הרב ישראל שפירא

Rav Yisrael Spira (5650/1889–5750/1989), the Bluzhever Rebbe, led his flock on two continents — a Rebbe who passed through the camps of the churban and rebuilt Bluzhov in America, and at the end of his life the senior member of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. He was born in Reisha (Rzeszów), Galicia, to Rav Yehoshua Spira of Ribatitch, author of Keren Yehoshua, son of Rav Tzvi Elimelech Spira of Bluzhov (1841–1924), called the Tzvi LaTzaddik after his chief work, and a descendant of Rav Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov, the Bnei Yissaschar.

He received semichah at the age of thirteen from the Maharsham of Brezan. He served as rav of Pruchnik and afterwards of Ustrzyki Dolne (Istrik) near Sanok, and married Perel, daughter of Rav Shalom David Unger, the Zashavna Rebbe. On his father’s petirah in 1931 he became Rebbe of Bluzhov.

In the years of the churban the Rebbe was sent to the Janowska camp; in October 1942 he was deported to Belzec, escaped and made his way back to Janowska, and was later taken to Bergen-Belsen. His Rebbetzin Perel was murdered on 31 October 1942, and his brothers, Rav Eliezer of Ribatitch and Rav Meir of Bluzhov, were killed with the rest of his family, הי״ד. On 15 April 1945 he was freed from Bergen-Belsen. After the war he married Rebbetzin Bronia of Sosnowiec, whose first husband, Rav Yisrael Avraham Koshitzki, had perished in Belzec.

In America the Rebbe settled first in Williamsburg and then in Boro Park, where he rebuilt his court and took a leading part in the building of Agudath Israel of America, sitting on the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah as its senior member. What he carried from the years of the churban, told in his later years to Yaffa Eliach, became the basis of the book Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust. He was niftar on 30 October 1989, two weeks short of his hundredth birthday — the oldest of the chasidic rebbes then living — and was buried on Har HaZeitim in Yerushalayim. His grandson Rav Yosef Spira gathered his divrei Torah in the two volumes of Shufra DeYisrael and wrote his life in Le’Ed Bivnei Yisrael.