The Promise

The Kaliver Rebbe’s life was, in fact, the fulfillment of his personal neder.

The Rebbe was born in 1923 in Margareten, Transylvania, to Rav Yechiel Yehudah Taub — rav of Rozla and Margareten and a direct descendant of Rav Yitzchak Eizik of Kaliv. He married Rebbetzin Chana Sarah Shifra, the daughter of Rebbe Pinchas Shapiro of Kechnia, shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

“I remember,” the Rebbe related, “that when they told my father-in-law ztz”l that there was a possible route to escape the Nazis, he refused and said, ‘I want to go where the Jews are going.’”

The Rebbe’s own father passed away in 1939, leaving behind seven orphans. The Rebbe was the only one of his siblings to survive the inferno.

“When the Nazis came,” the Rebbe related, “I didn’t know what to do, since my father was gone. So I made a goral haGra and got the pasuk, ‘v’atah berach lecha — and now, flee for yourself,’ which Rivkah had instructed Yaakov. So I fled. Within an hour I was on a train en route to Hungary, but the Nazis eventually caught me there and sent me to Auschwitz.”

He arrived just before Shavuos 1944.

He shared the events of that day, part of a longer conversation the Rebbe had with Mishpacha about the miracles he witnessed during the darkest periods — not just open revelations of Hashem’s power and might, but displays of the glory and heroism of the poshute Yid. On his first morning in Auschwitz, the Rebbe saw a large crowd of inmates pushing toward a barbed wire fence. They were reaching for a paper on the other side of the dangerous barrier, thin arms outstretched to pull it close. It was a page of Akdamus, ode to the unbreakable relationship between Klal Yisrael and HaKadosh Baruch Hu, and the bloodied, beaten inmates were eager to see the words.

The Rebbe would speak of Chanukah in Auschwitz, and remember how his sister, Baila, traded her precious bread rations for margarine. Once she had enough margarine to use as an oil substitute to light a fire, she exchanged her rations yet again, this time for a bullet casing, which would be the menorah. Then she tore threads from her uniform, and she had wicks.

Those were the memories engraved on the Rebbe’s pure heart, the stories he never tired of retelling.

One night, the cursed Nazis commanded him to wheel a cart filled with trash to an adjacent camp, a few kilometers away. It was a dark, moonless night, and he didn’t know the way. The Nazis warned him that if he didn’t arrive by morning, he would be killed. With little choice, he started to push. Along the dark, twisting road, the cart tipped over, spilling its contents.

“I sat down on the ground, taking in my situation — far from my family, my home, my friends, everything,” the Rebbe later recalled. “It was a very difficult moment. All seemed lost. But then, I pulled myself together and said to myself, The Ribbono shel Olam is here with me, right next to me. No place is without Him. I was reminded of the words of a song that we used to sing at home on Yamim Tovim and at simchahs — Ki b’simchah teitzei’u — and I suddenly burst into tears, singing and weeping. If only people cried on Yom Kippur the way I cried then.

“To this day, I don’t know how — I am absolutely sure, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was Hashem’s Hand that did it. The cart was upright, with all the refuse back inside, and it started moving — by itself — toward the second camp. Indeed, I arrived at dawn, and the Nazis couldn’t believe their eyes.”

The Rebbe made sure the cries he’d heard during the dark nights never stopped echoing. “A few hundred meters from the entrance to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, the son of a great rabbi from Grosswardein cried out to us, ‘Dear Jews, whoever stays alive, remember to say Kaddish after me!’ At that moment, I said to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, ‘What will my recitation of Krias Shema give You? But I promise that if I am saved from this valley of death, I will do all I can so that everyone will say Shema Yisrael, each and every day.’”

That promise was his protection. The Rebbe survived, and true to his oath, he spent the next seven decades working to increase the recitation of Shema Yisrael all over the world.

“I wasn’t the only one protected by this segulah,” the Rebbe said, recalling an incident at the Breslau slave labor camp, where he was transferred after a narrow escape from the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “It was dangerous to identify oneself as a Jew and Jewish slave workers tried to pass themselves off as non-Jews, of whom there were many there. One day, I noticed a little boy. He looked terrified, and his lips were moving as he mumbled something. A few days passed, and the child was still there, loitering around the train tracks, lips moving unceasingly, as if he were constantly talking to himself.

“I asked him what his name was. He was so frightened that he broke into bitter weeping. I spoke to him in Yiddish, and then, seeing that I was one of his people, someone he could trust, he replied, ‘My name is Yitzchak Weinig from the Warsaw Ghetto.’ He was completely on his own and had come to the camp alone, after his entire family had been sent to the death camps.

