When Reb Shayale passed away in 1925 at the age of 74, his only son, Reb Avrumele (he had several daughters), stepped in as his successor. But less than two years later, Reb Avrumele passed away, and his son-in-law, Rabbi Meir Yosef Rubin, became the next rebbe of Kerestir, continuing Reb Shayale’s mission of providing for the poor and making himself available to anyone who sought his counsel or his brachos.

While Kerestir’s Jewish community only consisted of several hundred members, they weren’t spared the devastation of the Holocaust. Rav Meir Yosef, his wife, and 11 out of his 14 children were murdered in Auschwitz, leaving a surviving daughter and two sons. The oldest son, Rav Mendel Rubin, was his successor. Returning to Kerestir after the war, Reb Mendel reestablished 68 Kossuth Utca as a destination for those in need.

“My grandfather would go to the train station to meet people who were coming back to Kerestir and take them back to his house and give them food,” his grandson Mendel Rubin, son of Rav Shaye Rubin, the Kerestirer Rebbe in Brooklyn, tells Mishpacha. “He did his best to make sure that people knew that the house was open again and that there was food for the refugees.”

Despite his best efforts, the senior Reb Mendel found it impossible to remain in postwar Kerestir. In 1948 he moved his family to America, settled in Williamsburg and became close to the Satmar Rebbe. (His brother Reb Berish became the Kerestirer Rebbe in Boro Park, and his sister was the Koson Rebbetzin.) All the while though, he continued to keep watch on his hometown from afar.

Reb Shayale’s house was taken over by the government, and a non-Jewish family moved into the home that had been a bastion of chesed for decades. Still, Reb Mendel continued sending money to Kerestir to ensure that the cemetery was maintained, and he kept in touch with some of the locals. When the opportunity presented itself to visit Kerestir, he eagerly made all the necessary arrangements to go with his children.

“It was complicated,” Mendel Rubin explains about those early visits of his grandfather and namesake. “You had to arrange visas in a communist country, where they followed you around toting their guns.”

The first glimmer of hope to reestablish a Jewish presence in Kerestir emerged in 1997 when Reb Shayale’s house was purchased by the Rieder family. Their grandfather, Reb Shmuel Yosef Rieder, had been a devoted chassid of Reb Shayale and the family hoped to finally perpetuate his legacy. Two years later, a chanukas habayis was held at Reb Shayale’s restored house (“Reb Shayale’s House”), and later, another guest house and hospitality center (“Reb Shayale’s Guest House”) was established by Rabbi Moishe Yosef Friedlander, a grandson of Reb Shayale’s attendant. Reb Moishe, a real estate developer at the time who was struggling with parnassah, related how Reb Shayale appeared to him in a dream, in which he blessed him and asked him to become his gabbai.

In 2004, 150 people came to Kerestir to mark Reb Shayale’s yahrtzeit, and by 2013 the crowd had swelled to 1,000, but it was just a harbinger of things to come.

The ohel covering Reb Shayale’s kever at that time, a replacement for the original structure that was destroyed during World War II, was built under the communist regime and was just large enough to accommodate a dozen visitors. And so Rav Shaye and Rebbetzin Rochel Malka Rubin took it upon themselves to expand the ohel into something that would be better suited to accommodate the crowds arriving in Kerestir each year for the yahrtzeit. They built a new ohel on the structure’s original foundation that was large enough to squeeze in as many as 100 visitors.

By 2017, 10,000 people spent gimmel Iyar in Kerestir, partaking of the hospitality in Reb Shayale’s two guest houses and leaving mountains of kvittlach at his tziyun. A crowd of 25,000 commemorated Reb Shayale’s yahrtzeit in Kerestir in 2022, but even that impressive turnout paled by comparison next to the last two years, when over 35,000 people came to honor Reb Shayale in his hometown.

“For 70 years, Reb Shayale’s yahrtzeit was only known to family and his close followers,” observes his great-great-grandson, Reb Mendel, who today devotes himself full time to perpetuating his elter-elter-elter-zeide’s legacy. “But in the last ten years it’s just exploded, with hundreds of organizers preparing months in advance for the convergence on this little town.”

Reb Mendel offers his own explanation for Kerestir’s growing popularity. The 2010 publication of Moifes Hador, a book written in Hebrew by Reb Mendel and Rabbi Shulem Eliezer Lichtenstein to tell the world about Reb Shayale, was followed by a translation in multiple languages; that was followed by Feldheim’s English version, authored by Yisroel Besser in 2017 under the simple title Reb Shayale.

“I’ve gotten feedback from thousands of people who finish reading the book and decide to pick themselves up and go to Kerestir,” says Reb Mendel. “When you finish this book, you feel connected. You feel you just have to get on a plane and go visit Reb Shayale’s kever and his house, that you’ll find your yeshuah there.

“The house had become its own attraction. People come to daven in the place where he davened, to cry out in the place where people cried out to Reb Shayale, and to have coffee and cake in the place where people ate so many years ago.”

