His expertise was in solving newly-arisen complex halachic concerns on numerous technological and other modern-day issues (his sefer Kuntres Ha’Electric discusses dozens of sh’eilos involving gadgets and electricity). Dayanim and rabbanim worldwide give much weight to his halachic rulings and consider his Be’er Moshe — an eight-volume set of responsa which he began compiling in 1969 — an essential part of their library.

Two decades after his passing on 2 Av in 1997 my brother Rav Shaul Yechezkel Schwartz who is now the Debrecener dayan in Boro Park shared memories of his zeide — this special man who was not only his grandfather through marriage but his teacher rebbi and role model.

I Would Not Return

Born in 1914 to Rav Avraham and Gittel Stern Hy”d Moshe and his four brothers were known as the “ilu’ishe Stern boys” who showed tremendous potential as future gedolei Torah — although the only sibling to survive was his renowned brother Rav Betzalel author of Betzel Hachochma who served as rav in Melbourne Australia and later in Vienna Austria.

Reb Moshe’s main Torah influences were his father Rav Avraham Stern the dayan of Neuhäusel (today Nové Zámky in Slovakia bordering Hungary) and author of Malitzei Aish and other seforim; and his maternal grandfather (Reb Avraham’s father-in-law) Rav Yosef Meir Tigerman Hy”d the Neuhäusler Rav and one of the Hungary’s eldest gedolim.

Rav Tigerman was 96 years old when he was killed in Auschwitz together with his son-in-law Reb Avraham and and his youngest son Meshulam who was still a bochur. (The local bishop offered to hide Rav Tigerman but he refused to leave his kehillah. It is said that on the three-day cattle-car journey to Auschwitz the Rav and his son-in-law the dayan spent their time learning the laws of dying al kiddush Hashem and discussed which nusach of the brachah to say when being moser nefesh.)

Long before the war, Rav Moshe spent his formative years in the yeshivah of Surany and under the tutelage of the Daas Sofer (Rav Akiva Sofer, the Chasam Sofer’s great-grandson) in the yeshivah gedolah of Pressburg.

Decades later his friends would recall the combination of his intense hasmadah and consideration for his roommates — his 3 a.m. chavrusa would wake him up by pulling at a string that extended from his leg and out of the window.

Already as a bochur his quick mind and clear halachic analysis was noticed. When his father had to leave town for a few days he entrusted the sh’eilos of the entire community in Neuhהusel under the supervision of his son who already had semichah although he was all of 18 years old.

Reb Moshe received semichah from several prewar gedolim — among them his rosh yeshivah the Daas Sofer, as well as the rabbanim of Šurany and Ujhely. In fact, the halachic correspondence he kept up with several gedolim as a bochur eventually led to his shidduch. Rav Shlomo Tzvi Strasser, rav of Debrecen, was so impressed with the young man’s brilliance that he chose him for his granddaughter Malka, a descendant of the Chasam Sofer. After their marriage the young couple settled in Debrecen, where Reb Moshe assisted his illustrious grandfather-in-law in answering sh’eilos. A son and a daughter were born to the young couple before the war, but the daughter passed away at a young age.

Although Hungary escaped the Nazi clutches until late in the war, the Germans’ dreaded arrival in Debrecen in 1944 became a nightmare for the city’s Jews.

Reb Moshe, as the city’s young dayan, was faced with unimaginable sh’eilos on which he paskened and recorded for posterity but never publicized.

In his introduction to the sefer Gevuras Ari on Maseches Taanis, authored by the Shaagas Aryeh (the 18th-century sage Rav Aryeh Leib Ginzburg) that Reb Moshe reprinted after the war, he shared some of those experiences:

The Pfeilkreuzer [Hungarian fascists] worked along with the Nazis to round up Jews from villages and transport smaller populations to Debrecen…. Among the people I met a rav who had brought along the sefer Gevuras Ari on Taanis. I had never seen this sefer before and was surprised that the Shaagas Aryeh had written a sefer on such an “easy” masechta. So I borrowed it and was astounded at its genius. It was a very bitter time in which we accepted upon ourselves many fasts, and so I felt it befitting to study Maseches Taanis with this sefer.

