23 Nisan · Yahrzeit
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Taub - the "Kaliver Rebbe, Admor of the Holocaust"
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Taub - «Admor of the Holocaust» (1923-2019)
Yahrzeit - 23 Nissan
Resting place - Bnei Brak, Israel
He was born in Transylvania and was a direct descendant, seventh generation, of the founder of the Kaliv dynasty (starting from Rebbe Yitzchak of Kaliv, a student of Rebbe Elimelech of Lizhensk).
Before the war he had six brothers and sisters, and a wife with whom he dreamed of having many children.
In 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz. He ended up in the block where Josef Mengele, nicknamed the "Angel of Death" (may his name be erased), conducted his experiments on living people.
As a result of these monstrous experiments, Menachem Mendel lost the ability to have children, and the hair on his face stopped growing (which is why he had no beard).
Having lost all his loved ones during the Holocaust and having endured the experiments performed on him in the Nazi concentration camps, he devoted himself, to the end of his days, to preserving the memory of the victims of the European Jewish Catastrophe. For this he was respectfully called "Admor of the Holocaust" (Admor HaShoah).
After Auschwitz he was in Breslau, the Warsaw Ghetto, and Bergen-Belsen. After liberation he went to Sweden, where he was reunited with his wife. From there the family moved to the United States, and in 1962 settled in Israel.
For as long as he had the strength, the "Admor of the Holocaust" gave talks about the Holocaust - in yeshivas, kollels, and schools.
In his final years the Admor worked on establishing a religious Holocaust museum. It is planned to be built in Jerusalem, in the neighborhood where Kaliver chassidim live.
The "Admor of the Holocaust" said that the existing Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, shows mainly the suffering of the Jews, while the religious museum would speak first and foremost about their spiritual strength, their faith, and the daily sanctification of the Name of Ha-Shem in the death camps.
The "Admor of the Holocaust" recalled how, in the Warsaw Ghetto, he and his companions were locked up for two days without food or water.
"We survived thanks to bread crumbs. All the prisoners turned out their pockets, and soon a small pile of crumbs had formed on the table. It was decided to keep them as an emergency reserve, in case someone began to lose consciousness from hunger. Such unity and mutual help are rare today."
Shema Yisrael
Menachem Mendel Taub established a large chassidic center in Bnei Brak. At every one of his talks he would ask those present to stand and recite the "Shema Yisrael" prayer together with him, in memory of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust. These were the last words that Jews said before their death.
The "Admor of the Holocaust" said: "A Jew who does not remember the Holocaust every day is a Holocaust denier."
- And not only because he must thank and praise Ha-Shem for the manifest miracles thanks to which no one succeeded in destroying the Jewish people, but for the sake of the lessons the Catastrophe taught us.
When I was a hair's breadth from death in the Warsaw Ghetto, I said "Shema Yisrael" and asked Ha-Shem: "Do not leave me among the dead so that I may keep saying 'Shema Yisrael' - leave me among the living."
G-d saved me, and since then my Beit Midrash "Shema Yisrael" has existed, in which the study of Torah is inseparable from the memory of the Holocaust, its lessons, and the hope for the salvation of the Jewish people."
In 2014, in an interview, the "Admor of the Holocaust" bitterly noted that the memory of the Holocaust was gradually fading, and that national pain was being replaced by formal ceremonies. "It is painful that people remember the Holocaust only once a year, at the sound of the siren," he said. "I would give my eyes not to see this, I would give my hearing not to hear it. But they stand before me constantly, all six million, among them my parents, my brothers, my sisters..."
There is a special symbolism in the fact that the Admor of the Holocaust passed away on the eve of Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. His entire life was bound up with that terrible period, about which he said: "When I am gone, I will remind you from Heaven: do not forget 'Shema Yisrael.'"
Works
Kol Menachem, a 13-volume work on the Torah and Jewish holidays;
Shema Yisrael, a two-volume Holocaust encyclopedia (Hebrew);
Shema Yisrael: Testimonies of Devotion, Courage and Self-Sacrifice, 1939-1945 (English).
May the merit of the tzadik protect Am Yisrael, and may Am Yisrael remember the terrible pages of its history!