Curious about Satmar?
With Torah, family, education, prayer, work, charity, communal responsibility, and an inheritance carried across generations.
An independent educational project by a member of the Satmar community, offering one informed perspective on its life, history, and thought.
The governing idea
Understand the world
before judging the argument.
Satmar is a transmitted way of Jewish life, received and renewed through generations.
Satmar at a glance
Across neighborhoods and continents, Satmar life is sustained by families, schools, congregations, charitable institutions, publications, and a shared religious inheritance.
Published estimates commonly place Satmar at roughly 100,000 to 150,000 people worldwide. Exact totals vary because affiliation is lived through families, congregations, schools, neighborhoods, and rabbinic allegiance rather than a single membership roll.
See the scale and map →Torah, family, Yiddish, education, prayer, livelihood, charity, publishing, and communal institutions carry an inherited way of life from one generation to the next.
Enter ordinary life →
Satmar gives the clearest and most sustained public voice to an anti-Zionist religious outlook whose resonance reaches beyond formal Satmar membership. Its first distinction is between the Jewish people, Eretz Yisrael, the modern state, its governments, and Zionism.
How Satmar sees Israel →Images in this section are interpretive illustrations.
Day-to-day and year-round
Homes, schools, work, preparation, ritual, neighborhood life, and the calendar reveal Satmar through the rhythms in which it is lived.
Peter Santenello
A street-level visit through Williamsburg, with conversations about family, work, education, neighborhood life, and the boundaries between the community and the wider city.
What to notice. The density of institutions and relationships that makes the neighborhood function as more than a collection of visibly religious individuals.
Der Muzikant
The 2023 Kiryas Joel gathering led by Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum brings music, dancing, families, a public address, and the lighting of the bonfire into one communal event.
What to notice. How a date on the religious calendar reorganizes public space and gathers several generations around rabbinic leadership, music, dancing, and a shared act of celebration.
Archival footage
An early moving-image record of Kiryas Joel while a new Satmar settlement and its institutions were still taking shape.
What to notice. The modest physical scale of Kiryas Joel in 1978 makes its later growth easier to grasp. Streets, homes, and early institutions show a community being built deliberately around shared religious life.
Recently added
New and newly deepened profiles, stories, institutions, films, and collections keep opening the people, history, and structures of the communal world.
See all updatesA substantially expanded, source-led biography now opens eight standalone stories about rescue, chesed, education, rebuilding, and responsibility beyond Satmar itself.
Explore →A manuscript scholar, yeshiva leader, rescuer, and witness whose underground network pursued visas, couriers, bribery, ransom, warnings, and border routes while deportation trains moved across Europe.
Explore →Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl: Read the book in its own movement: the closing circle, the underground, the wager on ransom, the unanswered appeals, the loss, and the indictment.
Explore →The enterprise software company founded by Shloma Baum to coordinate work orders, scheduling, inventory, routing, and mobile service teams.
Explore →A concise history
The story moves through a Hungarian and Transylvanian inheritance, destruction, migration, rebuilding, and rapid growth.
Read the history →Satmar grows from the religious world of Hungarian and Transylvanian Orthodoxy and Hasidism.
Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum becomes the leading Hasidic rabbi in the city now called Satu Mare.
The Jews of Hungary and the Carpathian region are deported with devastating speed; most are murdered.
Survivors rebuild congregational, educational, charitable, and family life in Brooklyn.
A new community in Orange County creates room for institutions and families to grow.
Satmar life extends across neighborhoods and countries, with more than one leadership center and substantial internal diversity.
Jewish life in exile
Diaspora is not only a condition to endure. It is where families build homes, institutions, livelihoods, charity, and relationships of gratitude and responsibility toward the places in which they live.
Explore life in the DiasporaTorah, prayer, education, family life, and communal institutions make inherited obligations livable across generations.
Peace, liberty, and public order allow Jewish communities to flourish and create obligations toward the countries and cities they call home.
Communal organization joins care for local needs with civic participation, cooperation, and concern for the welfare of the wider society.
A first orientation
Satmar affirms Jewish peoplehood, sacred attachment to Eretz Yisrael, and responsibility for Jewish life. Its opposition is directed at Zionism and at making political sovereignty the foundation or fulfillment of Jewish destiny.
The Jewish people, the land, the people who live there, the state, a government, and an ideology are related—and each carries its own meaning.
Read the short answerReader-supported
Satmar.org is an independent educational project documenting Satmar life, history, and thought from within the community. Contributions support original research, Yiddish and Hebrew translation, archival work, writing, editing, and the technology that keeps this material freely available.
Support the work