Have you ever wondered about the differences between Hasidic sects? How Hasidim came specifically to live in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Boro Park? How far back Hasidic political activity, for which they are now famous, dates? Have you ever wondered how centralized Hasidic communities actually are? Wondered what the role of women in the Hasidic world is, what clothes they wear and why? Or even, at this time of year, how do Satmar Hasidim observe Rosh Hashanah?

Of course, regular readers of Shtetl will be quite familiar with some of these concepts, but to many, encountering an occasional article on Haredim may feel like joining in the middle of a foreign conversation. The practices, principles and even just the terminology can all be confusing. 

That’s where “Hasidopedia” comes in.

Self-published in two volumes through Amazon in 2023 (“The Calendar”) and this year (“Culture and Institutions”), “Hasidopedia” sets out to explain Hasidic customs, garb, language, traditions, and many other details. For years, early in the last decade, Jacob Gluck gave walking tours of Hasidic Williamsburg where he had grown up. He heard firsthand how little people knew about the Hasidim and saw for himself how much non-Haredi Jews and tourists wanted to better understand the community, so he set out to write an encyclopedia of the Hasidic community.

As an adult leaving the Yiddish-speaking Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn, Gluck had a particular perspective – an intimate knowledge of how life was lived in Satmar Brooklyn, but also an understanding of the outside world and an ability to explain to those not in the community. Where the tours were an opportunity to explain to a small group, “Hasidopedia” reaches out in plain English to a wider audience, bridging the insular world of Gluck’s upbringing and the broader, more secular society he later embraced.

Gluck grew up in the Satmar community of Borough Park, which sees itself as more enlightened and modern than its counterpart in Williamsburg. Examples of this modernity he gave to Shtetl included being allowed to ride a bicycle up until his bar mitzvah and playing with a ball at middle school.

Until he went to Israel aged 19, he told Shtetl, he was a regular yeshiva student. Satmar tends to be anti-Zionist but his parents, whom he describes as “moderate” within the Satmar spectrum, let him go to study at a Yeshiva in Israel where, as it turned out, his eyes were opened to the existence of a world beyond what he had seen in Borough Park. This was the beginning of the process through which Gluck embraced secular learning and gradually left the community, allowing him to speak to its unique character from the outside.

Though Gluck has been outside of the community for decades now, he told Shtetl he has been regularly keeping up with developments and changes through Haredi media and his own sources in the community. “Hasidopedia” shows both his deep understanding of Hasidic life and his unique ability to explain it to outsiders. The book catalogs the details of Hasidic life in New York, offering a rare glimpse into a Jewish world that is mysterious to most — and largely unrecorded in English.

To an extent that is uncommon in the wider American Jewish community, the Hasidic community is very insular. It keeps many secrets along with a general desire not to offer up information to the outside world but, on a practical level, since much of its public discourse takes place in Yiddish, there’s a natural barrier for English-speakers in understanding the community. As Gluck married and moved away from the area, physically and emotionally, he wanted to leave a record of what he knew.

He chose to write "Hasidopedia" to act as a transparent and accessible resource. Although, like Wikipedia, it attempts to explain large historical moments like the founding of Hasidism “in the late eighteenth century in Ukraine” by “R. Israel” (the Baal Shem Tov) alongside minute details like the “corrupt” vocalization of the “shureq vowel,” exactly where and how the cantor takes over the singing from the prayer leader on Rosh Hashanah morning, or the variations in women’s head coverings, Gluck’s book is neither crowd-sourced nor editable like a wiki. It is, rather, like the encyclopedias that came before, a compendium of information about Hasidic history, practices, and communities that simply has not previously existed.

Unlike some of the more sensational TV shows about Haredim or ex-Haredim or investigations about issues in the community, Gluck’s “Hasidopedia” neither sensationalizes nor criticizes. It neither glorifies nor denigrates the community and its practices, it simply documents it as is. More accurately put, “Hasidopedia” represents the details of the community as closely as the author’s memory and his unnamed sources allow.

“Hasidopedia” parades a quirky, almost dogmatic, independence as a kind of virtue, reminding insiders as well as outsiders that its autodidact author is beholden to no one. Indeed, just as the book itself is a genre-defying mixture of narrative, observation, and translation, Gluck’s own choices in spelling Satmar pronunciations are unconventional, bordering on stubborn. For instance, he spells Torah, Toroh, Rosh Hashanah, Rosh Hashonoh, Shovuos, Hanukkah, Hanukoh, and bokhurim as bohorim, none of which are used by Hasidim. He justifies these spellings as authentic to their verbal usage, but that’s not how spelling in English has worked for a millennium. His spelling choices are jarring and can be annoying, but they are still extremely useful despite providing a constant reminder that he is not only talking about another world, but giving an idiosyncratic view of that world.

Another example of Gluck’s unusual approach is his absolute lack of citations. That is a significant difference from most reference works and presents both a pro and a con to its legitimacy. On the con side, it is difficult to authenticate any of his claims. On the pro side, though, because this work is sui generis in its attention to such a breadth of minutiae there are few, if any, appropriate academic sources to call on for authentication. So, rather than waste time and limit scope by searching for citable sources, Gluck eschews them on principle. After all, Gluck says, he has done all the reading on this specific topic that your average academic could do, in addition to his upbringing and direct lived experience of the topics he describes. Going the standard publication route for a work of reference by citing academics, wooing agents, pleasing publishers and going back and forth with fact checkers would have significantly prolonged the writing and sucked the joy out of the project for him.

Depending on how it is used, Gluck’s lack of a rigorous review procedure means that professors or students in academia might only be able to use the “Hasidopedia” as a guide or primary source, not a formal reference work to cite. However, for them — or for anyone trying to better understand the Hasidic world from the outside, whether researchers, neighbors, or allies – this book is an invaluable first stop.

So, whether you are the head of a UJA Federation which is grappling with a growing and increasingly impoverished Haredi community, or a judge encountering an ever-growing number of cases involving Haredim around business, divorce, custody, and more, it’s an unparalleled resource. Whether you are a college student embarking on a research project about Hasidim in New York, or a state health commissioner trying to understand the Hasidic community and understanding ways to get through to them, this book could just be the window into the community that you need.

Or, you might just be a tourist from Ireland who booked a tour of Williamsburg to see a different side of New York. If so, you can use “Hasidopedia” on your seven hour flight from Dublin to JFK to make your tour more meaningful, immerse yourself in the community, and realize quite how different Hasidic Brooklyn can be!

Though he wishes Hasidim would read it — and there’s plenty in it that even Hasidim may find informative about their community’s history or the genesis of certain customs and traditions — he’s under no illusions that this book will be found in many bookcases across Borough Park and Williamsburg, given what he describes as the book’s “historical critical approach.” Meaning, unlike authorized Haredi books, it doesn’t align with the narrative Haredi rabbis and leaders tell about themselves.