In the video below Frieda Vizel interviews the singer Yumi Lowy about his recollections of how the Satmar split unfolded!
Yumi (which grownup still uses "Yumi" as a name?) grew up in Satmar and it's clear from this conversation that he speaks from the Aroni faction's perspective, however, his observations of the physical violence between the Satmar Chassidim amongst themselves is astounding.
He starts with a false narrative, obviously repeating the "horse crap" that the "Aronim" were dishing out!
For example at the 7.24 mark he claims that the Beirach Moshe z"l suffered from dementia, an unmitigated lie!
R Aron Teitelbaum, the elder son, fabricated that because his father refused to name him as his successor. Why wouldn't the father name his eldest son as his natural successor, because the Beirach Moshe didn't want a known bully with an uncontrolled mouth to succeed him so he went ahead and named the younger one R Zalman Leib to be the next Satmar Rebbe,
In 2005, R Aron tried to drag his father to secular court to get the court to approve R Aron's psychologist that would have said "that his father lost his marbles."
However,before the Secular Judge even ruled, the rebbe passed away April 2006.
Now I don't have a dog in this fight and could care less who was the true successor is but I won't allow re-writing of the facts. I know for a fact that he was sharp as a tack.
The Rebbe did get very depressed when his daughter Rebbetzin Chaya Meisels passed away in 1993, and couldn't get over it, but he functioned 100%
Now when you watch this video, you will hear what I have been telling you guys for years, that Satmar is a violent uncivilized sect.
But what Yumi Lowy doesn't tell you, is that this violent history goes back all the way to Europe preWW2 where R' Yoel Teitelbaum the founder of the Satmar Chassidus fought with everyone including his own brother the Atzei Chayim and his nephews in Sighet! Later he fought with the Spinker Rebbe, for reasons only Hashem knows!
After settling in the USA, he fought with Reb Hershele Spinker z"l and made his life a living hell. He also fought with his nephew the Kloizenberger Rebbe z"l. The Kloizenberger had to flee to Union City NJ!
When I say "fighting" I mean actual physical violence!
PS: At the 44:27 mark, Yumi compares the Satmar Civil War to the Israeli/Arab conflict!
This shows that Satmar Chassidim by-in-large whether they are still in the community or out of it like Yumi, are basically stupid!
Frieda Vizel is a former Satmar Chasid who left the community, yet she remains deeply connected to it. She has even built a business guiding non‑Jews and non‑affiliated Jews through Williamsburg so they can see firsthand how Chasidim live. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. But when she receives antisemitic comments on a nonbinary video—(see below)—she seems genuinely shocked, unable to understand why it happened.
This confusion stems from her Satmar upbringing, which instills the belief that they are the “authentic” Jews, while Zionists are somehow outside the Jewish people. When Satmar Hasidim speak to non‑Jews, they often try to convey this distinction. But the reality is that non‑Jews do not see these internal divisions. To them, Jews are Jews. Antisemites throughout history—including the Nazis—never differentiated between Satmar Hasidim and Zionists. Hitler didn't bother to kosher the ovens between burning Satmar Chassidim and burning Zionists!
Even though Frieda left the community, she still carries many of its assumptions. As the saying goes: you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Back on October 15, 2024,I wrote about another video of hers in which she tried to explain to non‑Jews the difference between Zionist and anti‑Zionist Jews. She could not understand why some viewers expressed hatred toward her and her Satmar family despite their anti‑Zionist stance.
I wrote then:
I truly believe Frieda is a kind and gentle person with good intentions. But that is precisely what makes her influence so concerning. She has thousands of non‑Jewish followers who respect her deeply, and she now wants to use that platform to teach them about internal Jewish divisions.
In her videos, she tends to group all “victims” together. She avoids acknowledging Jewish victims specifically, instead equating Israeli women who were raped and murdered with Arab civilians in Gaza—many of whom supported a terrorist regime that launched tens of thousands of rockets at Israel long after Israel withdrew from Gaza. She insists on feeling equally for all “victims,” which ignores the moral and historical context.
She now wants to explain to her followers that not all Jews support Israel, and that some religious Jews believe Zionism caused the Holocaust and that the State of Israel should not exist. She hopes that by doing so, non‑Jews will understand that her community “has nothing to do with Israel.” She genuinely believes this distinction will matter to them.
But she fails to grasp a simple truth: antisemites do not care about these nuances.
In her recent video about her trip to Poland, she once again expresses genuine bewilderment at the antisemitic comments she received. She even says she would like to “have a dialogue” with the commenters. She wants to open a conversation with people whose hostility toward Jews is so deeply rooted that they themselves could never articulate its origins.
