Rav Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam

Early years

Rav Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam zy"a, the Klausenberger Rebbe and author of Shefa Chaim, was born in Rudnik, Poland, on 10 January 1905. He was a great-grandson, in the direct male line, of Rav Chaim Halberstam of Sanz, the Divrei Chaim, and a grandson of the Gorlitzer Rebbe, Rav Baruch Halberstam. His father, Rav Tzvi Hirsch Halberstam, the rav of Rudnik, filled him with a love of Chassidus and of Torah learning, and told him stories of the Divrei Chaim's learning, his davening and his tish (the Shabbos and Yom Tov table).

At thirteen he lost his father. He went on to learn under other leading Chassidic rebbes, among them Rav Meir Yechiel of Ostrovtza, Rav Chaim Elazar Shapira, the Munkatcher Rebbe, and his great-uncle Rav Shalom Eliezer Halberstam of Ratzfert. Rudnik came to call him its ilui (genius). He visited Rudnik from time to time in later years, and its chassidim stayed loyal to him even when his first cousin, Rav Binyomin Teitelbaum-Halberstam, took up the rabbinate there in 1924.

In 1921, at the age of sixteen, he married his second cousin, Chana Teitelbaum, daughter of Rav Chaim Tzvi Teitelbaum, the rav of Sighet. She too descended from the Divrei Chaim. With no money to set up a household of their own, the young couple lived in her parents' house for several years.

Torah and leadership

In 1927, at the age of twenty-two, he accepted the rabbanus of the Sefardi congregation of Klausenburg, Romania, at the urging of his relative Rav Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rav. The congregation, made up mainly of chassidim, had separated from the city's official Orthodox community and kept its own congregation under a clause that allowed it.

Though he was young, his ahavas Yisroel, his wisdom, his wit and his warm, inviting personality made him beloved by the community, including Jews of every background. For the next sixteen years, as his family grew to eleven children, he devoted himself fully to his kehilla while also making remarkable personal advances. He ate very little during the week, often just one meal a day, keeping bread for Shabbos, and he slept little more than three hours a night, dozing on a bench in shul as he learned through the night. He spent much of the day in tefillah and learning, and his love of Hashem was legendary. He started a cheder for the local children, to learn al taharas hakodesh (in complete purity), and a yeshiva in which a hundred students learned.

His reputation spread through Romania and Hungary and reached Eretz Yisroel. In 1937 he was offered a seat on the beis din of Yerushalayim. Unsure whether to accept it or to stay with his community, he asked his mother in Rudnik what to do, and she told him to stay put, since he was too young for such a post.

The Holocaust years

The Jews of Hungary and Romania did not feel the full force of Nazi cruelty until 1944, but the Rebbe devoted himself early on to helping the refugees who managed to escape over the border. After the Second Vienna Award of 1940, Klausenburg, which the Hungarians called Kolozsvár, came under Hungarian rule. In 1941 a new Hungarian law demanded that every Jew prove that his family had lived and paid taxes in the country since 1851. Thousands were suddenly at risk, among them the Rebbe, who had been born in Poland. He, his wife and their eleven children were seized and taken to Budapest, where the family was split up. The Rebbe was imprisoned alongside a group of communal leaders who were later deported to Auschwitz. Friends and supporters worked on his behalf, he was freed, and the family went back to Kolozsvár.

Even then he would not abandon his followers, and he took no steps to protect himself from the searches that followed. He continued assisting refugees from the occupied lands and looking after his chassidim, and through the years 1941 to 1944 he never stopped learning Torah or davening for Klal Yisroel.

The Germans invaded Hungary on 19 March 1944, and Hungarian Jews were rounded up, confined to ghettos and sent to Auschwitz. The Klausenburg ghetto was set up on 1 May, and six transports had emptied it by early June, the first leaving in late May. Aware that community leaders were seized first, the Rebbe spent several weeks concealed in an open grave in a cemetery. He escaped to Nagybánya, where he was drafted into a forced-labor camp along with five thousand other Hungarian Jews. There he shaved his beard, as the Hungarian Chief Orthodox Rabbinate permitted. He kept leading the services and even held a Shabbos tisch, and because conditions were not harsh, he and many other prisoners paid the guards to excuse them from work.

