The Sar Shalom—Rabbi Shalom Rokeach of Belz רבי שלום רוקח מבעלזא

Before him Belz was a dot on the map of Galicia; after him, a capital. As a young man he traveled to the Seer of Lublin and took his path from him; in 1817 the Belz community seated him as rabbi, and the road to him filled.

Of his teaching the house of Belz keeps more by mouth than by book: the Sar Shalom's torot were written down by listeners and printed late, at second hand. What remains is visible instead: the great fortress-synagogue, built through his decades—they tell that the rebbe carried stones himself—stood until the Churban; the Nazis failed to blow it up and took it apart by hand.

Sons and grandsons held the court four generations in one place, and the word Belz came to mean a school: prayer aloud, plainness against fashion, the Galician firmness of custom.