Writing History

 They were a family with one foot in the past and the other in the future. The Rotenberg home was infused with a fascination with Jewish history and yet Rabbi and Rebbetzin Rotenberg were also dedicated educators and innovators — they scanned the horizon of our history while keeping their eyes trained firmly on the future.

“If you ask me to sum up my grandmother” says Chaike Oppenheimer “I would say mesorah. She was a piece of the previous generation that is no more and she was absolutely dedicated to transmitting the mesorah of those previous generations and their Torah to the coming generations.”

Nothing Else Matters

Chana Zehnwirth was born in Krakow Poland in 1920 a scion of two prominent families. Her father Rav Moshe Yehoshua Heschel Zehnwirth who was a shochet was descended from the great chassidic rebbe Rav Naftali of Ropshitz ztz”l and her mother Baila Yuta descended from the great Rav Eliezer Tiefenbrun ztz”l of Krakow.

Times were hard in Poland and in 1927 Rav Zehnwirth and his family fled the crushing poverty emigrating to America where they settled in the Lower East Side of New York. Their time there was brief. One year Mothers’ Day fell on Shavuos and Baila Yuta noticed the daughter of her frum neighbor arriving in a car to bring her mother flowers. Horrified Baila Yuta resolved to take her family back to Poland. Incredibly the entire family returned to Poland to the same crushing poverty from which they had fled. As Rav Yaakov Yosef Rotenberg rosh kollel of K’hal Shaarei Shlomo in Lakewood and one of Rebbetzin Rotenberg’s three sons points out “That was unheard of — how many people went back? But it demonstrates a major point that my mother drove home to us: when ruchniyus is at stake nothing else matters.”