Rapoport-Albert as “hagiography with footnotes,” these seemingly scholarly and modern texts constituted an alternative narrative to that of academic Jewish history. From this vantage point, I consider how biographies published by academics and by hasidic authors have mutually influenced each other, particularly in their scope, form, and method. To that end, I examine the controversy that surrounded the 2010 publication of the first academic biography of Schneerson, Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman'sThe Rebbe, and analyze the strategies undertaken by subsequent authors that have allowed them to present the Rebbe's life in a form that was no longer “hagiography with footnotes” (which would have alienated a secular readership) but as seemingly impartial biographies (without alienating the hasidic readership).

AbstractScholarship on Hasidism typically utilizes literary source material of the dynastic leaders and their top disciples, while the more typical master/disciple relationship has escaped attention. Hasidic movements have produced, distributed, and voraciously consumed visual portraits of their leaders throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The most visually productive Hasidic community is the Belarusian HabadLubavitch, which has produced images of five of its seven generations of leaders. Indeed, portraits of its leaders have been integral to the development of Habad both in Eastern Europe and its post-Shoah rejuvination in the United States. This paper begins with Habad's visual history from the 1880s release of portrait paintings of the first and third Habad leaders in the effort to establish a unified group identity at a time of factionalism. The survey then moves to Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Rebbe of Habad, who rallied his followers with the medium of photography. Photography became a central component of his leadership in the 1930s and 1940s. The study then moves to the seventh and last Habad leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who expanded the use of visual culture in Habad and used his own image to forge a post-Shoah group identity around a distinctly American leader who was also the spiritual repository of the six preceding Russian leaders. Schneerson's image production and reproduction began to model American celebrity culture in the early 1970s as part of a public campaign to inaugurate the Messianic Age. This broad dissemination of Schneerson's image inadvertantly created an elastic Schneerson portrait, whose reflexivness, in some respects, transcended its subject.

Much scholarly and popular attention has been centered on whether or not Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh rebbe of the Ḥabad-Lubavitch dynasty, identified himself as the Messiah. While this interest is surely understandable, both doctrinally and anthropologically, in my judgment, it obscures the central question concerning the nature of the messianism he propagated. This line of inquiry might seem gratuitous for two reasons. First, his writings, discourses, and actions are replete with references to a personal Messiah, and since there is no evidence that he ever deviated from the strictures of rabbinic orthodoxy, there should be no reason to cast doubt on his explicit assertions. Second, a distinguishing feature of Ḥabad ideology, in consonance with the general drift of Ḥasidism, is the ostensible commitment to divulging mystical secrets, penimiyyut ha-torah, the spreading of the wellsprings outward (hafaṣat ma‘yanot ḥuṣah) to broadcast the mysteries that impart knowledge of divinity mandatory for proper worship. Prima facie, it would appear that Ḥabad breaks the code of esotericism upheld (in theory if not unfailingly in practice) by kabbalists through the centuries. This is surely the self-understanding sanctioned by the seventh rebbe, and it can be justifiably argued that he went to greater lengths than his predecessor and father-in-law, Yosef Yiṣḥaq Schneersohn—availing himself of the socioeconomic opportunities of the postwar American environment and making use of the instruments of technology—to accomplish the diffusion of the inwardness of the Torah.

On the Opening of the Department of the Russian State Library in Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, as well as about the history of the Library of Schneerson family, which had become the center of the collection.

The article deals with the social construction of the charisma of the seventh leader (rebbe) of the Jewish Chabad movement, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (19021994). The comprehensive analysis of the charismatic carrier of the leader shows the process by which the spiritual power of Schneerson moved from a classical (according to Weber) interaction between charisma and a community that recognizes this power to a identification of his figure with the Messiah. Schneerson and the Chabad movement actually represent an effort to modernize one of the two tendencies present in the Chassidic tradition concerning the figure of Messiah: in contrast with the idea that considers not predictable the arrival of Messiah, Chabad, particularly because of the Schneerson's charisma, believe the advent of Messiah imminent. The task of the leader consequently is to pay attention on the premonitory signs of the forthcoming event. The identification between charisma and Messiah in Chabad movement represents a case study of extreme messianism that means a real impasse to solve and rule the question of succession of charisma after the death of the Rebbe.

