The question that returned with consciousness
What Is Happening with the Children?
Five telegrams carried the fear of Moroccan parents to Williamsburg. The burden Rabbi Yoel took upon himself would become inseparable from the stroke that cost him his strength.
The telegrams came from Moroccan Jews pleading for help. Parents had entrusted their children to people who promised them a Jewish future in Eretz Yisroel. Now they were hearing that the children were being placed in secular settings and drawn away from the Torah life of their homes. They turned to Rabbi Yoel across an ocean because they believed he would hear their anguish as his own.
Five telegrams
The Satmar account records five urgent telegrams. They told of children sent from Morocco whose parents expected them to remain observant, only to discover that the institutions receiving them were separating them from the religious life in which they had been raised.
Rabbi Yoel had already spoken publicly about the danger facing North African Jewish families. The cry of Moroccan Jews, he said, reached every Jew who refused to stand aside while another Jew’s spiritual life was being taken from him. These were not Satmar children. That distinction had no place in the obligation he felt.
The night his strength gave way
The pleas weighed upon him with extraordinary force. On the night he received the telegrams, Rabbi Yoel suffered the devastating stroke of February 1968. It left him unconscious and then severely limited his speech and movement. The public strength with which he had led, traveled, spoken, and built would never fully return.
When consciousness returned, the remembered first question was not about his own body: “What is happening with the children?” Even after his strength had failed, the children remained before him.
The work outlived the moment
Others carried the campaign forward. A surviving 1969 letter identifies Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, then the Sighet Rav and later Rabbi Yoel’s successor, as the head of a committee devoted to saving Moroccan children. Satmar support also helped sustain a school for Moroccan and other immigrant girls in Bnei Brak without asking them to become Satmar.
The answer to the telegrams therefore became more than protest. It became organizers, schools, money, and people responsible for keeping children close to Torah when their parents could not protect them from afar.
What Satmar remembered
Satmar memory has never separated the stroke from those telegrams. The struggle against a Zionist system that was drawing Jewish children away from Torah had entered his heart so completely that it cost him his health.
That is why the small question remembered from his return to consciousness carries so much of his life inside it. The child was far away. The family was not his own. Yet his first thought was still: What is happening with the children?
Sources & further readingOpen the reading list +
Sources
Continue with the books and memories
The Rebbe — the Moroccan children
Dovid Meisels, The Rebbe: The Extraordinary Life and Worldview of Rabbeinu Yoel Teitelbaum, pp. 244–246, preserves the telegrams, the stroke, and Rabbi Yoel’s first question after regaining consciousness.
Open source ↗The cry of Moroccan Jewry — Divrei Yoel
A translated passage from Rabbi Yoel’s discourse in Divrei Yoel, Parashas Naso, p. 128, on the danger facing Moroccan Jews and the duty not to stand aside.
Open source ↗Committee to save Moroccan children — 1969 letter
The auction catalogue describes a 1969 letter addressed to Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum in his capacity as head of the committee to save Moroccan children.
Open source ↗A school beyond Satmar
A communal account of Rabbi Yoel establishing a school for Moroccan and other immigrant girls in Bnei Brak that remained outside the Satmar school system.
Open source ↗