Spiritual Socialism in Agudas Yisrael Circles: Yehudah Leib Orlean

Jewish life in eastern Europe in the interwar period spanned a wide spectrum of religious, ideological and political positions. One of the forgotten thinkers of the interwar period is Yehuda Leib Orlean. He was a Gerer Hasid and activist in Shlomei Emunei Israel (שלומי אמוני ישראל) which later became Agudas Yisrael in Poland.

After serving as the president of Poalei Agudas Yisrael in Poland for a decade he left his political career and on the request of the Gerrer Rebbe, became the head of the teacher’s seminary for the Beis Yaakov movement in Warsaw, He wrote extensively on education and the goals and pedagogy of Haredi Education. His corpus of writing was not given significant scholarly attention, he is usually mentioned in scholarship as an apologetic, a person trying to justify Orthodoxy in response to the criticism of modernity not unlike the “hashkafa” discourse that was created in Israel after the holocaust in the Haredi world. A close reading of the primary sources shows a very different image. It seems that the Hebrew translations of some of his articles in the 1960s’ portrayed him as a classical Haredi apologist but that is a misnomer. The original Yiddish articles published in the 1920s’ and 1930s’ show a complex original thinker with significant knowledge of socialist literature. His work suggests not only a well thought analysis of socialism from an Orthodox perspective but also an Orthodox interpretation of socialism.