About a month after the Rebbe arrived there, the Arrow Cross took over Hungary. The prisoners went through a selection, and he was sent to the Auschwitz labor camp. Months earlier, his wife and the children who had stayed with her had been deported from Klausenburg to Auschwitz. They did not survive.

Even in the camp's inhuman conditions the Rebbe kept his halachic stringencies. He would not so much as touch food that was not kosher, and he refused anything cooked in a pot that was not kosher, so he often went hungry. He ate bread only after he had washed his hands. To his fellow prisoners he ruled that they must eat whatever they could get. Again and again he assured them that Hashem was with them, even in the valley of death, and would never abandon them.

In late 1944 he was assigned to a special labor detail that cleared the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, together with six thousand other prisoners. There he did not shave his beard. He bound a handkerchief around his beard and face, pretending to have a toothache, and he wept all day as he worked, praying. When the prisoners heard that the detail was about to be liquidated, some planned to storm the gates and run for the forest. The Rebbe advised patience. Until it was clear that the Nazis meant to kill them, he ruled, it was forbidden to put oneself in certain danger, but they had to stay alert and rise up with all their strength at the moment the intention became clear. The prisoners followed his advice. Later, five hundred of the remaining prisoners did revolt, and the Nazis killed every one.

With the Russian army approaching, the Germans resolved to destroy the unit. They marched the prisoners to a field beyond Warsaw, ordered them to strip and lined them up at the edge of open pits. Then, at the last moment, a car raced in and a senior officer leapt out carrying orders from Berlin to cancel the execution and ship the men to Dachau as needed slave labor. This reprieve brought a brutal death march. For a week the prisoners were driven at top speed, twenty-one miles each day, through the heat of July, with nothing to eat or drink, and anyone who fell behind was shot.

On the third day, with the guards asleep, the Rebbe sent word from prisoner to prisoner: “Everyone should dig beneath himself. Hashem's salvation comes in the blink of an eye.” Each man dug with his fingers, a spoon or a scrap of wood, and each came upon water. Small springs welled up all around, quenching thirst and restoring life. It is told that the Rebbe himself did not drink, because that day was Tisha B'Av. On the fifth day the survivors were loaded into cattle cars to finish the journey to Dachau. Of the six thousand who had set out, fewer than two thousand arrived alive, and the Rebbe was among them.

From Dachau he was sent to the Muldorf forest, where prisoners built an underground airfield, working twelve-hour shifts carrying 110-pound sacks of cement. Weakened, he collapsed under a load and was beaten. He refused to work on Shabbos, which brought more beatings, until his friends persuaded the camp managers to make him the custodian, sweeping the barracks, so that he could daven all day. He was a source of strength and hope for the others. When a prisoner died in the infirmary, a commonplace event, the Rebbe rose and eulogized him as a great Torah scholar of Hungary. For nine months in Muldorf he ate only bread and water, would not eat food from the non-kosher kitchen, and would not eat bread until he had washed his hands, waiting days at times to find water. One prisoner saw him stand for hours at the cement mixer, catching the drops that dripped from the tank.

In the spring of 1945 the camp was disbanded, and the prisoners were sent on another death march, sometimes loaded onto rail cars and driven back and forth. On Friday, 27 April, the train halted at a small town. SS men climbed aboard, announced “You are free,” and ripped the insignia off their uniforms. Many believed them and jumped down. The Rebbe said to those near him, “Today is erev Shabbos. Where will we go?” and added, “My heart tells me that not everything here is as it should be.” Then SS men came pedaling in on bicycles from every side, shooting machine guns and killing hundreds, while American planes swooped low and strafed the field. The Rebbe and the men who had remained with him on the train were the only ones not hurt. Two days afterward the guards ran off, and American soldiers climbed on board, smiling and handing out candy and chocolate.

