"Chief Grand Rabbi"

Manhattan's East Side ghetto lay dank and dismal beneath a late autumn drizzle. In one narrow street, before a certain house, thousands of Jews milled about on the wet flagging and cobblestones, packing the whole block with their numbers. Grief was on their faces and in the low wailing that some set up as they waited. In the middle of the block stood a hearse.

Out of the house so intently watched by the throng came some rabbis, slowly bearing a coffin. The thousands in the street set up a louder cry and surged toward the hearse for a last look at the remains of their holy man, their "Chief Grand Rabbi." Called Isaac Friedman, he had come to them in the spring, from Sadagora, Austria, he saying, they believing, that he was of the seed of David in the legendary Messianic line that is to fulfill the Old Testament prophecy of the second coming of the Son of God. In their midst he had died. They carried him over the long river bridge in sombre procession to a hill without the city, and buried him at sunset, simply, in white shroud and plainest wooden coffin.

These mourners of Isaac Friedman were of the Hasidim, a cult of Judaism that had its origin among the Polish Jews in the 18th Century, as a movement of popular protest against the strict ritualism and insistence upon the immutability of the law as propounded by the Talmudists, or orthodox rabbis, whom the Hasidim call the Mitnaggedim, or "opposition." The belief in the miraculous powers of their rabbis, and in the blood-kinship with David of a line of rabbis now represented by Isaac Friedman's 17-year-old son, is essentially mystical and emotional in character. Orthodox Jews regard the cult as moribund, but admit its value and influence in the past. "Chief Grand Rabbi," say the orthodox, is meaningless ; as well say "King Kleagle Rabbi."