Framed in Plotzk

Title: Framed in Plotzk

Location: Plock, Poland

Document: The Jewish Monitor

Time: October 1920

[He] probably didn’t know what the charges against him were; he very probably couldn’t read Polish or Russian, he was no doubt living in another world — a world too holy for war, and too sublime for the internecine bickering of Bolsheviks and Poles; in a world peopled by rabbis and the sages, sitting around listening to the words of wisdom as they fell from some fancied saint. No one who knows anything about the life of the chassidic rabbis will for a moment entertain any doubts about their innocence with regard to the wars that are being waged in hell-centers of Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Indeed, it was later ascertained that the charges of treason… were false. Yet who mourns the death of the chassidic rabbi of Plotzk? Who but a few fellow Jews even took notice of it? Aye, who cares anything about it? … Not only many of the Jews themselves, but the world has become calloused to the murder of the Jews — and from the point of view of the unsympathetic world, the glorious martyrdom of an innocent rabbi is to be noticed but by the fellow Jews of the martyr, who alone appreciate the holiness of martyrdom, but feel the keen sorrow and the sharp pangs of pain that come with the realization that after all these centuries of so-called Christian discipline, none in this bleak and wide world raise as effective voice on behalf of the millions of sufferers, of whom the sainted rabbi of Plotzk was only one.

—The Jewish Monitor, October 29, 1920

IN the aftermath of World War I, battles continued to rage on the blood lands of eastern Europe during the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Russian Civil War. In the middle of all that came the Polish-Soviet War, fought between 1919 and 1921, today a largely forgotten war. The newly established Second Polish Republic led by Marshal Jozef Pilsudski attempted to establish borders along the 1772 pre-partition lines of the old Polish Kingdom.

Pilsudski’s forces initially defeated Leon Trotsky’s Red Army and reached as far east as Kiev in mid-1920 before the Bolsheviks pushed back. Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin wanted to spark Communist revolutions across Europe, and ordered a counteroffensive. The Red Army pushed all the way back into Poland that summer, before finally being defeated at the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. There followed another eastward Polish advance, until the Soviets sued for peace in October. The Peace of Riga signed in March 1921 finalized the border between the Soviet Union and Poland, more than 120 miles east of the post–World War I Curzon Line. This was to remain the international border until 1939, when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland at the beginning of World War II.

At the Battle of Warsaw, Polish General Jozef Haller’s forces were stationed northeast of the capital along the Vistula River in the vicinity of the city of Plock (Plotzk in Yiddish). That city was home to Rav Chaim Shapiro (1879–1920), a scion of Kozhnitz and Mogielnica on his father’s side and of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz from his mother. Rav Shapiro continued the legacy of his illustrious forebears from his residence in Plotzk, where he opened a shtibel and gained a considerable following. Though several towns offered him their rabbinate, he declined them all, preferring an ascetic lifestyle completely detached from earthly matters. His ecstatic manner of prayer became legendary, and his intense dancing during Simchas Torah hakafos drew huge crowds who watched him dance for hours without respite.

The Pinkas Hakehillot’s entry on Plotzk describes his death: