While the Rebbe’s personal warm concern for each individual was surely a key factor in the unusually low drop-out rate among his kehillah’s members, there are additional factors in his leadership that also account for this phenomenon.
When he settled in Williamsburg shortly after arriving in the United States, he found a handful of his followers in a bais hamidrash all day, saying Tehillim, learning Chok – and spending their time in “the Rebbe’s Court”. He summoned them to him and insisted that they find jobs to support their families. “If I had the strength (he was in his sixties at the time) I’d also go to work.” ... He felt that he could not be oblivious to the stress on material well-being that marks American society. Here, especially, one had to be mindful of the dictum: “Poverty can sway a man from loyalty to his Creator.” Moreover, a viable community could only take shape if it is self-supporting on a level comparable to that of the surrounding society. By the same token, he guided his followers to give tzeddakah expansively – not to shy away from a sweeping gesture of generosity. Today, members of the Satmar community are active in all phases of business and commerce, as well as in a wide spectrum of occupations, ranging from grocers to computer programmers. And the community itself supports a host of social services, most notably its bikur-cholim program – administering to the sick, with fleets of cars and vans carrying hundreds of volunteers to hospitals all over New York, throughout the day.