And when the fateful day arrived and they came for me and my wife and young son Mordechai Nissen, I was up to the page yud-ches — chai, which I took as a sign of life. I was left no choice and forced to leave my precious seforim, among them the gemara on Taanis and the Gevuras Ari right there on my table. Grasping my son’s hand, I stood for a long moment at the mezuzah, knowing that once I crossed the threshold of my home, I would not return.

The Stern family was transferred to Budapest, where Rebbetzin Malka and son managed to hide out the remainder of the war. Reb Moshe was sent from there to Bergen Belsen, and somehow was able to smuggle his Rashi and Rabbenu Tam tefillin and his tallis into the camp. Fellow inmates went to great lengths — even climbing over fences from other parts of the camp — to have a moment to don those tefillin.

In the introduction to his magnum opus Be’er Moshe, Reb Moshe gave a hint to the strong underpinnings that held his emunah intact:

Is there a pen that can transcribe all that occurred? How we envied the dead who were at peace in the World to Come, for the fear was overwhelming… Yet Your Judgment is vast and runs far too deep for us to comprehend. We believe with a perfect faith that it was all with precise calculation, for all that Hashem does is just, even though His ways are hidden from our limited intellect….

Throughout his life, Reb Moshe made sure to pass on to his children and grandchildren the stories of mesirus nefesh that he witnessed in the war. “It is of utmost importance for the younger generation who never witnessed such mesirus nefesh to learn about all this, how those of the past generations were not ready to waver even in the harshest of times,” he often said.

Debrecen Never Left Him

After his liberation, Reb Moshe traveled back to Budapest, was providentially reunited with his wife and child, and returned to the utter devastation that Debrecen had become. This former crowning glory of Hungarian Jewry was now desolate, yet amazingly he managed to find part of his library, and in the very first crate of seforim which had been collected and left behind by the Nazis, he found the seforim he’d used last — Gevuras Ari and the gemara on Taanis right there on top of the pile. While still in Bergen Belsen he had made a promise: If he were to survive the war he would reprint the sefer along with his own observations — a promise the Rav would fulfill years later.

The Yidden who came back to Debrecen hoped to rebuild the destroyed kehillah and asked Reb Moshe to take up the position as their new rav. His wife’s grandfather, Rav Shlomo Tzvi Strasser, the old Debrecener Rav, was saved by getting a seat on the Kastner train and had then immigrated to Eretz Yisrael. And so, Reb Moshe accepted the challenge and threw himself into rebuilding the community. (Decades later, as Rav Stern watched the cement being poured in a new mikveh in Boro Park, tears coursed down his cheeks as he commented, “I’m remembering how right after the war, I dug out the mikveh in Debrecen with my own ten fingers. Who would have believed that we would one day have the zechus to come this far?”)

During that time, he also helped Rav Yochanan Sofer, the Erlauer Rav, to rebuild Yeshivas Chasam Sofer, which had been cobbled together from several dozen young orphans in Budapest from the Domonkos orphanage. But neither the Erlauer Rav, who’d established a kehillah in Erlau (Eger), nor Rav Stern, who had his community in Debrecen, were willing to abandon their fledgling survivor kehillos, and so the yeshivah came up with a compromise arrangement. The Erlauer Rav served as rosh yeshivah the first part of the week (he slept with the students in the dormitory — an old palace which was rented by Raoul Wallenberg and bore the Swedish flag), and the Debrecener Rav the second part. The arrangement lasted a year and a half, until the Erlauer Rav established a yeshivah in his own town of Erlau, to where many of boys from Budapest followed.

In 1949, with the passing of the new constitution in the Hungarian Parliament, it became evident that the country had fallen under the Soviet regime. Rav Stern and the Rebbetzin decided it was time to leave, and managed to obtain visas for the United States through the immense efforts of Nitra Rav, Rav Shalom Moshe Ungar and his brother-in-law Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl, both of whom had settled in New York.

