Cockroach Infestation

LampshadeQueen
Published on Apr 22, 2023
Date: April 24, 2006

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New York's Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, an Auschwitz survivor and revered leader of the large and politically influential Satmar Hasidic movement for more than a quartercentury, died shortly before 7:00 last night at Mount Sinai Hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side. He was 91.

Teitelbaum had been in the hospital since March 30, when he was admitted for an infection he developed while receiving radiation treatment for a spinal tumor. He fell unconscious and his one kidney failed a few days into his hospital stay, but his health later improved so much that aides expected him to return home. Yesterday, his condition declined swiftly.

Thousands of mourners will have poured into Kiryas Joel last night and early this morning for a funeral and burial. A funeral was held at the main Satmar synagogue in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn at 10 p.m. yesterday. Police planned for enormous traffic on roads leading into the village in southern Orange County.

Teitelbaum was the grand rebbe, or supreme spiritual leader, for as many as 120,000 Satmar members inhabiting tightly knit enclaves in Brooklyn, Kiryas Joel, Monsey, Montreal, London, Jerusalem and other places.

He leaves behind a sect sharply fractured around two rival sons, Aron and Zalmen, each a rabbi who could succeed him. Their respective supporters have already been waging a bitter power struggle in court. The rebbe's death will almost certainly open a fierce succession battle.

Moses Teitelbaum was born in 1914 in the Hungarian city of Sighet, the son and grandson of revered rabbis. He lost both parents at age 11 and joined the households of his grandfather and uncle, the man he would succeed as Satmar grand rebbe a halfcentury later.

Teitelbaum was building his own reputation as a rabbi when the Holocaust began decimating the European Jewish population. In 1944, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz, where his wife, Leah, and their three children died. Teitelbaum was transferred to Theresienstadt and liberated from there in 1945.

He and his new wife, Pessel Leah, returned to Sighet after the war, but they fled Communist persecution and eventually emigrated to New York City. There, he rebuilt the Sighet branch of Hasidim and became its leader, the Sigheter rebbe.

He was 66 years old and living in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn in 1979 when his uncle, Joel Teitelbaum, the charismatic leader of the flourishing Satmar Hasidic sect, died. With no sons to succeed the Satmar rebbe, congregation leaders turned to the Sigheter rebbe. He was crowned in 1980 in Kiryas Joel the Satmar community founded in Orange County in his uncle's name just a few years earlier.

In recent years, Teitelbaum has presided over a movement riven by loyalties to either Aron or Zalmen, either of whom could become the next rebbe. He had appointed Aron, the oldest of his four sons, chief rabbi in Kiryas Joel in 1984. The fault lines opened in 1999 when the rebbe passed over Aron and plucked his younger brother, Zalmen, from a post in Jerusalem to become chief rabbi in the Satmar base of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

In 2001, the two factions each held elections for leadership of the Williamsburg congregation and declared itself the winner, igniting intense litigation that has churned for more than four years and now rests with a state appeals court reviewing two separate lower court decisions.

Even the rebbe's health became a political football in this overheated atmosphere. In July, several of Aron's children petitioned the court to assign guardians to the aging leader, claiming he had severe dementia and was being kept in seclusion by Zalmen's supporters. A judge rejected the request in November.

Aron's supporters claimed the rebbe's mental conditions started declining at least as far back as 1997, which implicitly questions the validity of Zalmen's appointment in 1999. Zalmen supporters, meanwhile, called the move for guardianship and claims of dementia outrageous and disrespectful. They had said previously that the rebbe merely forgot things and sometimes repeated himself, as old people do.

The rebbe's physical health has fluctuated. He suffered a minor stroke in September, resulting in another hospital stay. But a Brooklyn judge who visited Teitelbaum at his home on Oct. 31, 2005, to decide if he needed guardians, found him studying and walking around.

His condition dipped again in March, when doctors found a tumor on his spine and began radiation treatment. He soon developed an infection and was brought to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he fell unconscious on April 4. His one remaining kidney failed at the same time. Doctors placed him on a respirator.

#Satmar #SatmarRebbe #MosheTeitelbaum