Frieda seems to childishly believe that if she just engages them kindly enough, she can change their minds. For hundreds of years, the Pols murdered and pillaged their Jewish neighbors and were Hitler's willing executioners, but she wants to understand them and perhaps change their minds. Nazis knew where to place their largest extermination center, yes, in Poland in the city of Oswiecim, Auschwitz!
It’s a level of naïveté that reflects her upbringing: the belief that dialogue alone can dissolve centuries‑old hatred. She truly thinks that by talking, she can persuade committed antisemites whose parents assisted the Nazis, to rethink their views. It’s a mindset that only someone shaped by her Satmar background could sincerely hold.
This kind of naïveté is dangerous.
We have seen similar tragedies in Israel. Some of the most left‑leaning Israelis—people who truly believed in coexistence and built friendships with Gazans—were brutally murdered by those very same people on October 7. Their goodwill and their "dialogs" did not protect them, on the contrary it was their death trap, as they had a false sense of security thinking that the Gazans would never commit these atrocities!
Frieda has not internalized this lesson. She does not understand—and perhaps never will—that her son, who may not look visibly Jewish, is still viewed by antisemites the same way as a Jew wearing a kippah and tzitzit. To them, a secular Israeli at a music festival and a Chariedi Jew in Williamsburg are the same.
Another important point that you will only see on DIN
When Satmar or Neturei Karta tell Goyim that they believe that the Torah doesn't allow a State until Moshiach comes, they don't tell them what they truly believe will happen AFTER Moshiach comes!
Both Satmar and Neturei Karta believe that when Moshiach comes all the Arabs will be driven out of Eretz Yisrael to make room for the Jews!!
Deep down they have absolutely no respect for Goyim and lie to them about Zionists! If they had any respect for them they would tell them their true beliefs, the fact that they themselves are Zionists as well!
Satmar won't tell Goyim that they yearn for a time when ALL Jews will return to Eretz Yisrael! That they have Eretz Yisrael in ALL their prayers! And that they shout at their Seder Table "Next Year in Yerushlayim"
They don't tell them that there is basically only one difference between them and Zionists....... and that it is ........"timing!"
Zionists believe that we have to do hishtadlis and live there in the here and now, and Satmar prays and yearns to live in Eretz Yisrael ASAP as soon as Moshiach comes, which can even happen today!
Frieda Vizel was brought up in the Satmar Community in KJ in Monroe. She was married to a Satmar Chusid, had a child, and decided to leave the Satmar culture and divorced. She was able to take her son with her, something very rare in the Satmar Community!
Frieda has a Web Site, and U-Tube Channel where she discusses her background and does "hasbara" of the Satmar Community in Williamsburg. In fact, she is presently a tourist guide where she brings in outsiders to explain and experience the community. She is also a talented cartoonist, in fact the above cartoon is a self-portrait. She unlike others that left the community only speaks of her background in glowing terms. She left because it wasn't for her. period!
את חטאי אני מזכיר היום I have to admit that I try to follow her content and find it very interesting, and found her to be genuine, very sweet, kind with a calming demeanor. I wish her well!
Having said all this, I was shocked when I watched her latest podcast in which she is totally bewildered about antisemitic hate comments on a segment that she did on Kosher Phones
Those who follow this blog, know that my background is Chareide, leaning to the Chasiddishe side; my parents were Holocaust survivors and I was brought up in a community where there wasn't a Jew that I knew that had grandparents. When I was in Shidduchim, all my prospects were from similar backgrounds and in fact my wife's parents were also survivors.
I didn't grow up in KJ as that town didn't exist at that time, I grew up in Brownsville then we moved to Crown Heights before Chabad was dominant, and then we moved to Boro-Park, When I got married I moved to Monsey, and now B'H, I live in Ramat Bet Shemesh.
I have to say that I don't remember ONE SINGLE DAY as a child and teenager that I didn't experience antisemitism, whether it was on my way to and from school, in school, or playing in the neighborhood parks. Every single day I was reminded that I was a Jew! Halloween was literally the scariest day of the year, not because the Goyim dressed up in scary costumes, but because they would wait for us to come home from school to beat the crap out of us!
So for Frieda to be bewildered by the hateful comments on her content is something that I didn't understand at first.......... And then I got to thinking.
She actually did grow up with hate but didn't realize it or internalize it, even now on May 23, 2024 she doesn't have a clue about the hate she grew up with. I know because I know people very very very close to me who grew up in KJ!
One just has to open a Satmar Yiddish book designed exclusively for Satmar girls, that drips with hate against their fellow Jews who are Zionists! Outright Blood Libels! The book has 309 pages of pure hate and vile vitriol, She doesn't recognize it as such even now that she is out of the community!
