When he sent a letter to the Holy Land, he would write the address himself, and he would write it using the gentile alphabet, not the Hebrew alphabet. Once in his later years, when he did not have the strength, he wrote a letter and asked his attendant to address it for him. The attendant wrote it using Hebrew letters. When the Rebbe saw this, he said, “Jewish?! Are they Jews?! Is it a Jewish state?!” He took the envelope and tore it up, and he took another envelope and wrote the address himself with the gentile alphabet.
He would not touch the currency of the Zionist state. When someone put some Zionist currency on his table, he would push it off with his elbow. When he had wine made by the Lipshitz company, on Friday afternoon he would peel off the Star of David from the label.
The Pshevorsker Rebbe founded a major Hasidic community in Antwerp, Belgium. The community has remained faithful to their founder’s opposition to Zionism. Click here to read about the Antwerp community’s reaction to the Gaza war in 2009.
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