Yet Rabbi Yisroel Avrohom Portugal, the grand rabbi of the tiny Skulen Hasidic sect, a slender man with a broad, snowy beard and long white sidelocks, was revered throughout the growing ultra-Orthodox world.
On Tuesday, tens of thousands of black-hatted and black-garbed Hasidic men from every major sect crammed the thoroughfares of Borough Park, Brooklyn, for his funeral.
The jostling columns stretched for blocks along 14th Avenue and spilled into the radiating side streets. Mourners stood riveted to the eulogies piped through loudspeakers. They then thronged the black-draped coffin, hoping to help support it, as it seemed to float atop the crowd on its way to a hearse.
A similar outpouring came later, in a more rural setting: Monsey, New York, in Rockland County. There, a long ribbon of Hasidim followed the coffin as it was carried to the cemetery of the Viznitz Hasidim.
Portugal had died the day before at 95, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, succumbing to an infection he had had for months, said Yosef Rapaport, a media consultant for Agudath Israel of America, the ultra-Orthodox umbrella group.
Yossi Gestetner, a founder of the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, said Portugal may have been the last of the Hasidic grand rabbis who survived the ordeals of both the Holocaust and the Iron Curtain and rebuilt their communities in New York and Israel.
“He exemplifies the two great challenges that the Orthodox community faced, the darkest part of Jewish history of the last hundred years,” Gestetner said. “He and his father suffered from them both and came out strong on the other side.”
Portugal and his father, Rabbi Eliezer Zusia Portugal, rescued and cared for more than 300 Jewish children orphaned by the German effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. They eventually settled with many of them in Bucharest, Romania.
There, the communist authorities jailed father and son for five months on charges of teaching Torah and smuggling children into Israel. The two were tortured, some reports said. Outraged, prominent American Jews in 1959 successfully prevailed on Dag Hammarskjold, the United Nations secretary-general, to intervene, and the Portugals were freed. They emigrated to the United States in 1960.
In Borough Park, Portugal gained a reputation for compassion and a spare and humble lifestyle: He ate one meal a day and was said to get little sleep. On any given day he drew long lines to the door of his home for blessings and counseling.
“If someone told him her tsoris, he would literally cry,” Rapaport said, using the Yiddish word for troubles. “There were tears running down his face.”
Yet he never chose to translate that veneration into a community of acolytes on the scale of, for example, the Satmar Hasidim, who number almost 75,000 around the world. Nor did he create the synagogues, yeshivas, kosher certification enterprises and other institutions that the larger sects possess.
“He was doing God’s work and wasn’t interested in building a following,” Rapaport said.
Like his father, Portugal was famed for the melodies he composed to accompany passages in Psalms and holiday prayers, some of which are regarded as Hasidic classics. Although he did not know musical notation, he carried a cassette recorder to capture the melodies he would sing as they came to him.
But he was wary of some forms of modern technology. He was among the sponsors of a gathering in 2012 that filled seats at Citi Field and Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens — the turnout was so large that a second venue was added — to alert ultra-Orthodox Jews to the dangers of using the internet without special filters to block objectionable material.
“Whoever uses the internet without a filter is a beast, because the source of the internet is beastliness,” he was quoted as saying by the ultra-Orthodox newswire JDN.
Hasidim, however, remain avid users of the internet for business and professional needs. Many of them sell products through Amazon.
Portugal was more successful in his exhortations against possessing television sets that might introduce unwanted secular influences into the home. To underscore his point, every year, on the morning of the Passover Seder, he and his supporters threw a discarded television into a bonfire of forbidden grain products, the usual objects of the burning ritual.
Portugal was born on June 2, 1923, in the town of Skulyany (Skulen in Yiddish) in what is today Moldova, to Eliezer and Sheina Rachel Portugal. (The name Portugal does not refer to the country but is an approximation of the family name’s pronunciation in Yiddish.)
His father was the leader of Skulyany’s Hasidim before being urged to move to the city of Chernowitz to serve a larger community of Jews. The son became the Skulener Rebbe when his father died in 1982.
Portugal’s wife, Reisel, died in 2005. He is survived by five sons, three daughters and scores of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His sons, Yeshaya Yaakov, Meir, Ephraim, Zvi and Shmuel, are all rabbis. His three daughters, Leah Libba Stern, Chaya Sarah Weinberger and Nechamah Klughaupt, are all married to rabbis. Yeshaya Yaakov is expected to succeed his father as the sect’s head.
Portugal founded and raised funds for Chesed L’Avraham, a network of schools and orphanages in Israel largely devoted to the children of immigrants; they were established to counter the influence of more secular institutions.
But according to the Orthodox news website Hamodia, Portugal, unlike other grand rabbis, did not create yet another yeshiva for his followers in the United States, preferring to devote himself to spiritual development.
“What would my yeshiva add to all the others?” he asked.