The Kotzker Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk רבי מנחם מנדל מורגנשטרן מקוצק
twenty years of seclusion and not one line published
Born at Goraj near Lublin to a family not Hasidic, he passed through Peshischa and after Simcha Bunim's death gathered the hardest around himself. Kotzk did not console: one went there not for a blessing but for a question with no answer to give.
From 1839 until his death in 1859 he scarcely came out to people. Of the seclusion's cause there are different accounts, themselves disputed; we do not choose among them. His sayings were gathered after his death; the famous "nothing is so whole as a broken heart" exists in no record from his lifetime—it was ascribed to him by later report, and we say so plainly. His brother-in-law, Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Alter, became the first rebbe of Gur.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Emet ve-Emunah, the gathered sayings — the Kotzker's words as the students kept them
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and the dynastic chronicles — Goraj, the seclusion of 1839–59 and the fate of the manuscripts
Basis: Talmud and midrash.