In 1831, a cholera epidemic swept through Europe. Elijah Guttmacher, the rabbi of a West Prussian community, wrote for guidance to his mentor, the famed Rabbi Akiva Eger. In response, Eger gave a long list of advice, from reciting the biblical and talmudic descriptions of the Temple’s incense service to “modern” medical instructions: clean your houses, wash your hands, don’t eat pickles, and avoid crowding by holding prayer services in groups of no more than fifteen. Around the same time, writes Elli Fischer, Eger issued a seminal ruling:
The pandemic produced so many mourners that the longstanding custom of rotating the recitation of kaddish, [the mourner’s prayer, so that each mourner would be able to say it individually], would have left each mourner with few opportunities to recite the prayer for his deceased parents. So, for that year, Rabbi Eger allowed multiple mourners to recite kaddish simultaneously. That one-time exception has become the norm.
In 1851, a second cholera epidemic hit, and this time Guttmacher was himself a famed rabbinic authority, who, although not ḥasidic, played a role similar to that of ḥasidic rebbes—responding to a steady stream of petitions for advice, wonderworking, and divine intercession.
In the fall of 1852, [Guttmacher] was presented with a dilemma: there were too many corpses piled up for the local Jewish burial society to perform taharah—the ritual cleansing and preparing a Jewish body for burial—and sew enough shrouds to meet the demand. Could they enlist the help of non-Jews in this endeavor? If need be, could they dispense with the rituals altogether and bury the unpurified bodies in regular clothing? Rabbi Guttmacher responded by prioritizing the various practices and outlining which could be dispensed with most easily when necessary. He ultimately concluded, however, that if there was really no choice, it was permissible to bury a body with a symbolic shroud over plain clothes, and without performing a taharah.
Evidence of Guttmacher’s unique role can be found in a pamphlet published in 1874, shortly after his death, that offers prayers and advice for confronting the disease:
The manual . . . contains several amulets, including an “expert amulet from [Rabbi Guttmacher], of blessed memory.” This amulet, the reader is told, was “an amazing protection against that disease,” that is, cholera, during the 1866 cholera pandemic [that was] “sent to every boundary of Israel, and the plague then ceased from upon Israel.”
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/6892/rov-in-a-time-of-cholera/