The desire came suddenly, without explanation, and AZR does not hide his distaste:
"Suddenly the desire arose in the hearts of many of the worshippers — and especially in the hearts of my father, my grandfather, and my uncles — to exchange the Ashkenaz rite for the Chabad rite… not one of them knew in what respect the accepted rite was any worse… Why, then, did they spurn it? I do not know." AZR, "A Dispute 'for the Sake of Heaven'" (Chapters of Memoirs), Ben-Yehuda read/20425.
From here, an absurd war of positions: each faction rushed to seize the "amud" (the prayer lectern) and set the rite; whoever got there first prevailed, and the other side was forced into the side room. "The war was especially fierce on the Sabbath." And the little "rascals," AZR among them, excelled at reading aloud.
AZR's theological irony is piercing, and yet he does not dismiss the worshippers' sincerity:
"These on this side call out 'Nakdish' and those on that side call out 'Nakdishkha,' and the Holy One, blessed be He, sits on His throne of glory and takes, as it were, abundant pleasure, saying: 'Happy is the King who is praised in His house like this!'…" Ibid.
"And far be it from me to say that these men… were empty and reckless, that prayer was a laughingstock in their eyes. Heaven forbid!… It is only that they did not sense that in doing so they were profaning the sanctity of prayer. Great was the wildness…" Ibid. Both sides believe with all their hearts — and that is precisely the tragedy.
The human moment: the old prayer leader who could no longer "seize the amud," and went into exile to another beit midrash at the edge of town. The child AZR felt compassion:
"In my tender heart there awoke a feeling of compassion and sympathy for the sorrow of this old man, who found no rest in the house where he and his fathers had prayed all their days!" Ibid. (The seed of the compassion that would become AZR's hallmark; see "Lyady: Hasidism, Zion, and Compassion.")
The ending: the Hasidim built a beit midrash of their own — on the very site of the house of the author of the "Tanya" (which by then belonged to R. Binyamin-Chaim the shtadlan), "and in the end the Chabad rite prevailed… a total victory."
This is one of the most important documents for understanding AZR. Here, in his childhood, he saw how a "holy" quarrel over nothing — a prayer rite — tears an entire community apart, with sincere people (his own family!) as the instigators. From this grows his lifelong aversion to "divisions": his stand in the Brenner Affair against the Odessa Committee, "On the Instigators," "We Are All Jews," and even Acosta and Abraham — all of which return to the same principle: "the unity of the nation… and contradictions must not be allowed to bring about division between brothers." The child who watched the liturgy war became the man who demanded unity.