The Rebbe Who Never Wanted to Be One

The Beirach Moshe of Satmar—Reb Moshe Teitelbaum—once told a close associate that he had "never had a single good day." Orphaned at eleven, he lost his first wife and three children in Auschwitz, survived multiple concentration camps and a death march, rebuilt a family and community in America, lived for decades in the shadow of his legendary uncle the Satmar Rebbe, and when he finally succeeded him at age sixty-six, faced fierce opposition from within the Satmar court itself. Yet the story of his twenty-year leadership is not one of tragedy but of quiet, unassuming success—the institutionalization and flourishing of the largest Hasidic community in the world, led by a man who saw himself as nothing more than a custodian.

The Man Behind the Shadow

The Beirach Moshe was born in 1914 into the aristocracy of the Teitelbaum dynasty of Sighet, the second son of the Ateret Chaim of Sighet. His mother was a Halberstam, granddaughter of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz. When his father died young in 1926, the boy was raised by relatives—including his brother-in-law the Klausenberger Rebbe, his grandfather Reb Shulem Eliezer of Ratzfert, and his uncle Reb Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe. He studied in various yeshivas, received semicha from the famous Kasha Rav, and in 1939 became rabbi of Senta in Yugoslavia (now Serbia).