That book clearly differentiates Zionists from Jews with a strict line of demarcation.
Yiddish Satmar Book for Women
The Chapter talks about Living in Israel ... The Title? "Living together with Rashaim"
"Asking Jews to make Aliyah is Apikorsas!"
And that is why she cannot understand even in her wildest dreams that Goyim that hate Zionists, hate Jews!
She doesn't hear, that to a Goy, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, whether he is a Zionist, whether he is a Satmar Chusid, a Neturei Karta, Mizrachist, Litvish, Sfardie, OTD, or even a Tourist Guide.
In one of my posts just today I featured a young girl, by the name of Naama Levy, who is, should say was, a far leftist, who like Frieda, naively thought she could befriend Non-Jews and Arabs and help "bridge" the gap between Jews and Arabs and that if only we understood each other we could live together in peace.
Naama, unfortunately, learned the hard way that this is impossible, she is now a hostage, that is if she is still alive, Frieda is slowly learning that now!
Of course, there are Goyim and even Muslims that are decent, caring people who wouldn't hurt anyone, but as we now see and witness there are very few around, and those that are, cannot or will not say a word! Bilam says it best " עם לבדד ישכון" a "nation that dwells all alone!"
Frieda living and growing up in the utopia of KJ wasn't taught hate of goyim and even though she knew that her grandparents were survivors, they didn't talk about it and it wasn't taught in schools. Goyim as far as Satmar was concerned was so alien to their culture that it didn't need to be talked about, no Satmar except in the business world would have anything to do with Goyim; Goyim=Martians!
What was dangerous to Satmar philosophy were frum people that had a philosophy directly opposed to the Satmar SHIT'ah aka Zionism!
A Frum Jew even in a Shtrimal and Bekeshe and maybe even be wearing "vaaseh shtrimp" but who sympathizes with the Zionists was and is, an "inyan" of יהרג ועל יעבור that frum Jew was and is today a threat to Satmar and everything it stands for and must be slandered and cursed,
and so Satmar had no choice but to make that hate part and parcel of their curriculum even to girls, that "Zionism" wasn't a Jewish thing, and was actually an anathema something to abhor and loathe.
Satmar publicly burns the Israel Flag, a symbol of the Jewish people. If you ask any Goy to identify the flag of Cuba or Ireland, they couldn't do it but every single Goy in the world shown an Israel Flag will immediately identify this as the flag of the Jewish people, though Israel is smaller than New Jersey in size, and the population of the Jewish people in total, is less than the entire population of the first grade in China!
Yet Satmar sees nothing wrong with burning the symbol that the entire world equates with being Jewish and burns it publicly, thinking that Goyim will see the difference between Satmar and the Zionists!
This is where Frieda grew up and where she absorbed by osmoses that being a Zionist is far worse than being a Non-Jew!
Even the Love of Eretz Yisrael wasn't something actual it was something abstract, it was something that you mouthed on the Seder night "לשנה הבאה בירושלים" when 99.9% of the family was already safely tucked into bed!
So a Frieda Vizel that grew up in an environment where not only is Zionism separate from Judaism, but is to be hated, she cannot fathom or imagine that to a Goy, it makes no difference whether you care about Israel or if you are Neture Karta, to them it's all the same thing. Neturei Karta will learn that, hopefully, very soon too.
The battle cry of Free Palestine means Jews should leave the WORLD .. The Entire World!
It wasn't too long ago that Spain expelled its Jews and now, today on May 23, they announced that they want to expel Jews from Israel as well, as they announced just hours ago that they will recognize the State of Palestine.
Does Frieda know that for millions of Jews that live in Israel, they cannot go anywhere!! This is their home! They only have an Israeli passport!
Frieda is learning firsthand that GOYIM , by in large, hate Jews no matter who they are and where they are, or what they look like. They attacked her on her innocent segment on Kosher Phones, and she is bewildered that someone would spew hate on such a binary subject, she is shocked!
The only reason she is bewildered, is because in her background there is a major difference between a Zionist and a Jew, a Satmar Jew to be more specific!
She is coming to the realization that a Goy doesn't care what you think, a Goy only knows that you are a Jew and that is what they hate. They will take a segment on Kosher Phones and make it into a Free Palestine discussion!
They don't care that practically everything you, Frieda, talk about, is about a community that hates and abhors Zionists, they don't see that distinction!
To Goyim the fight of Zionism and Satmar is an internal struggle between Jews and that is all that is to them!
I would suggest that you read the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" on second thought, you don't need to read that today just listen to BBC, CNN, New York Times and you will see that we are hated by everyone!
And now a word to those who went off the Derech (OTD) and think that they will just blend in with the Goyim! Good Luck!
