Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam | |
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| Title | Klausenburger Rebbe |
| Personal | |
| Born | Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam January 10, 1905 Rudnik, Poland |
| Died | June 18, 1994 (aged 89) Netanya, Israel |
| Religion | Judaism |
| Spouse | Chana Teitelbaum, Chaya Nechama Ungar |
| Children | 11 children, Zvi Elimelech Halberstam Shmiel Dovid Halberstam Miriam Leah (wife of Rabbi Shlomo Goldman) Mindy (wife of Rabbi Dov Berel Weiss) Hindy (wife of Rabbi Fishel Mutzen) Yehudis (wife of Rabbi Shaul Yehuda Prizant) Suri Esther (wife of Rabbi Duvid Shapiro)[1] |
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| Jewish leader | |
| Successor | Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Halberstam Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Halberstam |
| Began | 1927 |
| Ended | June 18, 1994 |
| Main work | Shefa Chayim; Divrei Yatsiv |
| Dynasty | Klausenburg |
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| Judaism |
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Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam (January 10, 1905 – June 18, 1994) was an Orthodox rabbi and the founding rebbe of the Sanz-Klausenburg Hasidic dynasty.
Halberstam was one of the youngest rebbes in Europe, leading thousands of followers in the town of Klausenburg, Romania, before World War II. His wife, eleven children and most of his followers were murdered by the Nazis while he was incarcerated in several concentration camps. After the war, he moved to the United States and later Israel. Halberstam rebuilt Jewish communal life in the displaced persons camps of Western Europe. He also re-established his dynasty in the United States and Israel. Halberstam founded a Haredi neighborhood in Israel and a Sanz community in the United States. Additionally, Halberstam established a hospital in Israel that followed Jewish law. He also started a new family after a second marriage and the birth of seven more children.
Early life
Halberstam was born in 1905 in the town of Rudnik, Poland. He was a great-grandson (in the direct male line) of Chaim Halberstam of Sanz. [2] When he was 13 his father, Tzvi Hirsch Halberstam, the rabbi of Rudnik died.
In 1921, Halberstam married his second cousin, Chana Teitelbaum, the daughter of Chaim Tzvi Teitelbaum.
In 1927 he became rabbi of a Nusach Sefard congregation in Klausenburg, Romania.
Holocaust period
In 1941 a new law required all Jews living in Hungary to prove that their family had lived in and paid taxes in Hungary back to 1851. Halberstam, his wife and eleven children were arrested and brought to Budapest, where the family was separated. He was jailed with a group of leaders who were later sent to Auschwitz, but he was released and the family returned to Kolozsvár.[why?]
On 19 March 1944 the Germans invaded Hungary and Hungarian Jews were confined to ghettos and then deported to the Auschwitz death camp. The Klausenburg ghetto was established on 1 May 1944, and was liquidated via six transports to Auschwitz between late May and early June.
Halberstam fled to the town of Nagybánya, where he was conscripted into a forced-labor camp along with 5,000 other Hungarian Jews.
About a month after his arrival the Arrow Cross took over Hungary. He was sent to Auschwitz, where his wife and nine of their children who remained with her in Klausenburg had been sent several months earlier. They did not survive. Halberstam was assigned to a work unit in the Warsaw Ghetto and later was sent to the Dachau concentration camp as a slave laborer, and then to the Muldorf Forest, where the Nazis were building an underground airport and missile batteries. In the spring of 1945 the Germans disbanded the Muldorf camp and sent the inmates on a death march from which the survivers, including Halberstam, were liberated by Allied troops in late April.
Halberstam's wife and ten of his children were murdered by the Nazis during World War II. His eldest son survived the war but died of illness in a refugee camp soon after.
In the DP camps
In fall 1945, Halberstam moved to the new DP camp of Föhrenwald, a larger location in Munich which he turned into the center of religious Jewish life for all the DP camps. Here the Rebbe created a communal survivors organization called Sh'erit ha-Pletah ("the surviving remnant"), which operated religious schools for boys and girls and yeshivos for young men in nineteen different DP camps. In addition, Halberstam set up a kosher slaughterhouse; built a kosher mikveh; acquired and distributed religious articles such as tzitzit, tefillin and mezuzot; raised money to help couples marry; and established Halakhic (Jewish legal) guidelines for men and women who had no proof of their spouse's death, enabling them to remarry and start new families.
