הרב יקותיאל יהודה הלברשטאם

Rav Yekusiel Yehuda Halberstam (4 Shevat 5665/10 January 1905–9 Tammuz 5754/18 June 1994), the Klausenburger Rebbe, was the first Admor of the Sanz-Klausenburg chassidut and the founder of Kiryat Sanz in Netanya and of Laniado Hospital. He was born in Rudnik to Rav Tzvi Hirsch Halberstam, a great-grandson of Rav Chaim Halberstam of Sanz, the Divrei Chaim. He was orphaned of his father at fourteen, and that year received semicha from Rav Meir Arik and others. As a bachur he learned chiefly under Rav David Tzvi Zehman of Dukla, and traveled to Poland to Rav Meir Yechiel of Ostrovtza and to the Sanz courts. At about eighteen he married his relative Pessel Teitelbaum, daughter of the Sigheter Rav, and they had eleven children; in 5686/1926, at twenty-one, he was appointed rav of the chassidic kehilla of Klausenburg.

In Iyar 5704/1944, after the Germans entered Hungary, he was conscripted into labor service while his wife and children remained in the Klausenburg ghetto. In October the Arrow Cross coup brought his deportation to Auschwitz, where his wife and nine of his children were killed; his two remaining sons were niftar afterward of typhus. He was put to work in a unit in the Warsaw ghetto, and sent from there to Dachau and to Muldorf as a slave laborer; when that camp was disbanded in the spring of 1945 he survived the death march, and Allied troops freed him at the end of April.

In the Föhrenwald displaced-persons camp he raised Torah and chinuch institutions under the name She’erit HaPleitah. Thousands of survivors heard the drasha he gave on the first erev Yom Kippur after the liberation, at which General Dwight Eisenhower was a guest — and to whom he said that the failure to bomb the death camps and the tracks that led to them had cost millions of Jewish lives. In 1946 he came to the United States, and in 1947 established his court in Williamsburg. In 5715/1955 he came to Eretz Yisrael for the first time and resolved to build a chassidic quarter in Netanya; on 19 Kislev 5720 he settled there, founding chinuch institutions, a large yeshiva and Mifal HaShas — and, in fulfillment of a vow he had made in the years of the churban that if he came out of the fire he would always labor to save Jews, Laniado Hospital.

He held that the essence of chassidut is to learn Gemara. Following the custom of the Sanz Admorim he held back from printing sefarim in his lifetime; his divrei Torah appeared as the Shefa Chaim series and his responsa on all four chelkei Shulchan Aruch as the seven volumes of Divrei Yatziv. Among his talmidim were Rav Asher Weiss and Rav Menashe Klein, author of Mishneh Halachot. He was niftar on Shabbat, 9 Tammuz 5754, and lies buried in Netanya; his will split the leadership of the Sanzer chassidim between his two sons, Rav Tzvi Elimelech as Admor in Netanya and Rav Shmuel David as Admor in Brooklyn.