Belz בעלזא
A Galician town that became the name of a great hasidic court: from 1817 four generations of Rokeach rebbes sat here. The community perished in the Churban; the court of Belz lives on—in Jerusalem.
The Jewish community of Belz is on record from the sixteenth century—an ordinary Galician town of traders and craftsmen, one of hundreds. What made it singular was the year 1817, when a student of the Seer of Lublin, Shalom Rokeach, took the rabbinate: from that year to the Churban—four generations of the house of Rokeach: Sar Shalom, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Yissachar Dov, Rabbi Aharon—Belz was the capital of a court drawing tens of thousands.
The town's heart was the great fortress-synagogue raised in the Sar Shalom's day; in the war the Nazis failed to blow it up and dismantled it by hand. The community of Belz perished in 1942–43 at Belzec—the death camp stood thirty kilometers from the town whose name so resembles its own.
The fourth rebbe, Aharon Rokeach, was carried out of the fire and began again in the Land of Israel; the vast Belz synagogue in Jerusalem is built to the memory of the Galician one.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The chronicles of the house of Belz and the community's memorial books — the court from 1817; the synagogue; the community's death at Belzec
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Galicia; the community from the sixteenth century
Basis: documents and evidence.