Chaim Potok was born in 1929 in the Bronx, New York, the child of Hasidic parents who had fled Eastern Europe. After graduating from Yeshiva University in 1950, he went on to study for the Conservative rabbinate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He received his rabbinical ordination and a master's degree in Hebrew literature in 1954. From 1955 to 1957 he served as a U.S. Army chaplain in Korea. Potok afterward worked at the Har Zion Temple in Philadelphia and also wrote his Ph.D. dissertation, "The Rationalism and Skepticism of Solomon Maimon" for the University of Pennsylvania. His first novel, The Chosen, articulates the frustrations he felt as a Hasidic child denied a secular education and forbidden to pursue his artistic bent.
Hasidism. There is a variety of Orthodox Jews called Hasidim, the followers of Hasidism. Israel Ben Eliezer, the founder of modern Hasidism, was born near the Russian-Polish border in 1698, when Eastern European Jewish communities were still recovering from the devastating massacres of 1648. At the time Judaism's established leaders encouraged painstaking study of the Talmud, the record of the revelation that Moses is believed to have received on Mount Sinai and of rabbinic (i.e., post-biblical) interpretations concerning the laws given to the Israelites at Sinai.
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