Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam
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Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam (Template:Langx; January 10, 1905 – June 18, 1994) was a rebbe (hereditary rabbinical leader) of the Hasidic dynasty of Sanz-Klausenburg.
Early life
Halberstam was born in 1905 in Rudnik, Poland. He was a great-grandson (in the direct male line) of Chaim Halberstam, founder of the Sanz hasidic dynasty.[1] When he was 13 his father, Tzvi Hirsch Halberstam, the rabbi of Rudnik, died.
In 1925, Halberstam married his second cousin, Pessel Teitelbaum. She was the daughter of Chaim Tzvi Teitelbaum and therefore the sister of Moshe Teitelbaum as well as the niece of Joel Teitelbaum.
In 1930, he became rabbi of a Nusach Sefard congregation in Klausenburg, Romania.
Holocaust period
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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 Nazis 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 survivors, 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. After Allied liberation, the Klausenberger Rebbe met Dwight D. Eisenhower and criticized Allied failure to bomb the death camps and train tracks leading to them, insisting it could have saved millions of Jewish lives. [2]
In spring 1946 he went to the United States, where he established his court in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1947.[3]
Remarriage
On Friday, August 22, 1947,[4] he married his second wife, Chaya Nechama Ungar, the daughter of Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Ungar.[3][4] They had five daughters and two sons.
Kiryat Sanz, Netanya
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In 1968Script error: No such module "Unsubst". he founded another Sanz community in Union City, New Jersey,[5] and afterwards divided his time between that community and Netanya.[3]
Laniado Hospital
Halberstam established Laniado Hospital, a voluntary, not-for-profit 484-bed hospital in Kiryat Sanz, Netanya.[6]
The hospital's first building, an outpatient clinic, opened in 1975.[7] The hospital includes two medical centers, a children's hospital, a geriatric center and a nursing school, serving a regional population of over 450,000.[8]
Death and succession
Halberstam died on 10 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 rebbe of Netanya; Samuel David Halberstam became the rebbe of Brooklyn.[9]
A biography about his life was published by Artscroll titled "The Klausenburger Rebbe", in english.[10]
References
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- ↑ a b Landesman, Yeruchem. The Wedding that Changed Despair to Hope. Mishpacha, November 11, 2009, pp. 30–34.
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- ↑ Hall, J. (1 February 2006). "The Hospital With a Jewish Heart". Hamodia Magazine, pp. 12–13, 17.
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Sources
- Lifschitz, Judah. The Klausenberger Rebbe: The War Years. Targum Press, Inc., 2003. Template:ISBN
- Rabinowicz, Tzvi M. Hasidism in Israel: A History of the Hasidic Movement and Its Masters in the Holy Land. New York: Jason Aronson, 2000. Template:ISBN
- Pages with script errors
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- Rebbes of Sanz-Klausenberg
- Hasidic rabbis in Europe
- Romanian Hasidic rabbis
- People from Union City, New Jersey
- 20th-century Romanian rabbis
- American Hasidic rabbis
- People from Nisko County
- Auschwitz concentration camp survivors
- 1905 births
- 1994 deaths
- People from Williamsburg, Brooklyn
- Religious leaders from Brooklyn
- 20th-century American rabbis
- 20th-century Israeli rabbis