The Cropping Circles of Chabad History

To follow on Zalman Alpert’s comment to Maya’s book. First is the famous chess photograph. Maya Balakirsky Katz writes in her new book about Chabad that the photo was taken in the distinct Purkersdorf Sanatorium, managed by the author of the Rayatz’s watercolors Gertrud ‘Trude’ Zuckerkandl, the daughter of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel who analyzed the Rashab. Maya writes:

“R. Schneerson’s narrative reframes the chess photograph from one reflecting Yosef Yitzchak’s illness and recuperation to one illustrating dynastic grooming. When the photograph appeared for the first time in Arie Rubinstein’s 1975 monograph Hasidism, it was even more conspicuously “edited” than the stories surrounding it. Two added white circles, one added black circle, and one erasure render the positions on the board illegible. These edits appear to be motivated by a desire both to mask the positions on the board and the form of the chess pieces themselves. At the turn of the twentieth century, architect Josef Hoffman designed Purkersdorf Sanatorium with a commitment to aesthetic unity [Gustav Klimt himself decorated the building]; the glossy black-and-white chess tables for the sanatorium’s ground floor billiard room would have certainly fit into the repetitive black-and-white design motif throughout the building. Although the chess table in the photograph is one of the original 1904 black-and-white chess tables used at Purkersdorf, the chess pieces are probably replacement pieces typical of the large wooden sets of the 1920s and 1930s in which small crosses crowned the kings. Two of the edits in fact appear on the two kings on the board [two white dots], in all likelihood to correct the image of two rebbes staring intently in the direction of the two crosses. As in the Parisian and Berlin photographs of Schneerson, the editing of the photograph reflects the attitudes of Schneerson’s later editors in the United States rather than the original attitudes of the two men in the photograph.”

I find it ironic, actually comical, first they had to makeup the Nitle Nacht story and then they erased the crosses. Or perhaps the crosses crowning the kings gave them the idea in the subliminally reversed order? Similarly amusing is that they obscured the position. Why, so we wouldn’t find out who is winning? Or we wouldn’t be let on the secret that Mendel Schneerson played the Botvinnik Defence long before the grandmaster himself came up with it? One can imagine the conversation: “Mendel, hostu farloren dain shvartzer kenig…” Delving deeper into Maya’s precious footnotes, there is this gem on page 113 (didn’t I write about this at some point?):

“Sigmund Freud’s biographer and protege Ernest Jones, who proposed a classically Freudian theory regarding chess: “It is plain that the unconscious motive activating players is not the mere love of pugnacity characteristic of all competitive games, but the grimmer one of father murder… Jones judged chess an irresistible outlet for oedipal neurotics in that the object of the game is to kill, or at least disable, the king – an obvious stand-in for the father.”

Speaking of the footnotes there is also a reference to my old blog as Maya continues:

“Other pairings within the dynastic family have been palpably excluded from the Schneerson family album. In a community that voraciously collects all things connected to their rebbe, no matter how mundane, photographs of Schneerson’s brother Yisroel Aryeh Leib Schneerson have not been included within the album. Yisroel Aryeh Leib left Chabad and religious life altogether, settling down in London as “Marc Gurary” to work on a PhD in physics at the University of Liverpool. The Rebbe’s brother’s departure from religious observance and his Zionist affiliations could not be integrated easily into the Chabad narrative and, therefore, into Chabad visual history. Deutsch provocatively suggested that the man standing next to Yosef Yitzchak in the “engagement photograph” is not Schneerson at all, and following Deutsch’s train of thought, other commentators in the Chabad blogosphere have speculated whether that man might indeed be Schneerson’s estranged brother [mentalblog - Schneerson brothers. Maya is not convinced]. Images of Yosef Yitzchak with his other son-in-law, Rabbi Shmaryahu Gourary (1898-1989), appear far more selectively in Chabad publications, and in the rare instances that they are included, they appear in edited formats. In an often reproduced photograph of Yoset Yitzchak leaning on a cane and supported by his two sons-in-law, Gourary is cropped out so that Schneerson appears as his father-in-law’s sole support. Yosef Yitzchak traveled to Palestine and the United States in 1929-30 with his eldest son-in-law Shmaryahu Gourary, and although the trip was recorded with both still and live action film, the original film footage of the tour was not released from Yosef Yitzchak’s personal collection until Deutsch published an unauthorized copy in the 1990s. The 1929 film footage includes close-ups of Shmaryahu Gourary at Yosef Yitzchak’s side alongside long shots of the Statue of Liberty and the eager crowds who came to pay tribute to Yosef Yitzchak. The highly selective release of images from Yosef Yitzchak’s 1929 trip may have been motivated by the fact that the symbolic force of the visual accounts was not in accord with the actual transfer or leadership in 1951.”

The golems and the “hungarian-like” aliens left the cropping circles in places where they grow the very bread of history.

P.S. One wonders if the Rayatz knew about the connection between Gertrud Zuckerkandl, her father Dr. Wilhelm Stekel and the Rashab, otherwise it seems surreal. Noteworthy is the fact that the Rayatz leisured at the best in the world Sanatorium while his hassdim in Russia were led to the wholesale slaughter, just four years before the angel of life, Ernst Bloch, would knock on his own door in Warsaw.

Tagged as: architecture, chabad, games, history, maya balakirsky katz, russian jews, sigmund freud, wilhelm stekel