Rebuilding in Europe and America

The survivors reached the Feldafing DP camp, near Munich, worn out, shattered and without a penny. It was there that the Rebbe's gifts as a leader emerged, and he came to speak for the religious survivors and guide them. Right away he saw to it that those who had died beside the railroad tracks received a proper burial, and he insisted on kosher food. On the first Shabbos after liberation he led the tefillos in a shul that had just opened and spoke for two hours, citing from memory Torah writings he had last seen years earlier.

His wife and ten of his children had been murdered. His eldest son lived through the war but fell ill and died in a DP camp nearby, before his father had learned that he was alive. The Rebbe never complained about his lot. He kept despair away by turning to others, devoting many hours to hearing out and consoling people of every age, and his impassioned addresses brought hundreds back to Torah observance.

In the fall of 1945 he relocated to the DP camp at Föhrenwald, near Munich, a bigger site that he turned into the hub of religious Jewish life for every camp. He founded a survivors' organization there, Sh'eris HaPleitah (the surviving remnant). Through it he ran yeshivos for young men and schools for boys and for girls in nineteen DP camps. The Rebbe also arranged for a kosher slaughterhouse and built a kosher mikveh. He obtained tzitzis, tefillin and mezuzos and distributed them, collected funds so that couples could marry, and set down halachic guidelines for men and women who lacked proof that a spouse had died, allowing them to remarry and build new families.

In spring 1946 he made a special fundraising trip to New York for Sh'eris HaPleitah and raised $100,000, an enormous sum in those days. That fall he went on another fundraising trip and decided to settle in New York, to strengthen American Jewry and to keep working for the survivors from that side of the ocean. He traveled on the Marine Marlin, and recruited orphans on the voyage to learn in his yeshiva. In 1947 he settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and established his court there. For bochurim who could not obtain visas to the United States and ended up in Canada, he opened a yeshiva and asked Rav Shmuel Alexander Unsdorfer to be its rosh yeshiva. It is Mesivta Reishis Chochma, which still operates today.

On Friday, 22 August 1947, he married Chaya Nechama Ungar, an orphan whose father was the Nitra Rav, Rav Shmuel Dovid Ungar. Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl suggested the match. He was the Nitra Rav's son-in-law, had come through the Holocaust and had rebuilt his yeshiva, which stood in Somerville, New Jersey. The tenayim took place at his yeshiva, while the chuppah and the dancing were at Yeshivas Sh'eris HaPleitah, the Rebbe's own yeshiva, also in Somerville.

After the war he had labored to make it possible for agunos and widowers to remarry, accepting the word of people who had watched their spouses sent “to the left” in the Nazi selections. For his own first wife, though, he would not depend on such testimony. He obtained the approval of a hundred rabbanim, and before remarrying he sat on the floor for half an hour in mourning for her. With his second wife he had five daughters and two sons. The sons, Rav Tzvi Elimelech Halberstam and Rav Shmuel Dovid Halberstam, followed him as the Sanzer Rebbe of Netanya and the Klausenberger-Sanz Rebbe of New York.

Building in Eretz Yisroel

Throughout his suffering he had kept the goal of settling in Eretz Yisroel. In the late 1950s he established Kiryat Sanz in the seaside city of Netanya, the first Rebbe to found a Chareidi neighborhood in an Israeli development town. At the cornerstone ceremony a journalist asked whether he really felt that all Jews should move to Eretz Yisroel. The Rebbe replied that Eretz Yisroel is the best place for Jews to live. “What about all the anti-religious things that go on here?” the reporter asked. “Just because Adam and Chava sinned in Gan Eden,” the Rebbe answered, “doesn't mean it's not Gan Eden anymore.” Most other admorim in Eretz Yisroel admonished him for settling in a place of pritzus at the seashore. He replied, “We will go with goodness. We will not throw any stones.”