When Hitler ym"s wrote his book Mein Kampf in 1925 he had never met a Chassidishe Jew, he only knew Jews that looked like Goyim, he writes that his first encounter with Jews was in the German Army in WWI. I'm sure there wasn't a Jewish soldier wearing a Shtreimal! The Jew that Hitler ym"s hated was a Jew that looked like him and may even have been assimilated!
The Jew that Hitler ym"s loathed didn't look like Frieda's father, grandfather or ex-husband, or like the Satmar Rebbe of Monroe he looked like Blinken, and that's who he hated, so once the Goy gets wind of the fact that you are Jewish, he will hate your guts even if your jeans are torn, even if you wear a halter top, he will hate you even if you are kind to him.
Frieda says in the video below that her only son is off to college someplace if I remember in Minneapolis, I wish him the best of luck, and I don't know what he looks like, but Frieda should know that even if he is blond and blue-eyed, once they find out that he is Jewish he will be shunned and rejected. Frieda, you heard it here first! They won't give two hoots that his mother grew up with anti-Zionists, to them he is a Jew from a Jewish Father & Mother! No "hasbara" will explain that away!
The Jews fought and died for the civil rights movement, I remember that very well, and what did they get in return???? A huge kick in the proverbial ass!
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished! Said a wise man! So True!
"I often had a hard time differentiating between zionists and nazis. To me it was all a heap of Jew-destroyers, a curse word you followed by “erased-be-their-names”, yemach shemo. The zionists killed six million Jews, I’d write on my history test."
In the quote below she states that OTDs are anti-Zionist because of "the atrocities against Arabs"
Shows you how ignorant she is of what is happening in Israel This quote is parroted by Satmar propeganda!
"It seems many who leave orthodoxy also espouse an anti-zionist stance of sorts, mostly because of the overwhelming religious power in the Israeli government and because of atrocities committed against Arabs"
Frieda wrote the above quote in a humorous essay titled "On Zionism" she wrote it in 2012, not long after she left the community. I fail to see the humor!!
The latest salvo in The New York Times’ ongoing exposé of the yeshiva system in New York focused on a new report issued by the New York City Department of Education that found 18 religious schools failing to meet secular education standards set by the government. The article raised some troubling questions but ignored one of the most important: Why do Hasidic parents continue to send their children to “failing schools?”
I am a former Hasid who makes a living as a tour guide and YouTuber exploring Hasidic Williamsburg, where many of these implicated Hasidic schools are located. Since I am in the neighborhood often, I have come to know the rhythm of the schools that are at the center of the ongoing controversy. Every day I watch hundreds of happy boys spill into the streets during recess and pile into buses at the end of the afternoon. I see children who are deeply cared for. I see a neighborhood with one of the lowest median ages in the country, where life revolves around raising the young. Furthermore, I see parents who pay private school tuition to send their children to these schools. So why, if they are failing, do the schools continue to burst at the seams?
The author (left) and her son at the Museum of Natural History in New York // Courtesy of Frieda Vizel
by Frieda Vizel (former Satmar Monroe "Vaabel) On Saturday, I was walking on Amsterdam Avenue in New York City, crossing over to the other side with my son Seth when a man with white stubble and a New Jersey accent stopped me and asked: “Do you want to be a tenth to minyan?” I was shocked. I looked at him and asked: “Me?” “Yes, why not?” I was caught so off guard; I wore nothing that gave me away as Jewish. Just black leggings and a red shirt; boots. An ordinary outfit. I felt so integrated into the New York City weekend scene. But my eight-year-old son, who often chooses to be more religious than me, had his yarmulka on, so he gave me away. I never thought anyone would ever ask me to be a part of a quorum for prayers. According to Jewish tradition, the presence of God descends to where there are ten men. Only in egalitarian synagogues women are also counted. I’ve watched men look for a tenth for minyan many times, because I grew up Hasidic and the men needed a minyan three times a day. When my grandfather was old and frail we held prayers in our house and finding ten men older than 13 who could make it was often a problem. We called the extended social network; cousins and neighbors and far away relatives who would make the effort for the sake of the grandfather; but I would never be called. I often helped get the men by running after younger brothers and knocking on neighbor’s doors to ask if someone could come be a tenth. After I got married at eighteen, I could help by sending my husband to be part of prayers when there was a need for minyan, but that was the only extent to which I could participate. Then I left the Hasidic community and began to explore small, tentative ways I can express my Jewish identity and be part of the Jewish community. I stood there on this rainy Saturday and looked at the kindly Jewish man in astonishment. A part of me wanted to remind him that I was a woman and couldn’t be part of the minyan even if I wanted to, and a part of me was so deeply touched that this man valued me for religious services as much as he would a man.