The logistics of feeding close to 40,000 visitors is staggering. For Reb Shayale’s House alone, four full shipping containers of food and dishes were sent to Kerestir in advance of this year’s yahrtzeit to ensure that the team of chefs and kitchen workers had everything they needed to create culinary magic. Their shopping list included six tons of meat, two tons of fish, five tons of potatoes, two tons of onions, 120,000 eggs, 3,000 liters of oil, two tons of sugar, a ton of salt, three tons of flour, six pallets of 1,000 one-liter water bottles and five pallets of 2,500 smaller bottles.

The amount of food served by waiters clad in black sweaters emblazoned with the “Reb Shayale’s Hoiz” logo might seem mind-boggling, but Reb Mendel sees it as the natural continuation of Reb Shayale’s renowned hospitality — it’s said that no matter how many people he fed, the pots never emptied.

Visitors to Reb Shayale’s House can get a bite to eat, a full meal, temporarily store their luggage, hail a taxi, print their boarding passes, find a place to catch a quick nap, take advantage of an on-site mikveh, or write up a kvittel to place at the tziyun in the dedicated “kvittel shtub,” which is stocked with 15,000 pens and 65,000 sheets of paper.

And the new, larger ohel also holds a special appeal, particularly since it was built to Reb Shayale’s specifications.

“Reb Shayale had said that he wanted windows on all sides of the hilltop ohel so that he could look out on to the town and watch over the people,” Reb Mendel relates. “But the one erected after the Holocaust didn’t have the windows. The new structure does, and it seems as if Reb Shayale’s brachos are just growing and not stopping.”

As a countryside village in the famed Tokaj winegrowing region with a population of approximately 800, Kerestir isn’t exactly designed for large-scale events. Organizers had to invest considerable thought and effort, working closely with the locals, to keep the yahrtzeit event and the year-round pilgrimage from overwhelming the area.

While the two visitors’ centers and yahrtzeit infrastructure are closely coordinated with the local police chief and the mayor’s office, the annual influx of Jewish visitors has left some of the village’s residents reeling from culture shock.

Until about a decade ago, the village’s non-Jewish residents, as well as the local authorities, placed little significance on the small building at the edge of town, and the few dozen people who would ascend to the site didn’t leave much of an impression on the locals — in fact, over the years the townspeople have considered the grave their own protection and good luck charm.

Today, though, the village has become a major destination for Jews traveling across Europe to daven at the gravesites of tzaddikim.

“Today people visit Kerestir all year round, as part of a broader European itinerary,” says Avraham Abir, a regular volunteer at Reb Shayale’s Guest House. “Before the development of the place, the few people who visited the village would bring their own food and water, because there was really nothing here.”

Yossi Mendelowitz, owner of the Mendelowitz Brothers guest apartments in the village, relates that the Hungarian government has also been very helpful in developing the area, having renovated many of the local roads in and around the village because of the heavy Jewish traffic.

With the village becoming a pilgrimage center, Jews began purchasing apartments in Kerestir. For Yossi Mendelowitz, the purchase was a good investment, but as often happens with such initiatives, some investors have experienced great disappointment.

Avi Klein, a well-known figure in the Jewish tourism industry in Hungary, a Budapest resident, and the owner of guest apartments in Kerestir and its surroundings, explains that local Hungarian law actually prohibits nonresidents from purchasing property in the Tokaj region.

As a workaround, developers offered investors the option of purchasing land in Kerestir through companies owned by Hungarian citizens, which sometimes turned out to be a sham. But even for buyers who purchased properties in an orderly and legal fashion, today the prices have skyrocketed. Six years ago, you could buy a home in the village for $25,000. Today, that same house goes for between $150,000 and $200,000, resulting in a mass exodus of the locals from Kerestir.

Furthermore, it turns out that over 125 out of 400 houses in Kerestir — about a third of the village — are in the hands of investors and actually stand empty for much of the year, are rented out to tourists, or used by the owners for their annual visits.

“Of the Jews who bought houses here, only a few actually live in them year-round,” says Mendelowitz. “The Jews who actually live in those houses are mainly the management and staff of the local hospitality centers.”

Many of those who purchased homes as an investment, says Mendelowitz, realized that the promising economic venture didn’t always yield the profits they had expected. For those who bought vacation homes for personal use, perhaps also renting them out to visiting Jews, it turned out to be a worthwhile investment. But others suffered significant loses because the local banks refused to approve mortgages based on the sky-high prices that the properties were commanding.

“For the banks,” he says, “there’s no difference between Kerestir and neighboring villages, where property prices hover around $20,000.”

And the non-Jews of the village have suddenly found themselves facing a reality they had never known before.
“The feelings among the local residents are complicated,” says Klein. “On the one hand, they benefit from a sharp rise in property values, but on the other hand, they claim that the Jews leave behind their trash and then disappear. And if there are groups or individuals that are rowdy or engage in illegal activities, it’s us regulars and Reb Shayale’s people who get the fallout. In addition, there are almost no local businesses in the village, and therefore the financial benefit that the residents derive from the large Jewish tourism is minimal — although the hospitality centers employ dozens of local workers, and hundreds during the time of the yahrzeit.”
People also purchase cigarettes, bottles of water, and tools from the local stores.