In the Soviet time, libraries only preserved the names of private and, occasionally, institutional collections. Standalone manuscripts or small sets of manuscripts would become part of the collections in national languages. The information concerning the origins of new arrivals was not considered valuable enough to keep record of. Such was the case of Fond 182 of the Manuscript Department of the Russian National Library, commonly referred to as the Schneerson Library. Close examination of the content, handwriting, binding, stickers and owners’ inscription may allow us to identify some of the manuscript’s former owners. Thus, the collection contains not only the manuscripts of the Schneerson family proper, but also those belonging to Zelig Persits, Yaakov Maze, Benyamin Epstein, Bentsion Ettlinger, and the Karaite national library “Karay Bitikligi”, as well as the materials – mostly fragments – that should have been ascribed to the Günzburg Collection and some “trophy” manuscripts that were brought over to the USSR after the WWII and due to the lack of qualified scholars, wound up in Fond 182.

The paper is dedicated to the quest for the sources of the two notes made by Daniil Kharms in his notebooks and dated May 1927 and July 1933. The first one is devoted to someone “great Rebbe from Liadi”: Kharms was going to get his book with musical score from Doibver Levin. The motif in question is the arba bavot nigun, also called “the great nigun”, ascribed to Schneur Salman Schneerson von Liadi, the founder of Liubavich Hasid dynasty, The paper analyses the “magic” context of Kharms interest in nigun (which, according to the followers of Habad, could influence reality) and the circumstances of the hypothetic visit of Levin, Kharms and Bekhterev to the sixth Liubavich Rebbe Joseph Yitzhak Schneerson, who was then residing in Leningrad. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the origins of Kharm’s note on the ship “Pyatnitsa” (“Friday”) alledgedly created to fight superstitions. It is demonstrated that the form of the legend written down by Kharms points to its direct source — Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Red Rover. However the Russian source could have been the first edition of the novel that contained the author’s note telling the legend; this note was withdrawn from all later reeditions.

When Menachem Friedman and I resolved to write what became The Rebbe: The Life and the Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, we did so because as sociologists we were puzzled, as we put it in our preface, by how a “a small Hasidic group that seemed on the verge of collapse in 1950 with the death of their sixth leader” had replanted itself in America and in less than a generation “gained fame and influence throughout the world in ways no one could have imagined” at the time their next and thus far last rebbe, Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson, took over the reins of leadership in 1951. More than that, we were quite amazed that this group, which at its height during the twentieth century was never among the largest hasidic sects and probably numbered at most about 100,000 worldwide, had managed to become among the most well-known hasidim in the world. We were no less struck that they had found ways to make their Jewish outreach efforts, as well as their extraordinarily parochial belief that the contemporary world had entered messianic times (and that only Lubavitchers and their rebbe knew how to hasten his coming), both newsworthy and known far beyond the borders of the hasidic world. Through a series of directed campaigns that aimed to transform Jewry and the world, many, if not most Lubavitchers had also tried to convince the world that their leader, who had reigned over them from Brooklyn for forty-three years, was the Messiah incarnate, even as he lay dying at Beth Israel Hospital in New York.

The scholarly literature on millennialism commonly employs Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance to understand how groups deal with failed prophecy. For many years Lubavitcher Hasidim held that their spiritual leader, Menachem Schneerson—the Lubavitcher Rebbe—was the Jewish Messiah and that he would reveal himself as such, ushering in the redemption. He died, however, in 1994 without fulfilling his followers’ messianic expectations. The author presents recent ethnographic data from fieldwork among Lubavitcher Hasidim illustrating the role of ritualistic performances and modern communication media (television, radio and the internet) in maintaining a sense of the Rebbe’s continuing presence. This ritualised reaffirmation of belief—a collective experience of symbolic fulfilment—provides disappointed followers with social and psychological support to render such an experience less cognitively distressing.