The community in Debrecen was saddened but not surprised when they had to take leave of their beloved rav. Yet while Reb Moshe indeed left Debrecen, Debrecen never left him — he would continue to be known as the Debrecener Rav until his passing 20 years ago this week.

Soon after their arrival to America, Rav Stern was called to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to be rav for a kehillah of Hungarian Jews. He stayed there for a year, and then moved back to New York, where his family settled in Boro Park. Their home at 1514 49th Street soon became an international address for psak on myriad issues.

A group of staunch Chasam Sofer followers who had established the Kahal Yesodei HaTorah kehillah in Boro Park were overjoyed when the Debrecener Rav accepted their proposition and took on the mantle of leadership, a position he would keep for the rest of his life. Although the Rav himself kept minhagim of Ashkenaz, he wore chassidic levush on Shabbbos and encouraged his congregation to lean towards chassidus.

Yet Reb Moshe wasn’t only the rav of his kehillah; he became the posek for every Yid in Boro Park and beyond. His magnetic personality attracted people from all sectors — from Oberlanders to Litvish, from chassidish to American-born. When, Rav Moshe Bick ztz”l, who lived in the Bronx, noticed a sudden decrease in people from Boro Park traveling to him with their sh’eilos, he felt a responsibility to make sure that this newly arrived posek was indeed competent. He placed several anonymous calls to the Rav, each time posing a different difficult halachic query, all of which were answered satisfactory. After several such calls the Debrecener Rav said to him, “Reb Yid, you’re obviously a talmid chacham, why do you need to ask me these sh’eilos?” Needless to say, Rav Bick was reassured and told his people, “Yetzt veiss ich ver der neier rav iz — ir zent in gitte hent, now I know who this new rav is — you’re in good hands.”

The house was always abuzz. People would come at all hours, through the main entrance or the side door for extra discretion. The Rav, for his part, made sure to give everyone their privacy by pointing to different corners where they could await their turn; he would then give each person his full attention, whether their dilemma was halachic or personal. On his way to and from shul, he’d find the sidewalk lined with people waiting to catch him for a question. Although in the first years he would follow the crowds out of Brooklyn for a vacation in the country, when he discovered that other rabbanim left Boro Park for the months of July and August he decided never to take a day of vacation again. He once said, “All the other rabbanim are away. What kind of achrayus would it be if I would leave the people without a posek?”

Letters would arrive from across the globe and he would take time to respond to each one. In the last years when he no longer had the strength to reply to every letter, he still answered kollel avreichim, “for these are the men who are the foundation and the future of Klal Yisrael,” he would explain.

“The biggest wonder of all,” says Rav Schwartz, “is the fact that a man who had time and patience all day and night to pasken, assist people, deliver shiurim and derashos,  to personally take time to write teshuvos, arrange gittin, chalitzos, and supervise hechsherim, still found time to sit down and learn Torah and write and print numerous seforim.”

Indeed, the Rav managed to print eight volumes of Be’er Moshe on Shulchan Aruch, as well as several more volumes on Gemara under the same title. He also reprinted numerous seforim of previous gedolim, adding his own commentaries — among them Sheilos U’Teshuvos and Zichron Moshe of the Chasam Sofer, Gevuras Ari, the Sefer Hame’iri, and Tzofnas Paneach of the Rogatchover Gaon.

While he managed to publish much of his writings during his lifetime, Reb Moshe left dozens more manuscripts unprinted. Rav Schwartz, who spent many years sifting and sorting through them, printed the Sefer Piskei Be’er Moshe and is currently compiling the sefer Samah d’Chaya, Reb Moshe’s halachic rulings on two complex yet contemporary issues — family planning and matters pertaining to end of life.

Halachah for a New Age 

Rav Stern was known for his extreme humility, for running from kavod, and for his temimus. “We usually think of temimus as being incompatible with being open-minded,” Rav Schwartz says, “so people couldn’t imagine that he could grasp all the modern technological advances. At a time when so many things were changing at such a fast pace, it was rare to find a posek who was willing and able to take upon himself the responsibility of solving the halachic challenges all these new advances posed. Yet he would analyze and research every detail, often conferring with top-tier engineers until he felt confident in paskening. When it came to yiras Shamayaim, the Zeide was a tamim, but when halachic rulings were involved, he pulled out all the stops on his own brilliance and deep understanding.”

