Deaths of major rabbis leaves Orthodoxy reeling

JERUSALEM — Four times on Sunday, Jan. 31, Orthodox men carried the body of a beloved Torah scholar wrapped in a black and white prayer shawl through the streets of Jerusalem to a freshly dug grave.

First there was Rabbi Dovid Soloveitchik, the 99-year-old heir to a vaunted tradition of Talmud study.

A few hours later it was Rabbi Yitzchok Scheiner, the 98-year-old leader of a prominent yeshiva.

In the evening they took Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, a psychiatrist and scion of chasidic dynasties, to his final resting place near Beit Shemesh.

Rabbi Avraham Avidan, former dean of Yeshivat Sha’alvim and a frequent visitor to Denver, died the same day. This had a particularly saddening effect on his many friends in Denver.

By nightfall, the Orthodox world could count four fewer rabbinic scholars than when the day began. 

All died of COVID-19, the disease that has killed well over 2.3 million people around the world, including more than 400,000 in the US and nearly 5,000 in Israel.

In Israel, one in 132 haredi Orthodox Jews over 65 had died of COVID-19 by the end of 2020.

The weekend’s losses were relentless in their pace, but they reflected a cruel fact of life in the Orthodox world over the past year. A long list of Orthodox rabbinic leaders have died, leaving communities reeling from their losses and at times wondering who will emerge to fill their shoes.

The deaths from COVID — and from other causes during a pandemic that curtailed the mourning rituals that usually follow the deaths of major rabbis — spanned the range of the Orthodox community, from modern Orthodox to Lithuanian, or non-chasidic haredi, to chasidic.

In some cases, the deaths of major rabbis signaled the end of an era in which men who attained high levels of secular education also joined the ranks of the generation’s leading rabbis. And in others, the rabbis who died were symbols of connection to a past era of Orthodoxy in which the quality of Torah study was deemed to be higher and holier.

The rabbis leave behind many disciples who have dedicated their lives to study, so their deaths do not signal the demise of traditions, as may be the case, for example, for some Native American tribes whose elders have been hit hard by the virus.

Still, the rabbis symbolized a connection to the past that is highly valued in a community based on the transmission of a tradition said to date back to the giving of the Torah to Moses at Sinai.

“It represents periods of real Jewish glory in terms of Torah scholarship,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, chief executive officer of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division. “We’re looking for that link to what was.”

The losses began early in the pandemic. In the US, there was the Novominsker Rebbe, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, a member of the rabbinical council for Agudath Israel, a haredi Orthodox advocacy group. Perlow died of COVID in early April, just a few weeks after he exhorted the haredi community to take precautions to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

“The loss to [the Jewish people], and Agudas Yisroel, is incalculable,” Agudath Israel said at the time in a statement, using an alternate spelling of its name, not yet knowing how much greater the losses would be.

Another major loss was Rabbi Mordechai Marcus, a leading editor of the Artscroll translation of the multi-volumen Jerusalem Talmud.

The deaths piled up in the haredi community in New York during the spring.

Meanwhile, the modern Orthodox world suffered a series of devastating losses. Rabbi Norman Lamm, a former president of Yeshiva University who had used his post there to promote his vision of modern Orthodoxy, died at age 92 in May. His wife, Mindella, died the month before of COVID-19 at 88.

In August, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, a scholar whose expertise ran the gamut from Jewish mysticism to prayer to theology to ethics, but who became famous for his translation of the Talmud into modern Hebrew, died at 83. Steinsaltz did not die of COVID.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom who became an eloquent spokesperson for Judaism to the world, died in November at 72 of cancer.

His death, a major blow not only to his community in the United Kingdom but to the Jewish community worldwide, was mourned in a torrent of essays and tributes.

Just a few days later, Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, the eminent Jewish legal authority, died at 91.

In December, Rabbi Gedalia Dov Schwartz, a longtime judge in Jewish legal courts, died in Chicago at 95, as did Rabbi Yehuda Herzl Henkin, a pioneer in the world of Orthodox Jewish feminism, who died in Jerusalem at 75.

Those who died were sometimes mourned for what they symbolized as much as for their individual accomplishments.

“Rav Dovid was the last surviving son of the Brisker Rav,” Genack said of Soloveitchik. The Brisker Rav, Rabbi Yitzchak Soloveitchik, moved the Brisk Yeshiva from Poland to Jerusalem and helped promote the Brisker method of Talmud study, which has since become popular throughout the Orthodox world.

“You feel that loss in the sense of that living link that we had to . . . Brisk before is gone,” Genack said.

Soloveitchik, at the age of 99, also was one of the dwindling number of rabbis who was born in prewar Poland, another link to the yeshiva world that thrived in Eastern Europe and was almost entirely wiped out during the Holocaust.

In the US, Feinstein formed that link, if not to the world of prewar Europe then to the decades when his father was the leading Orthodox rabbi in America.

Moshe Feinstein’s mastery of Jewish law commanded respect from all sectors of the Orthodox community.

Twerski, a Milwaukee native, represented another connection to a way of living as an Orthodox rabbi that has become rare. He was the son of a chasidic rabbi who attended public school and later medical school in addition to learning in yeshiva and becoming a rabbi. 

Twerski became known both for his contributions to the field of psychiatry as well as his writings on Jewish subjects. He combined the two in some of his 60-odd books, and in appearances at academic conferences where he presented papers dressed in chasidic garb.

“He was a great believer that there was no contradiction,” said Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, a psychologist and former executive vice president of the Orthodox Union. “A person could be a person of great faith and a rigorous scientist.”

Rabbi Avidan authored a learned and comprehensive work on the Jewish laws of and approach to tzedakah.

In the Lithuanian, or “yeshivish” world, encompassing the haredi Orthodox community that is not chasidic and centers around yeshivas like Soloveitchik’s Brisk yeshiva, most of the rabbis lost this year were in their 80s or 90s.

Rabbi Aharon Kotler, CEO and president of the Beis Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, NJ, the largest yeshiva of the non-chasidic haredi community in the US, said that was no coincidence.

“We venerate age and wisdom,” Kotler said. “So the advanced age doesn’t minimize the feeling of loss. In some way it magnifies the feeling of loss.”

Yet the fact that so many Orthodox leaders have died of COVID-19 has not spurred their followers to pay greater heed to public health advice meant to slow the virus’ spread. Thousands attended the Scheiner and Soloveitchik funerals in Jerusalem, with few wearing masks, in violation of Israel’s lockdown.

“Most of the leaders are in their 80s and 90s, so it’s relatively easier to detach yourself from [attributing it to] COVID. A person of 89 or 99 passes away, you know that can happen without COVID,” Genack said. “So in that sense it’s not a game changer.”

Few expect the deaths to end with these rabbis, as the virus continues to spread. Younger rabbis, some trained by the rabbis who died, will eventually fill the absences they left behind. But for now, the year’s losses continue to weigh heavily on the community.