512 A History of Judaism
aspect of life particularly for mothers with babies among their multiple
children, who can otherwise find themselves unable to leave their homes
for the full twenty- five hours from Friday to Saturday night. These enclaves
in the diaspora are mostly in the suburbs of big cities, but occasionally
they are clustered around an isolated yeshivah: the Gateshead yeshivah,
established in 1929 as one of the numerous branches founded by emissar-
ies of the Novardok yeshivah in Navahrudak (then in the Russian empire
and now in Belarus) and dedicated to Talmud learning within the Musar
tradition of the Hafets Hayyim, is now the largest in Europe, with hun-
dreds of students, even though the size of the rest of the Jewish community
in Gateshead (and even in neighbouring Newcastle) is minimal.^19
The view of Jewish life in England from within the intense atmos-
phere of the Gateshead yeshivah inevitably differs from that of modern
orthodox Jews in the rest of the United Kingdom. Students from the
yeshivah are not encouraged to combine their studies with university
education, and any contact which might appear to give legitimacy to
non- orthodox forms of Judaism is anathema, as was made very clear to
the former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in the reaction of hare‑
dim in England to his attendance at a memorial service for a Reform
rabbi (and Holocaust survivor) Hugo Gryn in 1997. A similar oppos-
ition to any official approval of representatives of Reform and
Conservative Judaism is also characteristic of Lubavitch. But in other
respects their missionary zeal to attract each individual Jew to greater
observance of the commandments encourages a far more welcoming
attitude to Jews of varied, or no, beliefs and differing degrees of com-
mitment to Jewish practices, so that, as we have seen, Lubavitch hasidim
have become communal rabbis in many parts of the Jewish world.
The tolerance of irreligiosity displayed by this particular group of
haredim is astonishing, but so too has been the willingness of some
modern orthodox Jews to accept religious leadership for their non-
hasidic communities by Lubavitch rabbis whose central messianic belief
about the status of the Rebbe and the imminent end of the world they
do not share. The assertion by one wing of the Lubavitch movement
after the Rebbe’s death in 1994 that the Messiah would return posthu-
mously to complete his mission comes perilously close to beliefs rejected
by rabbinic polemicists for nearly 2,000 years in response to Christian
claims. Orthodox indifference to such claims about the Rebbe has been
characterized by some modern orthodox Jews as a scandal. Some hare‑
dim, like Aharon Feldman, dean of the Ner Israel yeshivah in Baltimore,
have urged publicly that orthodox Jews should avoid praying in Habad