Place
Ger גור
A town near Warsaw from which came the court that in interwar Poland counted hundreds of thousands of Hasidim.
The court was founded by the Chiddushei ha-Rim, R. Yitzchak Meir Alter, a student of Kotzk. He brought heavy Talmudic study back into Hasidism, where Kotzk had all but set it aside, and that gave Ger its face: not wonder, but sitting over the Gemara.
His grandson the Sfat Emet took the court as a boy and grew it so that by the early twentieth century Ger Hasidim were counted in the hundreds of thousands. After the Shoah the court was rebuilt in Jerusalem and remains one of the largest.
On the timeline
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Chiddushei ha-Rim — the book of the court's founder
- Sfat Emet — the weekly discourses of the grandson under whom the court became the largest
Basis: documents and evidence.