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rabbi Ya‘akov Landa was one of some 250,000 Russian Jews who had fled, or been forcibly expelled, from their homes in Russia's western provinces to settle in the country's interior. After Landa's exile, he spent several months traveling amid refugee communities in Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Saratov, and Samara provinces. At the conclusion of his journey, he composed a detailed report about the state of religious observance among the refugees, which he sent to Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson of Lubavitch. Landa's observations during these months shocked his core sensibilities as a rabbi and an observant Jew. He noted that refugees were disregarding such fundamental aspects of Jewish practice as Sabbath observance and were living without the basic institutions that had traditionally defined religious and communal life.

Theoretically grounded in agenda setting, a theory focused on the transfer of influence from communication media to a public, this paper examines the media activity of Chabad, an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish movement that is committed both to making Judaism generally accessible and to influencing public discourse. Rabbi M. M. Schneerson, the movement’s late wise and charismatic leader, undertook this dual mission in light of his conception of the theological grounds for the exploitation of mass media. Our examination of Chabad’s agenda-setting communication strategy was guided by two research questions: What is the range of communication media used by Chabad in an effort to achieve its goal? What evidence is there regarding the agenda-setting success of these communication efforts? Although it is obviously difficult to judge the precise degree of success, it is clear that Chabad is involved in a wide range of media and public activity and has already influenced public discourse well beyond the range of the movement itself and of the Jewish religion. The answer to the two questions above will help us understand the various movements that try to influence the agenda on religious grounds, so that we can determine the interface between religion and setting the agenda. It may also assist the efforts of other religious groups that want to influence the media and the political agenda.

