Those traits testified to Taub’s torturous ordeal as an inmate in Auschwitz, where the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele subjected him and hundreds of other Jews and Gypsies to macabre experiments designed to tinker with their genetic heredity and thus prove the supremacy of the Aryan race.
Taub, the Israeli-based grand rabbi of the Kaliv Hasidim, died April 28 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 96. His funeral took place the same day, and thousands of Hasidim crowded the plaza outside to mourn.
Once he had reconstituted his Hasidic tribe in Israel, Taub devoted himself to exhorting the Hasidic world and those outside it to remember the approximately 6 million Jews killed by the Nazi regime during World War II. “He was the ultimate Holocaust survivor,” Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, chief of the Orthodox rabbinate in Budapest, Hungary, said in a telephone interview. “He constantly commemorated the 6 million Jews who disappeared.”
While many other Hasidim spurned the state-sanctioned Holocaust Remembrance Day, preferring instead a religious fast day, the 10th of the Hebrew month of Tevet, Taub accepted it, though he urged that it be spent in prayer and Torah study.
But he objected to the primacy Israelis put on heroic feats of resistance.
“Why do we give more importance to the physical fighters?” he told The New York Times in 2000. “How about the rabbis and yeshiva students who clung to the religious commandments until the end? Did they not defend the soul of the Jewish people? Are they not as important to Israel today as F-16s and A-bombs?”
He also reached out to less observant Jews to reconnect them with their faith by urging them to regularly utter the Shema Yisrael prayer, leading such recitations himself.
The Kaliv Hasidim was founded by Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Taub (1744-1821). He is venerated by large sects like the Satmar and Viznitz Hasidim as the spiritual leader who established Hasidic culture and philosophy in Hungary. Menachem Taub was the seventh rebbe, or grand rabbi, in a direct paternal line that stretched back to Yitzchak Taub. There is also a separate branch of the Kaliv Hasidim in Brooklyn, New York.
Hasidism stresses joy in worship and in religious acts, values the ordinary Jew who cleaves to the ways of the Torah as much as the scholar, and centers its organization on a single spiritual master or rebbe, who is consulted on matters such as whom to marry and even the appropriateness of surgery.
With his pleasant alto, Taub was identified with a plaintive Hasidic standard, “Sol a kokosh mar.” It is a lament for Jewish exile, and he sang it on many occasions, most prominently at a ceremony in March 2014 on the Danube to mark the 70th anniversary of the wartime murder of 565,000 Hungarian Jews.
He published a collection of more than 500 first-person accounts by Holocaust survivors. It is called “Shema Yisrael: Testimonies of Devotion, Courage, and Self-Sacrifice.” And he burnished his reputation for scholarship with a 13-volume work on the Torah and Jewish holidays.
When President Donald Trump decided in 2017 to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a choice matched by only a handful of nations, Taub issued a message of praise.
“I want to wish you from the depths of my heart that you should have great success. Don’t worry if people are talking bad about you. The Almighty is with you.”
Rabbi Taub was born in 1923 in the Transylvanian town of Marghita, now in Romania. He had six siblings. His father, Rabbi Yehuda Yechiel Taub, was a prominent Hasidic leader. In 1944, the family was deported to Auschwitz. All six siblings were killed.
Taub spent time in other concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, and after liberation, reunited with his wife, Hana Sara, in Sweden. They immigrated to the United States and settled in Cleveland, but by 1962, had moved to Israel, where they re-established the Kaliv community, first in Rishon LeZion and then in Bnei Brak, outside Tel Aviv.
Hana Sara died in 2010, and he married Sheindel Malnik of Bnei Brak. At Taub’s funeral it was announced that his stepgrandson, Rabbi Yisrael Mordechai Horowitz will succeed him as the Kaliver rebbe.
According to The Jewish Chronicle, the London-based weekly, Taub was once asked why the recitation of the Shema Yisrael prayer was so important. He replied that just before he was liberated at Bergen-Belsen, Nazis were throwing Jews into burning pits.
“I cried out the Shema Yisrael and said ‘Ribbono shel Olam (Creator of the World), this might be, God forbid, the last time I will be saying Shema Yisrael. Soon I will be with the rest of my family in heaven. If you give me life, then I promise You that I will say time and again Shema Yisrael, declaring Your eternity and those who will outlive the war.’’’
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.