Rav Ahrele Roth, founder of Chassidus Shomrei Emunim, came to Yerushalayim in 1925. He was known for his fervent and emotional style of tefilla. In Satmar, Hungary, at the time, he was viewed as being inordinately intense, and became somewhat of a curiosity. Such was his manner of conducting himself that the talmidim from the Satmar Yeshiva were banned from visiting or even laying eyes on him. It is said that he often had to change his shirt up to three times during Shabbos-morning tefillos. He often stretched out the davening to four or five hours, such was his intensity.
[I have read that he instituted the practice that all the shuls in Europe in which his Chassidim davened were forbidden to light the fires in the warming ovens during the cold winter days. He instructed that his Chassidim’s tefillos should be sufficient to warm them up and keep them from freezing. They say that the windows of such shuls glistened with condensation due to the intense heat generated inside them despite the lack of ovens to heat them!] When he moved to Yerushalayim in 1925 he had decided to become a sofer (a scribe), but his teacher quickly realized that this was no ordinary human being and, soon after, Rav Ahrele Roth founded Shomrei Emunim.
