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Chasidic Judaism is broken up into various communities around the world. I was just curious if any of these communities have ever moved to "consolidate" and absorb into a new larger community?

Obviously, there would need to be agreements about aligning Halacha interpretations but assuming the differences were slight enough and each community was majority in approval, has such a merger ever happened?

Perhaps the families of two head Rabbis of different communities married into one another? Circumstances such as this.

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    There's loads of 'marital mergers'...
    – Dov
    Commented Jun 7, 2021 at 13:01
  • Are they genuine mergers though or does each dynasty remain independent if there are multiple children? Do you have specific examples of mergers where another dynasty ceased to exist entirely?
    – Michael
    Commented Jun 7, 2021 at 13:26
  • Hmm.... not that I can think of, off the top of my head. The only other thing I can think of, although I'm not sure if this answers your question, is the Ruzhin chassidus, in which the Rebbe's sons all formed their own separate dynasties.
    – Dov
    Commented Jun 7, 2021 at 13:35
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    When R' Yoel Teitelbaum died, his nephew the Sigheter Rebbe, became the Satmar Rebbe, as well. Sighet has since merged with Satmar
    – Noach MiFrankfurt
    Commented Jun 7, 2021 at 13:56
  • How often do you see different branches stemming from one trunk, and how often do you see two branches merging into one?
    – Al Berko
    Commented Jun 7, 2021 at 21:33

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Formal mergers as in a business agreement between the leaders of two groups , no (what would be the reason for such a thing?) but there have been many mergers and acquisitions due to circumstances. A Hasidic group small enough that it is no longer sustainable frequently gets absorbed into a larger similar Chasidus following the same roots.

For example both Stolin and Chabad at one time were many different groups led by different rebbes that ultimately consolidated into one because the other offshoots were either leaderless or no longer large enough to be self contained groups.

This happened to the greatest degree after the holocaust when many smaller groups were left with with very few adherents and no leaders so the remaining adherents just absorbed themselves into a larger one. Groups like Sochatzev and Radzmin that had thousands of adherents and world known leaders before the holocaust ceased to exists afterwards and were mostly absorbed into Gur.

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