And he made sure his responsa seforim — compiled from teshuvos he’d written over several decades — were not only for sophisticated scholars, but for laymen as well. Sometimes printed teshuvos become so complex the reader gets lost before the question is even explained. But Rav Stern did something novel: The questions and answers are summarized in just a few lines at the beginning, and only after that comes the expanded, often complex reasoning with a veritable bibliography of sources. This organization of material actually goes back to his early years in Debrecen, when he compiled an index of all his grandfather-in-law’s teshuvos to make research easier when a sh’eilah came up. Even Rav Strasser himself used it.

Reb Moshe would become extremely upset if he heard of a rav being machmir for no reason, and another issue that greatly troubled him were sh’eilos involving dishonesty in business dealings. He blamed the increase in corruption in the corporate world on lack of mussar study and the fact that rabbanim were afraid to speak up to their congregations on these matters.

A woman once called up with a question involving the kashrus of a large amount of food she had already cooked. The Rav was in a dilemma, trying to find a heter because of the monetary loss, and remained quiet for a moment. Suddenly there was a loud noise over the receiver. “Rav Stern,” the women said over the receiver, “there’s no sh’eilah anymore. I don’t know how it happened, but the whole pot just spilled all over the floor.”

Once, a young couple who had been dealing with infertility for six years needed to undergo a certain treatment that was to take place on Shabbos. When the Rav paskend that it was prohibited, the young man burst into bitter tears. The Rav was quick to assure, telling him, “The same Torah that forbids this procedure because of Shabbos, says ‘six years he [an eved Ivri] shall work and in the seventh year he shall go free.’ You have suffered for six years — may you be free of all this pain in the seventh year.” Within a year the young couple was blessed with a healthy child.

If the Rav felt that a petitioner needed a heter but also felt that he couldn’t grant it, he would suggest the person ask a different rav who might be matir. “This is a rare thing for a rav to do,” Rav Schwartz explains, “yet for him it was not about his own kavod, but about caring for and helping another Yid in whichever way possible.”

And for Rav Stern, it didn’t matter if the questioner was a choshuv balabos or a young kid. Once an 11-year-old wrote the Rav a question from camp: He wanted to make a siyum, but questioned whether doing it in public in camp would be gaivadig. Rav Stern, in turn, wrote a nine-page response, kept the original, and sent a copy in a stamped envelope back to the boy in camp.

It’s Shabbos Today

Today everyone takes the Shabbos quiet on Boro Park’s 13th Avenue for granted, but back in the 1950s many Jewish stores remained open and were run by non-Jewish workers on Shabbos. While others adopted a live-and-let-live attitude, Rav Stern decided to take matters into his own hands. Shabbos after Shabbos passerby would observe the Rav’s tall, imposing figure strolling down the avenue, stopping at store entrances to announce “Yidden, es iz Shabbes heint, it’s Shabbos today.” Cynics didn’t believe that it would have an impact, but little by little his efforts took effect and businesses started to close. Rav Stern was fearless and constantly spoke out regarding other “uncomfortable” subjects such as tzniyus or watching films, and once remarked, “It’s worth it for me to have given derashos for 60 years if it will have caused one person to do teshuvah for even one moment.”

He also introduced the idea of regular shiurim on topics such as family purity and hilchos Shabbos. His Friday night hilchos Shabbos shiur became so popular that crowds would stand on the street outside the jam-packed shul to catch his words.

“Another major campaign he instituted was a no-talk policy in shul during davening,” Rav Schwartz relates. “In Zeide’s shul, there was no such thing as talking. When he would see a person speaking, he would tell him that according to halachah he could daven at home, since his talking disturbed others from davening.”

