An eyewitness account and a surviving siddur
Musaf Behind the Wire
A Hungarian Jewish writer remembered the moment when a camp barrack became a place of prayer—and two literary men stopped to listen.
The passengers of the Kasztner train had expected Switzerland. Instead, their train was diverted to Bergen-Belsen. Among the rabbis, communal leaders, Zionists, journalists, writers, families, and children held there was Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar.
A voice from the same transport
In 1959, a Hungarian Jewish writer published a recollection of Rabbi Yoel in the Hungarian-language newspaper Új Kelet and in the Yiddish periodical Das Vort. He had traveled on the Kasztner train and lived in the same men’s block as the Rabbi.
The English version names the writer as Dr. Ferenz Kennedy. He begins as an outsider to Rabbi Yoel’s world and then describes, scene by scene, the impression the Rabbi made upon him.
The Musaf prayer
On Yom Kippur 1944, the narrator remembered Rabbi Yoel leading Musaf, the day’s additional prayer service. He invited two fellow Hungarian Jewish literary figures, Béla Zsolt and Aladár Komlós, to hear him. In the account, the prayer overcame the distance between a Hasidic rabbi and men from a very different cultural world: Zsolt wept, and Komlós recognized that what they were hearing was prayer in its deepest sense.
The power of the scene lies in its contrasts. The uniform camp barrack did not erase the histories its prisoners carried with them. For the duration of the service, the Rabbi’s voice gathered loss, inherited language, and religious discipline into one act performed inside captivity.
From the eyewitness
The moment, in his own words
The English article carries the memory from the writer’s growing sense of Rabbi Yoel’s presence, through the prayer inside the wire, to the transport’s arrival in Switzerland.“I too was affected by his influence and appeal”
“the heartbreaking prayerful voice”
“we could not remain indifferent”
“Where is the rabbi?”
The object that remained
A wartime siddur associated with the episode survived. The Sotheby’s catalog identifies it as the prayer book lent to Rabbi Yoel by Gyula Nemeti and kept with a 1959 letter telling its story. The small book carries the Musaf scene beyond memory and into the hands.
The siddur gives the prayer scene a physical history: a book used in Bergen-Belsen, returned after the war, preserved, and identified by people connected to the event.
Sources & further readingOpen the reading list +
Sources
Continue with the books and memories
With the Satmar Rov in Bergen-Belsen
A 2009 English reproduction of the account published in Új Kelet and later in Das Vort in 1959.
Open source ↗The wartime siddur — Sotheby’s catalog record
Documents the prayer book, its owner, and its 1959 provenance letter.
Open source ↗Rudolf Rezső Kasztner — USHMM Encyclopedia
The transport negotiations, Bergen-Belsen detention, and the passengers’ eventual release.
Open source ↗Béla Zsolt — YIVO Encyclopedia
The life and literary world of the novelist and journalist remembered in the scene.
Open source ↗