On Yom Kippur, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the camps and came to see Halberstam, who had received a reputation as a "wonder rabbi". However, the Rebbe would not speak with him until he had finished his prayers. Afterwards he told the general, "I was praying before the General of Generals, King of Kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He. The earthly general had to wait." Impressed by the rabbi's leadership and frankness, Eisenhower asked him if there was any way he could help him in his efforts. In typical fashion, Halberstam asked for a small sample of the Four Species so that the survivors could properly celebrate the upcoming Sukkot holiday.
In spring 1946 the Rebbe made a special fund-raising trip to New York on behalf of Sh'erit ha-Pletah, raising $100,000, a huge sum in those days. That fall, he embarked on another fund-raising trip and decided to eventually resettle in New York to strengthen the American Jewish community there and to continue working for Holocaust survivors from that side of the Atlantic. He came to the United States on the Marine Marlin, and during the ocean crossing recruited a number of orphans to come and study in his yeshiva. He established his court in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1947.[1]
Remarriage
On Friday, August 22, 1947,[3] he married his second wife, Chaya Nechama Ungar, the orphaned daughter of the Nitra Rav, Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Ungar. The match was made by Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, Ungar's son-in-law who had survived the Holocaust and re-established his yeshiva in Somerville, New Jersey.[1][3] The tenayim were held in Weissmandl's Nitra Yeshiva, while the chuppah and dancing were held at Yeshivas She'aris Hapleitah, the Rebbe's yeshiva in Somerville.[3]
Although the Klausenberger Rebbe had gone to great lengths to allow agunos and widowers to remarry after the Holocaust, relying on testimonies from people who had seen their spouses being led "to the left" in the Nazi selections rather than documented evidence, the Rebbe did not rely on the testimonies of his first wife's death. Instead, he sought the approval of 100 rabbis and sat on the ground for half an hour in mourning for his first wife before he remarried.[3]
He and his second wife had five daughters and two sons. His sons, Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Halberstam and Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Halberstam, succeeded him, respectively, as Sanzer Rebbe of Netanya and Klausenberger-Sanz Rebbe of New York. His five sons-in-law all hold rabbinical positions.
On 4 April 2020, his widow, Chaya Nechama, died in New York, aged 96.[4]
Kiryat Sanz, Netanya
The Rebbe's decision to move to the United States was not a permanent one. Throughout his travails in the Holocaust, he always had in mind the goal of settling in Israel. Toward that end, he established the Kiryat Sanz neighborhood in the beachside city of Netanya in 1958.[1] In so doing, he was the first Rebbe to establish a Haredi neighborhood in an Israeli development town. Over the next few years, he raised money for the establishment of key neighborhood institutions, including girls' and boys' schools and yeshivas, an orphanage, and an old-age home.[1]
The Rebbe moved permanently to Israel in 1960, settling in Netanya and directing both the community there and in Williamsburg. He also founded battei medrash and schools in other cities in Israel, and established the Kiryat Sanz neighborhood of Jerusalem as well.
In 1968 he founded another Sanz community in Union City, New Jersey,[5] and afterwards divided his time between that community and his residence in Netanya.[1]
Laniado Hospital
The Rebbe is known for having established Laniado Hospital, a voluntary, not-for-profit 484-bed hospital in Kiryat Sanz, Netanya. The hospital is run according to Jewish law.
The vision for establishing the hospital originated during the Holocaust. At the cornerstone-laying for the second building in 1980, he told the assemblage in Yiddish:
I was saved from the gas chambers, saved from Hitler. I spent several years in Nazi death camps. Besides the fact that they murdered my wife and 11 children, my mother, my sisters and my brother – of my whole family, some 150 people, I was the only one who survived – I witnessed their cruelty. I remember as if it were today how they shot me in the arm. I was afraid to go to the Nazi infirmary, though there were doctors there. I knew that if I went in, I'd never come out alive. … Despite my fear of the Nazis, I plucked a leaf from a tree and stuck it to my wound to stanch the bleeding. Then I cut a branch and tied it around the wound to hold it in place. With God's help, it healed in three days. Then I promised myself that if, with God's help, I got well and got out of there, away from those resha'im (wicked people), I would build a hospital in Eretz Yisrael where every human being would be cared for with dignity. And the basis of that hospital would be that the doctors and nurses would believe that there is a God in this world and that when they treat a patient, they are fulfilling the greatest mitzvah in the Torah.[6]
In 1958, he laid the cornerstone for a community hospital to be run according to the strictest standards of Halakha. He petitioned the authorities for a building permit, but was not granted one until the left-wing Minister of Health left office in 1962 and the Health Ministry was given to a religious party. Halberstam spent 15 years raising funds to build the hospital, which would come to be named Laniado Hospital, after the Laniado brothers, two bankers from Switzerland whose estate provided a $300,000 donation for the Rebbe.[6][7] The hospital's first building, an outpatient clinic, opened in 1975.[8] In the next few years, a maternity ward, emergency room, internal medicine department, a cardiology unit, and an intensive-care unit opened. The hospital continued to expand, and today encompasses two medical centers, a children’s hospital, a geriatric center and a nursing school, serving a regional population of over 450,000.[9] The Rebbe continued to plan and supervise the expansion of the hospital until his death in 1994.
