Back in Zurich, people traveled from all over to Dr. Moshe Rothschild’s pediatric clinic. Yet when he moved to Bnei Brak and was the only physician around, he wouldn’t let the practical naysayers discourage him from a near-impossible dream: to build a medical center smack in the middle of Israel’s most densely populated chareidi city

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onday evening, Chol Hamoed Succos, 5779, Bnei Brak. The extended Rothschild family — sons and daughters-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren — had gathered in the large succah in the courtyard of their home at Rechov Elisha 20 for their traditional holiday celebration. Dr. Rothschild, father of 17, sat at the head of the table like a king. None of the family members knew that this was the last time they would gather with the beloved family patriarch.

Just a few hours later, early on Tuesday morning, Dr. Rothschild — with energy and health belying his 89 years and still involved in the medical center he founded 30 years ago in Bnei Brak — was injured in his home. He lost consciousness and was rushed in critical condition to the intensive care unit of Mayanei Hayeshua, the hospital he built from scratch to service the city’s chareidi population. This time, the man who was a constant, comforting presence for others had arrived as a patient.

That night, he was scheduled to be standing at the microphone in the large succah of the hospital courtyard for a Simchas Beis Hashoeivah. Instead, the crowd recited Tehillim for his recovery, while Rav Chaim Kanievsky paid his beloved physician a personal visit to his room.

 On Friday morning, Dr. Rothschild’s condition deteriorated further. The bris of Dr. Rothschild’s newest great-grandchild — a grandson of his son Reb Shlomo, the director of the hospital — was scheduled for Shabbos morning, but preparations for the simchah were accompanied by a sense of dread.

Shabbos morning arrived, and Rav Chaim Kanievsky rose after a typical short night of sleep to daven vasikin. “I dreamed that Dr. Rothschild passed away,” he told a family member. Two hours later, at 7:30, Dr. Rothschild passed away.

“When our father opened the hospital, his goal was to provide Bnei Brak with its own top-notch medical center to service the local population,” a son told Mishpacha. “He never set out to change the lives of the medical staff, but in the presence of such a great man, any person’s life can be radically altered. As much as we knew our father, we never realized the scope of his influence on the doctors and nurses, and on just about everyone who came in contact with him.”

 

Not the Time  

Dr. Moshe Rothschild was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1929. His father, Reb Yosef Rothschild, was a Jewish communal leader who emigrated from Germany to Switzerland during World War I, while his mother was the daughter of Rabbi Ernst Weil, a prominent Swiss Jewish figure. Moshe was one of ten children, nine of which were boys.

“My father owned a metal factory, but when World War II began and the Jews of Eastern Europe were on the verge of annihilation, my father locked the factory’s doors and announced, ‘This is not the time to make money. Our job now is to help our brethren who are suffering in captivity,’ ” Dr. Rothschild told Mishpacha in an interview several years ago. “Every day, he would come up with a new way to save Jews or a new idea for things to send to them, and he would recruit us boys to help him.”

 After the war ended, the Rothschild family began working on locating Jewish children who had been hidden in monasteries. Together with Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the Ponevezher Rav, they made their way from one monastery to the next, seeking to retrieve the Jewish children who had been left in the clergy’s care.

Young Moshe Rothschild spent his years as a yeshivah bochur in Montreux, near Geneva, where he had the privilege of learning under two renowned Torah luminaries: Rav Moshe Soloveitchik and Rav Aharon Leib Steinman, who spent the war years there together. (Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 730)