The school of Hasidic practice known as Satmar Hasidism arose in Satu-Mare (Satmar), Transylvania, in the decades immediately preceding the Holocaust and rose to prominence primarily in the postwar years. It is identified chiefly with the personality of Yoʾel Teitelbaum (1888–1982), who was rabbi in Satmar and, after his rescue from Hungary in 1944, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York.

In a larger sense, Satmar may be said to represent the distinctive Hasidic style that developed in northern Hungary and Transylvania in the nineteenth century. Lying outside the original heartland of Hasidism, Hungarian Jewry was dominated by a learned and pious rabbinate that saw itself locked in a life-and-death struggle with the forces of assimilation and religious reform, forces that were far stronger in Western-looking Hungary than they were in Poland and the Ukraine. Here Hasidism served as a goad to the revitalization of Orthodoxy...