Mifal HaShas
In addition to his achievements in rebuilding the Sanz-Klausenberg dynasty and establishing many communal institutions, one of the Rebbe's most far-reaching accomplishments was his establishment of "Mifal HaShas" ("Talmud Factory") in 1982. This worldwide project encourages thousands of Jewish men and boys to study copious amounts of Talmud and Shulchan Aruch and complete written tests on 20–30 pages per month in return for a monthly stipend. Mifal HaShas continues to operate today worldwide. The Israeli and European operations are under the leadership of Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Halberstam, the Rebbe's oldest son and current Sanz-Klausenberger Rebbe of Israel. The North American operations are under the leadership of Rabbi Samuel David Halberstam, the Rebbe's other son and current Sanz-Klausenberger Rebbe of Brooklyn.
The Rebbe recorded his Torah novellae in Shefa Chayim and She'eilos Uteshuvos Divrei Yatziv.
Halberstam died on 18 June 1994, and was buried in Netanya. In his will, he divided leadership of the Sanzer Hasidim between his two sons: his elder son, Zvi Elimelech Halberstam, became the Sanz-Klausenberger Rebbe (also known as the Sanzer Rebbe) of Netanya; Samuel David Halberstam became the Sanz-Klausenberger Rebbe of Brooklyn.
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f Leibowitz Schmidt, Shira. "The Rebbe's Daughters". Ami Living, September 15, 2013, pp. 59–65.
- ^ Freund, Rabbi Tuvia. "Carrying the Torch of Chachmei Yisrael: Harav Boruch Dov Povarsky of Ponevezh, shlita, and Harav Eliyahu Shmuel Schmerler, shlita". Hamodia. Archived from the original on July 21, 2011. Retrieved December 28, 2010.
- ^ a b c d Landesman, Yeruchem. The Wedding that Changed Despair to Hope. Mishpacha, November 11, 2009, pp. 30–34.
- ^ "Petira of The Klausenberger Rebbitzen A'H". Yeshiva World News. April 4, 2020. Retrieved April 5, 2020.
- ^ Tannenbaum, Rabbi Gershon (January 3, 2008). "The current Zvhiler Rebbe is a son-in-law of Rabbi Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam, zt"l (1904–1994), Klausenberg Rebbe and founder of the Union City community". The Jewish Press. Retrieved July 1, 2008.[permanent dead link]
- ^ a b Hall, J. (1 February 2006). "The Hospital With a Jewish Heart". Hamodia Magazine, pp. 12–13, 17.
- ^ Rosenblum, Jonathan (August 26, 2000). "No Strike At Laniado". Aish.com. Retrieved October 24, 2013.
- ^ "Sanz Medical Center – Laniado Hospital Timeline". Sanz Medical Center – Laniado Hospital. Archived from the original on July 31, 2012. Retrieved December 25, 2010.
- ^ "About the Hospital". British Friends of Laniado Hospital. Archived from the original on November 12, 2010. Retrieved December 28, 2010.
Sources
- Lifschitz, Judah. The Klausenberger Rebbe: The War Years. Targum Press, Inc., 2003. ISBN 1-56871-219-7
- Rabinowicz, Tzvi M. Hasidism in Israel: A History of the Hasidic Movement and Its Masters in the Holy Land. New York: Jason Aronson, 2000. ISBN 0-7657-6068-1
External links
- A video of Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam, zt"l
- Biography of Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam, zt"l
- the Rebbe zt'l, tells a story from his time in the holocaust
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