Introduction. The given paper is devoted to questions, which make up the dissertation research section upon the genre semantics of the Chinese composers’ solo piano creations. The general theoretic background for the vast amount of the musical artifacts studying is specified in the current section. Theoretical background. In his studying of the Chinese composers’ piano creative work the author follows the research trend, originated by G. Schneerson, Lui Ji, Wei Tinge, Liu Fuan, Zhang Xiaohu, Zhang Qian and others. In particular, the current research is based upon the works by Bu Li, Bian Meng, Wang Ango, Wang Yuhe, Cheng Xu and other authors, devoted to the problem of the European and national music traditions interaction in the Chinese composers’ piano artifacts. The insufficient readiness of this thesis is mentioned. Namely, it is still the point of discussion and analyzing, to what extend and in what quality the genre system of European piano music is mastered by the Chinese composers. It is another point of investigation if their compositions are the result of the surface signs borrowing, taken from the most widely spread European genres or the Chinese composers were able to comprehend the genre semantics profoundly and develop some genres creatively, basing on the national musical tradition. Objectives. The main objective of the current article is the essential theoretical background specification for the Chinese composers’ piano creations genre peculiarities research; in particular, the polygenicity, the borrowed material usage principle, the composer’s genre stylization method. Methods. The task setting and developing is based upon the functional and morphological approaches to the musical genre comprehension, on the terminological analysis of the musical genres and styles understanding, on the upto-date philological and musicological conceptions of composition poetics, artistic genre and stylization method. Results and discussion. The concept of musical genre is defined as the type of the creation or the musical creative activity. Here the category of genre involves not only the formal but also the substantial musical compositions properties, their typical semantics. The musical genre genesis is specified by three factors: 1) the functional creations similarity, the identity of their assignment; 2) the similarity of the conditions of the composition creating and performing; 3) artistic and contextual affinity. The given factors specify the occurance of common musical form properties among several compositions, and these properties are defined as genre style. The composition style properties quite definitely “indicate” some kind of genre “prototype”, and in this sense they are the sign-index of the genre. The typical artisticcontent properties of musical creations and performing are also the index of the genre. These typical properties and designated as genre image (or genre semantics). The genre style and the corresponding images reflect the real type relations of the musical practice phenomena. It enables the composers to use the formal signs of a certain genre as an artistic attribute well recognized by the audience. In the musical genres system, the areas of interactive and independent music are conventionally separated. The first group includes the numerous kinds of every day musical performing, where music interacts with the riot, dance, poetic verbal speech, theatre performance and other types of a person’s artistic activity. Meanwhile, the main and specific function of the independent music is its being the object of artistic perception. The independent music artifacts don’t need any interaction with the expressive means of other arts. The piano music can belong to both spheres. A lot of independent sphere piano music compositions are bear the names of the genres belonging to the folklore, theatre music, church rituals, urban life. We mean such as piano “lullabies”, “ballads”, “minuets”, “waltzes”, “marches”, “arias”, ”love songs” etc. there is still another phenomenon: the piano music pieces, the name of which is not connected with the interactive music genres, are often profoundly connected with them on the levels of the language and artistic text. Quite often, the piano pieces are built on certain composition, borrowed from the sphere of folklore, popular or church music. In all the alike cases we can notice the artistically justified synchronous (non consequent) interaction of several musical genres signs and properties in the form of the definite composition. This phenomenon is characterized as polygenicity. Two main approaches to achieve the polygenre artistic expressive effect are defined: a) the use of the “exterior” (non native, another’s, alien) musical material; b) the genre style characteristic properties reproduction (genre stylization). The given work gives the definitions for the methods of different musical genres properties combination by means of borrowing and of the “exterior” material use in the frames of the original composition: quotations, arrangements, edited versions, fantasies and transcriptions. The genres, originated by these composing methods, are characterized. The essence of the genre stylization method in the Chinese composers’ creations is revealed. It is the reproduction of tonal and compositional peculiarities of the certain traditional Chinese music genre style into the composition text belonging to the European piano music genre system. The wide range of this method implementation is mentioned: from total style imitation to allusion. Conclusions. The existence of the great amount of the piano music compositions in the today’s Chinese musical culture motivates the overall and profound scientific analysis of this phenomenon, in particular, it stimulates the given sphere genre features revelation in both synchronous and diachronic (historic-evolutionary) aspects. The piano music genre sphere researcher needs the clearly formulated, capacious and non-contradictory categories of musical genre, genre style, genre system, genre semantics, as well as of the notions, derivative and connected with them. As it was mentioned by numerous specialists, the Chinese piano music distinctive feature consists in its lasting connection with the national music tradition. The task, set for the musicologists, is to define the nature, the principles, the variants of the interaction between the European piano music genres and styles and the traditional Chinese music genres and styles ( folklore, theatre, popular song). The given article states that the first artistic method, leading to the combination of the European and Chinese traditions in the frames of one composition consists of the composer’s borrowing and using some “alien” material, a fragment of the famous musical creation in his artifact. Thus, using serves as a general notion, embracing a number of certain musical text composing methods, which include quoting, arranging, creating versions, fantasies and transcription. The second artistic approach, leading to European piano music and the Chinese traditional music interaction, consists in the artistic method of stylization. This method implies the reproduction of tonal and compositional peculiarities of the certain traditional Chinese music genre style into the composition text belonging to the European piano music genre system. This method reveals the unlimited possibilities to create the bright vivid effects for genre dialogue, conflicts, interaction, as well as very delicate conceptual modus, allusions, hints, promoting the remarkable enrichment of the compositions genre figurativeness. Basing on the given theoretical background the author is going to analyze the genre-style contents of the seven-volume edition “A century of Piano Solo Works by Chinese Composers”. This content may serve as a working model for the studying of the whole thesaurus of piano music artifacts, created by the Chinese composers.