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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Jerusalem Synagogue Victim Descended From Storied Dynasty of Hasidic World - New York Times





Rabbi Moshe Twersky, one of the four men killed on Tuesday at a Jerusalem synagogue, was a descendant of one of the oldest Hasidic dynasties of Europe — the Twerskys.


He was also someone who bridged the three great traditions of the Orthodox world — the Hasidic branch, emphasizing fervor in the performance of the commandments; the Yeshivish branch, emphasizing learning; and modern Orthodoxy, with its emphasis on engagement in the modern world.



Rabbi Twersky was the grandson of a Hasidic grand rabbi, Rabbi Meshullam Twersky, the Tolner Rebbe of Boston, who settled in the United States decades before the end of World War II, the period after which most European Hasidim immigrated to the United States. His father was Isadore Twersky, who, in an education unusual for a Hasidic son, attended the prestigious and secular Boston Latin School and became the head of Judaic studies at Harvard University from 1978 until 1993. He was also an authority on the great medieval thinker, Maimonides, known in Hebrew as Rambam.




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A Deadly Attack in Israel



A Deadly Attack in Israel


Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images


Isadore was married to someone who did not come from the Hasidic world — Atarah Soloveitchik, the daughter of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, considered by many the greatest rabbinic scholar of the late 20th century and a longtime teacher at Yeshiva University, regarded as the fountainhead institution of modern Orthodoxy.


“He wore three crowns,” Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at City University of New York and an expert on the Orthodox and Hasidic worlds, said of Isadore Twersky. “He was a distinguished professor at Harvard. He was the Tolner Rebbe. And he married the daughter of Rabbi Soloveitchik.”






Noble Sanctuary/


Temple Mount






Noble Sanctuary/


Temple Mount






Noble Sanctuary/


Temple Mount





Moshe Twersky’s brother-in-law is Jonathan Rosenblatt, the rabbi of the Riverdale Jewish Center, a modern Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx, and a great-grandson of Yossele Rosenblatt, regarded as the greatest cantor of the 20th Century.


Moshe was also a distant cousin of Rabbi David Twersky, the leader of the best known of the sects headed by Twerskys — the Skverer Hasidim who have settled in their own village in New Square in New York’s Rockland County, a rural shtetl of coiling streets made up of 10,000 Hasidim. More than a half dozen Twerskys lead Hasidic branches.




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Attack on Jerusalem Synagogue



Attack on Jerusalem Synagogue



Four people were killed while worshiping in a synagogue in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in West Jerusalem on Tuesday. Police said the two Palestinian attackers were killed.


Video by Reuters on November 18, 2014. Photo by Mahmoud Illean/Associated Press.

The Twersky family’s roots go back almost to the founding of Hasidism in the 18th century by the Baal Shem Tov, translated as “master of the good name,” according to Yitzchak Twersky, a distant cousin of Moshe’s who has written three books on his family. Wandering across Eastern Europe, the Baal Shem Tov upended the Jewish world by preaching that an untutored peasant could be as worthy a practicing Jew as a scholar if his prayers were sincere and ardent. Although his mystical teachings were attractive to thousands, they were condemned as heresy by some yeshiva scholars at the time, like the Vilna Gaon, whose base was in Lithuania.


The original Twersky, Menachem, was for a time a student of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, and he settled in Chernobyl, Ukraine. His son, Mordechai, established a rabbinic court and his eight grandsons radiated to other Ukrainian towns, gathering their own followers in places like Skver and Tolna, said Yitzchak Twersky. These dynasties lasted for a century and exerted a dominant influence on Ukrainian and Russian Jewry.


But with the pogroms of the late 19th century and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the sects scattered to Poland, the United States and what was then occupied Palestine.


Unlike other Hasidic dynasties — such as Satmar, where two brothers in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel, N.Y., claim the rabbinic throne — all the Twersky rabbis accept and acknowledge one another’s leadership,


“In the Twersky family, everyone gets along,” said Yitzchak Twersky. “All the descendants of Chernobyl get together at weddings or they make a tish together,'’ he continued, referring to a rabbi’s Sabbath table with followers. “This is very rare in the Hasidic world.”









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