Over the next years he raised money for the neighborhood's institutions, including schools for boys and girls, yeshivos, an orphanage and an old-age home. In 1960 he realized his dream of moving to Eretz Yisroel, settling permanently in Netanya and directing the communities there and in Williamsburg. He also founded batei medrash and schools in other cities, and established the Kiryat Sanz neighborhood of Yerushalayim. In 1968 he began a new Sanz community in the town of Union City, New Jersey, and from then on he split his time between it and his home in Netanya.

In 1958 he began to carry out a vow made during the war, to build a hospital in Eretz Yisroel run by the strictest standards of halacha. In 1980, at the cornerstone ceremony for the second building, he told the story in Yiddish. A bullet had struck his arm, and he dreaded going to the Nazi infirmary, because he knew that no one who entered came out alive. Instead he pulled a leaf from a tree and held it against the wound to stop the bleeding, then cut a branch and bound it on to keep the leaf in place. With Hashem's help the arm healed within three days. He resolved then that if he survived he would build a hospital in Eretz Yisroel in which every person would be treated with dignity, and in which the doctors and nurses would believe in Hashem and see the care of a patient as the greatest mitzvah.

He applied for a building permit, but it was not granted until 1962, when a religious party took over the Health Ministry. He then spent fifteen years raising funds for the hospital, which took the name Laniado Hospital in honor of the Laniado brothers, two Swiss bankers whose estate gave the Rebbe a donation of $300,000. An outpatient clinic, the first building, opened its doors in 1975. Over the next years the hospital added a maternity ward, an emergency room, and departments of internal medicine, cardiology and intensive care. Today it includes a nursing school, a geriatric center, a children's hospital and two medical centers. The Rebbe kept planning and overseeing its growth until his passing.

In 1982 he founded Mifal Hashas, a worldwide program that encourages thousands of men and bochurim to study large amounts of Gemara and Shulchan Aruch and to take written tests on twenty to thirty pages a month, in return for a monthly stipend. The Rebbe often said that Mifal Hashas was his greatest achievement. Its 463rd test, held more than thirty-seven years after the program began, drew participants all over Israel.

Teachings and seforim

For decades the Rebbe delivered shiurim on Chumash, in which he brought brilliant chiddushim and showed his encyclopedic Torah knowledge. Those shiurim included many stories, some he had heard from his father and some from his great-grandfather, the Divrei Chaim. He was a master storyteller, able to rivet his listeners even with stories they had heard many times. The lesson he drew, the way he told it, its timing and his reason for choosing it were as striking as the stories themselves.

His shiurim are published in kuntresim of only a few pages each, distributed worldwide every week. Each contains mussar, words of encouragement and hope, chiddushim on the parsha and stories, some of them parables and some true anecdotes about earlier tzaddikim, especially the Rebbe's own forebears. A large part of his Torah appears in the seforim Shefa Chaim and Divrei Yetziv, a collection of responsa that spans a wide range of topics and shows his mastery of halacha. His mastery of Chassidic thought and Kabbalah was also legendary.

Later years and passing

The Rebbe returned his neshamah to its Source on 9 Tammuz 5754 (18 June 1994), at the age of eighty-nine, and he is buried in Kiryat Sanz, near Netanya. His will split the leadership of the Sanz chassidim between his two sons: Rav Tzvi Elimelech Halberstam became the Sanzer Rebbe of Netanya, and Rav Shmuel Dovid Halberstam became the Klausenberger-Sanz Rebbe of Brooklyn.

Legacy

The Rebbe lost his entire family in the war, yet he became the living embodiment of survival and rebirth, and he played a pivotal role in rebuilding the Torah world. His journey carried him from the death camps and the DP camps of Europe to the court he built in America, and then to Kiryat Sanz, Laniado Hospital and Mifal Hashas in Eretz Yisroel.

Rav Hershel Mashinsky, who first met the Rebbe as a young bochur and said then, “This is my Rebbe,” carried his teachings into the classroom and treated every talmid as if he were his only child. A couple who came from Haifa to be treated at Laniado Hospital, though they had the well-known Rambam Hospital in their own city, said that for the care and the shemiras Shabbos according to halacha, there is nothing comparable to Laniado.