“I asked him why he mumbled to himself all the time, and he replied that after parting from his mother in the ghetto, the murderers put him together with a group of children. His mother ran after him and screamed, ‘Yitzchak, my dear child! Listen to me! We couldn’t teach you Torah, but remember. Wherever you are, in times of trouble, always say Shema Yisrael. It will save you from all harm!’ Yitzchak continued, ‘I constantly repeat Shema Yisrael as my mother told me.’ ”

The Rebbe himself was plucked from the jaws of death as he was led to the gas chambers. The Rebbe started to prepare himself spiritually for what seemed imminent, then had a thought. “Ribbono shel Olam,” he asked, ‘What do You gain if I say Shema Yisrael and die al kiddush Hashem? Give me life, and I promise to continue saying Shema Yisrael with live Jews.”

That very minute, the gates opened and a few German soldiers entered, looking for Jews for a slave-labor brigade. A small ruckus broke out, and the Rebbe called out, “Let’s run!” The other Jews in his group argued, frightened of being shot. “What do we lose?” the Rebbe asked them, urging them to join him in flight. They escaped, soon to be recaptured by Nazis, who took them to work in a factory in the Breslau concentration camp.

Heaven and Earth

The Rebbe didn’t dream that his young wife had also survived, but six months after the war ended, he discovered that she was living in the DP camp in Sweden, where she worked to lift the spirits of the survivors.

The Rebbetzin opened up the first kosher kitchen in a Swedish camp and studied limudei kodesh with 80 girls, essentially establishing a Bais Yaakov in Yiddish for these survivors. (The Rebbetzin, the Rebbe’s partner and confidante, passed away in 2012. At the shivah, many admorim came to be menachem avel the Rebbe, and he asked for the same brachah from each one: that the passing of his greatest inspiration not affect his determination to build and he find the strength to continue inspiring others.)

In 1947, the couple set off for America, where they settled in Cleveland and set up shop working to draw others close. In 1962, they moved to Eretz Yisrael, where the Rebbe created the first Kiryas Kaliv in Rishon L’Tzion, with a yeshivah and kollelim and a national network of shiurim that stretched far past the borders of the town. Several years later, he moved the chassidus to Bnei Brak, and finally, in 2004, the Rebbe’s court moved to Jerusalem.

The Rebbe authored several works, including Kol Menachem, a 13-volume work on the Torah and Jewish holidays, and he sponsored the Shema Yisrael Encyclopedia, a massive work detailing the scope of the spiritual heroism during the Holocaust. But his main influence was through personal contact with multitudes of Jews across the religious spectrum. The Rebbe would travel to schools and army bases and secular moshavim, always drawing souls close. His voice, his face, his radiance, reminded them of the fathers and grandfathers they’d known as children.

After enduring horrific “experiments” at the hands of Dr. Josef Mengele yemach shemo, the Rebbe could never grow a beard, and in this too, they saw a symbol: Where growth was not possible, the Rebbe planted and created new life.

He traveled the world, sharing one of his innovations in communities across North America. He called it a “Yom Shekulo Torah,” and he urged local balabatim — that first generation of hard-working survivors — to take a day off, to close their stores, to miss a day at the factory, and join him in a shul.

When he suggested it during one Shalosh Seudos, they smiled. The Rebbe was in Heaven. They were on earth. It wasn’t realistic.

Then, the Rebbe started to sing “Sol A Kokosh Mar,” the Hungarian song of his ancestor, Reb Eizekel, the holy hymn sent to him through a peasant, a cry of yearning for the Shechinah, and these simple laborers were hypnotized. They would do as the Rebbe said. They were his.

Six Million Chassidim

Despite the Rebbe’s encompassing influence over many decades, he never had more than a small cadre of dedicated Kaliver chassidim. He was a frequent visitor to other courts, an honored guest at family celebrations in Belz and Sanz, treated like a revered uncle.

In conversation with Mishpacha, he referred to the size of his own chassidus. “I say, chas v’shalom that I should build a big chassidus,” the Rebbe declared. “I tried to follow the path of my ancestor, Rav Yitzchak Eizik of Kaliv zy”a, who brought tens of thousands of Yidden closer to Hashem.

“After the war, I returned to Bergen-Belsen, and I saw so many shattered Jews. I was shattered as well, but then I said to myself, ‘Menachem Mendel, why are you standing here? Why are you letting yourself be broken? You have to take action! You have to strengthen Yidden!’

