Remembering Rabbi Mordechai Dov Altein ztz"l and Rebbetzin Rachel Altein a"h

In a piece recollecting my childhood in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, I mentioned that I had attended the Lubavitch Yeshiva of the Bronx. Housed in a large ramshackle building on the neighborhood’s outskirts, its student body was comprised largely of nonobservant kids, since nearly all my frum contemporaries went to yeshivos out of the neighborhood for what their parents considered a superior education. But my parents felt it was important to support the only local elementary yeshivah and the tzaddik Rabbi Mordechai Dov Altein, who ran it.

During their 40 years in the Bronx, Rabbi and Rebbetzin Rachel Altein raised a family that’s now spread out in six cities on three continents. After the yeshivah closed many years ago, the Alteins moved to Crown Heights (where they returned after a decade of retirement in Israel), and it was there that Rabbi Altein was niftar this past December, at age 100. And now, just four months later, the Rebbetzin too is no longer here, succumbing on April 13 to complications associated with the coronavirus. They had been married for 76 years. Hane’ehavim v’hane’imim b’chayeihem, uv’mosam lo nifradu.

Rabbi Altein was a Lower East Side boy who attended elementary school at Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin and then Mesivta Torah Vodaath. While in high school, he began studying chassidus with Rabbi Yisroel Jacobson, who was chairman of Agudas Chasidei Chabad of America, having been sent in the mid-1920s by the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe to build the presence of the chassidus here. Eventually, Mordechai Dov traveled together with friends (one of whom was Rabbi Berel Levy, founder of the OK kosher supervisory agency, whose son and successor, Rabbi Don Yoel, recently fell victim to the virus) to learn in the central Chabad yeshivah in Otvotzk, Poland.

He returned to these shores as the storm clouds of war gathered over Europe and was soon drafted by the Rebbe, who had also since emigrated here (due in no small part to the efforts of Rabbi Jacobson) into a lifelong career of harbatzas Torah that included establishing and leading yeshivos in Pittsburgh (which flourishes still), Connecticut, and my Bronx alma mater. In 1943, the young mechanech married the daughter of his mentor, Rachel Jacobson, who was very much of an educational force in her own right alongside her role as matriarch of an illustrious family.

She was a teacher of young women from her teenage years and on, and much later, a sought-after guide to generations of brides. And beginning in 1958, she also spent over 30 years as the English language editor of Di Yiddishe Heim, a periodical by and for Jewish women.

In her book Lubavitcher Women in America: Identity and Activism in the Postwar Era, self-described feminist historian Bonnie J. Morris described Di Yiddishe Heim as a publication in which “poetry, satire, editorial, scholarly essay, all literary forms were suitable for conveying the spiritual message to readers.” For her part, however, Rebbetzin Altein spoke of Di Yiddishe Heim as an opportunity for “spreading the teachings of Torah and mitzvos in every way we can find. It is not published in the name of literature Jewish or otherwise, general culture, or women’s culture per se.”

One anecdote, told to the Altein family by a visitor during the shivah in December, provides the merest glimpse into the menahel who formed my childhood, to whom I owe so very much.

When this man was a young student at the yeshivah in the Bronx, Rabbi Altein gathered him and his classmates together to speak to them of the specialness of the mitzvah of tefillin, a sign of the intimate bond between Hashem and the Jew. Rabbi Altein told them that when they went home that evening, they should tell their fathers what they’d learned about tefillin and urge them to observe this mitzvah.

This boy innocently did as the principal had said, only to be taken aback by his father’s vehement response. “You listen to me. I was in Auschwitz, and there I saw the Nazis pile up a mountain of pairs of tefillin, and mounds of bodies, and they burned them both. I’m finished with tefillin forever!”

In school the next day, the boy told his principal of his father’s emotional outburst. Without missing a beat, Rabbi Altein, who was quite tall, lifted the boy up, holding him even with his shoulders, and said, “Don’t you see? If after surviving Auschwitz, your father still sends you to a yeshivah to learn Torah, then you are your father’s tefillin!”

Reflecting back on the episode, the storyteller said, “With those few words, Rabbi Altein gave me back my respect for my father. And it also opened up something in my father’s heart, who eventually did indeed begin putting on tefillin.”

Yehi zichram baruch.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 669. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com