As the Sterns’ own family continued to grow, the Rav was a dedicated father not only to his own sons and daughters but to all of Boro Park’s children. In the 1950s he opened Cheder Beis Yehudah (whose founding staff members, veteran educators Mrs. Temma Fingerhut and Rabbi Ephraim Birnhack, eventually became the seed staff of the Gerrer cheder Yagdil Torah).

He waved the banner of girls’ education as well, and insisted on upholding many of the same strictures for the girls as for the chadarim. In his sefer Be’er Moshe, he quotes the following story:

I once went before a din Torah… to Moreinu Rav Aharon Kotler ztz”l together with the administrators of a certain girls’ school because they were teaching Chumash with Ivrit. While some of the administrators… spoke out harshly against me, I did not retort with even a single word. Then the tzaddik [Rav Aharon] stood up for me and pounded on the table to silence them… and announced “der Debrecener Rov is gerecht” [the Debrecener Rov is right!]. When they realized that [Rav Kotler] supported me, one of them said either he rule in their favor or they would all quit their jobs. With this [threat] they were able to weaken the power of this tzaddik [who had to weigh whether to risk a school losing its entire administrative board]. When I realized that the last speaker had managed to get his way I asked Rav Aharon, “imagine if someone were to threaten a dayan with a weapon and coerce him to pasken according to his will… isn’t this much worse than a weapon?” Upon which he exclaimed, “gerecht, gerecht — der Debrecener Rov is gerecht!”

The Rav kept up a strong relationship with Rav Aharon, along with numerous other gedolim of his generation — with chassidishe rebbes, with poskim like Rav Moshe Feinstein, and even with those of different minhagim such as Rav Ovadiah Yosef. He was especially close with the Satmar Rebbe, Rav Yoel Teitelbaum ztz”l, and it was the Rebbe who noticed the Rav’s financial difficulties — suggesting he start supervising kashrus of food production in order to earn some money. With time the Debrecener Rav’s hechsher became one of the most popular and trusted hashgachos in Brooklyn. (One of his first hechsherim was on Klein’s Kosher Ice Cream, and one Boro Park native and former neighbor remembers how Rav Stern received much of his remuneration in stock — but how much ice cream can one family use? This neighbor says that for years, they would be treated to ice cream whenever they passed the Stern home.)

Posek for Geulah

Until the age of 80, Rav Stern maintained his rigorous schedule and was able to carry out his duties without a break. But after suffering several strokes in the late 1990s, he weakened significantly and was forced to withdraw from public life, handing over responsibilities to his son Reb Shlomo Tzvi, the current Debrecener Rav, who carries on his father’s kashrus and rabbinic responsibilities, continuing to give shimush to rabbinical students and serving as one of the poskim in Boro Park.

“The strokes made the Zeide too weak to speak much,” remembers Rav Schwartz, “but when he noticed an infraction in halachah he suddenly found his voice.”

The Debrecener Rav was constantly yearning for the Geulah, refusing to repaint or fix up his house. “There’s no need to bother,” he would say. “We will soon live in a new home in Yerushalayim with Mashiach.” Every year, the closer the calendar got to Tishah B’Av, the more he would tremble at the thought that another year would pass without the final Redemption. It’s as if he couldn’t bear another year of anguish. On the 2nd of Av, 5757 ( August 5, 1997), he passed away. He was 83.

When Rav Stern went to visit the Lubavitcher Rebbe ztz”l in January of 1990 (they had a close connection and spoke in learning on several occasions, including at the shivah for Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka), the Rebbe said to him, “Publish a psak that the Geulah must come already!” The Rebbe also gave him a brachah that he be part of the future Sanhedrin.

The house on 49th Street has been torn down, leaving no trace of the former halachah hub. Yet the legacy of this rare personality remains interwoven in the fabric of Jewish life in the neighborhood, and around the world. “I’m sure that, just as he was often a lone, courageous voice here on earth paskening for kavod Shamayim,” says Rav Schwartz, “so too he has surely been the voice in Shamayim for the past 20 years paskening in favor of geulah sheleimah for Klal Yisrael.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 669)