World Renowned Figure Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum Passed Away At 91

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY - World renowned figure, author of Berach Moshe and leader of Satmar Hasidim one of the world's largest and fastest-growing sects of Orthodox Jews, has passed away now in Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, NY. and left us for a better place. He was 91 and lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Rabbe Moshe Teitelbaum the youngest son of Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Teitelbaum, of Sighet - (The Atzei Chaim) - son of the Kedushath Yom Tov, became leader of the Satmars in 1980, succeeding his uncle Joel Teitelbaum also a son of the Kedushath Yom Tov.

Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum had transplanted the tattered remnants of Satmar from post-Holocaust Europe to Williamsburg, giving the sect new life. Under Moses Teitelbaum, Satmar more than doubled its ranks, to an estimated 100,000 worldwide, building schools and expanding real estate holdings that are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
A Satmar historian, said that Rabbi Teitelbaum, known to his followers by his Hebrew name, Moshe, had likened himself to the biblical Jacob, who considered himself custodian of the great works begun by Isaac and Abraham before him.

"Jacob said, 'I'm not digging any new wells; I'm just watching the wells that the father and the grandfather dug, that they should continue to produce clean water,' " he said. "Rabbi Moshe said the same thing: 'Rabbi Joel dug the wells. I'm just tending them."

Rabbi Teitelbaum is survived by his wife, Pessel Leah; four sons, Aaron, Lipa, Zalmen and Shulem Elazer, all rabbis; and two daughters, Bracha Meisels and Hendy Halberstam; and at least 86 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, named for the 18th-century founder of the Satmar dynasty, Moshe Teitelbaum, was born into rabbinic royalty in Ujfeherto, in what is now eastern Hungary, on Nov. 17, 1914. When the region fell to the Nazis, Rabbi Teitelbaum, then teaching at a yeshiva, was sent to Auschwitz with his wife and three children. Only the rabbi survived. After the war, he remarried and moved to the United States, where Joel Teitelbaum had re-established the sect. Moses founded a congregation in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

After Joel Teitelbaum died childless in 1979, the Satmars named Moses the rebbe, and he moved into the sect's seat in Williamsburg.

Moses Teitelbaum "took a moderately successful Hasidic group and really nourished its growth," said David M. Pollock, associate executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council. "It's now the largest Hasidic group in the United States."

If the Satmar schools in New York were a public school system, it would be the fourth-largest system in the state, after those of New York City, Buffalo and Rochester.

Rabbi Teitelbaum's leadership was such that even as the sect has threatened to split over the succession battle, it has continued to grow, said Samuel C. Heilman, a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College.

"One of the signs of the Satmars' strength," Professor Heilman said, "is that in spite of this internal conflict, they're not on the verge of falling apart."