Come on and Ride the Train: The Kastner Story Part VI

The Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum—one of the most influential Torah leaders of the twentieth century and a lifelong, vocal anti-Zionist—was a passenger on the Kastner train. That train was organized and negotiated by secular Zionists. The irony has generated decades of polemics, much of it inaccurate. The episode's host, Yehuda Geberer, sets out to explain how the Rebbe ended up on that train, to summarize the entire train saga chronologically, and to describe what happened when the train stopped at Bergen-Belsen.

How the Satmar Rebbe Got on the Train

The Rebbe's inclusion was not a simple matter of Kastner choosing him. Geberer cites historian Esther Farbstein, who writes that the train's passenger list was drawn up by representatives of the entire spectrum of Hungarian Jewry. The Orthodox community in Budapest demanded the Rebbe's inclusion as a condition for its participation and funding. Dr. Joseph Fisher, Kastner's secular Zionist father-in-law from Cluj, also insisted—possibly because of family ties to Satmar Hasidim, or because he understood how highly the Rebbe was esteemed. Kastner himself wanted prominent figures from all ideological trends on the train for public legitimacy. All three factors likely operated together.