The most distinguished Hasidic leader in Galicia in the era was Chaim Halberstam, who combined Talmudic erudition and the status of a major decisor with his function as "tzaddiq". He symbolized the new era, brokering peace between the small Hasidic sect in Hungary to its opponents. In that country, where modernization and assimilation were much more prevalent than in the East, the local Righteous joined forces with those now termed Orthodox against the rising liberals. Rabbi Moses Sofer of Pressburg, while no friend to Hasidism, tolerated it as he combated the forces which sought modernization of the Jews; a generation later, in the 1860s, the "Rebbe"s and the zealot ultra-Orthodox Hillel Lichtenstein allied closely.