“There’s a story about an apple dealer who would stand in the market and sell his apples. One day, someone passed by and overturned his apple cart. The apples scattered every which way, and people scrambled to grab the scattered apples. The man began to scream in distress, until a wise fellow passed and said to him, ‘Reb Yid, everyone is grabbing — grab some too. Save what you can.’ And that’s what I did. I told myself that I also have to grab and save what I can…”

The Rebbe, it’s been said, had the largest chassidus in the world: six million chassidim, the holy souls he never forgot, whose precious memories rested upon his heart always.

The Rebbe somehow crossed the secular-religious divide in Israel and was frequently invited to speak in places where chareidi Jews were generally not welcome.

“One day,” the Rebbe related, “I was invited to speak to the IDF Engineering Corps. The officer at the entrance looked me up and down, took in my white socks, the brocade coat, and the wide-brimmed hat, and he began to laugh, asking, ‘What is this here? Purim?’

“But I stood my ground and told him, ‘I’ve been invited.’ The commander came and brought me in with great fanfare. There were 2,800 soldiers waiting for me there. I gave a speech for an hour and a half, sweating from the effort. When I finished, it took me another hour to get out. Hundreds of soldiers stopped me and said, ‘Rebbe, I want to get stronger,’ ‘Rebbe, I want to make a good kabbalah.’”

It Comes Down to Torah

But beyond the global initiatives and programs, the apple of the Rebbe’s eye was his kollel network, called Shufra D’Yerushalayim, with 18 branches across Eretz Yisrael, directed by the Rebbe’s grandson, Rav Yisroel Mordechai Horowitz. (The Rebbe and Rebbetzin had no biological children, but they adopted three daughters. Rav Yisroel Mordechai, crowned as the new Kaliver Rebbe at the levayah, is married to a daughter of an adopted daughter.) The Rebbe’s policy was to accept every avreich, regardless of which chassidic court he was affiliated with. Over the last few years, the avreichim of the kollel and their accomplishments brought the Rebbe great joy: Each time another talmid chacham earned semichah, he rejoiced anew.

“Dovid Hamelech said, ‘Aromimcha Hashem ki dilisani,’” the Rebbe explained. “One can understand the word ‘dilisani’ as a lashon of deles, a door — ‘Thank You, Hashem, for allowing us to have a door that is always open.’ I look back and I’m grateful that in our beis medrash, in our kollelim, all are welcome, and as spiritually impoverished as I am, it’s a zechus I cherish. Torah is the power of everything, the source of all brachah.”

Then the Rebbe offered a final, whispered message. “The nations wish to swallow us. There is no solution other than achdus, complete unity. We must be there for each other, for the sake of Torah, for the sake of emunah, for the glory of His Holy Name.” —

— Yisroel Besser contributed to this report

Song of the Sparks

Kaliv is the name of a small town in the northeastern part of Hungary, yet it is most famous as a chassidic dynasty. According to tradition, the Baal Shem Tov visited the town of Szerencs, Hungary, and blessed a childless couple with a son who was born in 1751. This child helped his mother support the family by watching a flock of geese in the field. He spent many hours in the company of shepherds, far from the noise of the city, and he began to copy the shepherds’ songs. Then, the Baal Shem Tov’s disciple Reb Leib Sarah’s discovered him and recognized the refinement and loftiness of his soul. Reb Leib brought the boy to the home of Rav Shmelke of Nikolsburg, who took him under his wing. Eventually, he grew up and became the first chassidic rebbe in Hungary, Rav Yitzchak Isaac Taub (Reb Eizikel) of Kaliv.

But he always remained attached to those shepherds’ songs, bringing them into the realm of kedushah, and he explained that every tune emanates from the heichal haneginah, the holy chamber of song in the Upper Worlds. If some fragments of song fell into the possession of the sitra achra, he maintained, it is a tzaddik’s job to bring them back to the chambers of sanctity. He said the proof was that when a gentile shepherd taught hi]ףm a song, the shepherd would forget it as soon as Reb Eizikel learned it.

Although six generations separated them, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Taub retained that energy of his ancestor, searching out the hidden holy sparks of Jewish neshamos and attaching them to a Shema Yisrael, bringing them back to the chambers of sanctity through song.

Along with the classics of the dynasty, the song associated with the Rebbe is the niggun of faith and happiness that the Rebbe would sing in the concentration camps, one he sang until his final day.

Nohr emunah, nohr emunah in Borei Kol Olamim

Nohr emunah, nohr emunah in Borei Kol Olamim

Tayere Yidden, heilige Yidden, hotz emunah, hotz emunah in Borei Kol Olamim,

S’vet eich gut zein, s’vet eich vohl zein

Haint un alle mohl, oif der velt un oif yener velt.

(Only emunah, only emunah in the Creator of all the worlds, it will be good for you, you will have happiness, today and forever, in this world and in the next World.)

(Originally Featured in Mishpacha, Issue 758)