Klein, one of the few Jews who maintains ongoing relationships with the local residents and municipality and who has become something of a point of contact for the authorities, estimates that the current reality in Kerestir will not continue for much longer.

“The Hungarian authorities believe this situation cannot go on like this,” he explains. “During the days before and after the yahrtzeit, the village is closed off. And it’s not just Kerestir — the entire area becomes, overnight, a site of pilgrimage for the masses, a reality the non-Jewish residents decidedly don’t enjoy. True, they have entry permits to the village because they are local residents, but even they must wait at the checkpoints and endure inconvenience. It’s not anti-Semitism — but it certainly creates a sense of general discomfort.”

Klein says there’s talk of creating a bypass road that would allow direct access to the gravesite, which would alleviate the burden on the village and surrounding towns.
However, most visitors also visit Reb Shayale’s house, which is located in the center of the village.
“I believe the situation here will definitely change in the near future,” Klein says. “While the current reality is unsustainable for such a small village, it’s important to understand that the Tokaj region is a designated preservation area. And from the Christian perspective, there are also ancient churches here that attract many Christian tourists, as well as a thriving wine tourism industry drawing visitors from all over the globe.”

Indeed, the Tokaj region of northeastern Hungary, a historic wine region, includes 28 villages besides Kerestir, and tens of thousands of dunams of vineyards where unique grape varieties are grown. In 2002, UNESCO declared the Tokaj wine region a World Heritage Site, making it one of the few wine regions globally to receive this distinction.

When Reb Shayale, who had lived in the home of the Liska Rebbe from the time he was an orphaned child, settled in Kerestir after the passing of the Liska Rebbe, he purchased land near his home to build a shul. But a fire broke out in the spring of 1918, burning the shul to the ground. As onlookers watched in horror and Reb Shayale, too, stood there, overwhelmed with grief, he suddenly turned to one of his followers, a very tall and strong fellow, and commanded him to run inside and rescue the sifrei Torah. A true chassid, the man did what he was told, and emerged a few minutes later, unscathed, holding the sifrei Torah in his arms.

Reb Shayale let out a breath and said, “Baruch Hashem that you made it out now. I had no more strength to hold up the roof beams.” And then suddenly, the roof collapsed and the entire edifice was destroyed.

After the devastation, Reb Shayale decided to rebuild the shul, but this time with a massive foundation. Before construction began, Reb Shayale handed the contractor a small bag of coins and instructed him to place them in the building’s foundation, but never to reveal this secret. He told the contractor that the day he’d reveal the secret of the coins, he would die.

Many years later, the elderly contractor confided to a Jewish woman from Kerestir about the hidden coins, telling her that he was old and tired and didn’t want to hold the burden of the secret any longer. He told her to come with him the next day and he’d show her where they were hidden. But the next morning, he didn’t wake up.

The woman shared the story with one of Reb Shayale’s grandsons, who immediately commissioned a crew to dig at the indicated location. But local police intervened and forced him to stop, ordering the hole to be refilled.

Reb Shayale’s shul, in fact, was not destroyed in the Holocaust, but rather confiscated by the local authorities. After the war, it was handed over to a factory. In 1960, lightning struck the shul and the roof was destroyed, causing the factory to vacate the site; the government then sold it to a non-Jew, who figured the stones were the most valuable part of the structure, and proceeded to dismantle it stone by stone, selling the building blocks off for construction. Nothing remained of the shul except for the underground foundations. In 1974, the property was purchased by another non-Jew who build his home on the property. Over the years, members of Reb Shayale’s family have made major efforts to buy out the non-Jewish owner, and after years of negotiations and significant financial investment, he’s finally agreed. And now, as the sale concludes, a small excavation has revealed the original massive foundation that Reb Shayale built — with the coins hidden in there somewhere, protecting the structure all these years.

Even without the shul, which hopefully will soon be rebuilt, the story of Kerestir’s rise over the past decade to a popular pilgrimage destination for Jews from all over the world is nothing short of a wonder, and a fulfillment of Reb Shayale’s own promise before his passing.

“You see great salvations at the gravesite,” says Yossi Mendelowitz, who shares a story he personally witnessed over the past year: “I had a friend whom I brought to Kerestir last year during the yahrtzeit to do some contracting work for me. He had been waiting for children for ten years. I suggested he visit the gravesite and pray for salvation. Last week, just before this year’s yahrtzeit, he was blessed with a baby boy.”

Moishe Friedlander adds his own story: “When I was building the mikveh, I was looking for someone to donate tiles for the building. A certain Jew donated the tiles and asked that, in the merit of this donation, his son — who had been childless for ten years — would be blessed with children. And indeed, they had a child within the year.”

And may the tzaddik’s merit protect us and all of Klal Yisrael, Amen.

Rachel Ginsberg contributed to this report.