Back from the Brink

AWAKENING THE SPARK Already in his 90s the Kaliver Rebbe has never tired of his projects to bring a spark of Yiddishkeit to estranged Jews. With his trusted right-hand Rav Chaim Binyamin Kirschenbaum (seated left) will the Rebbe have strength for his newest project? (Photos: David Mor and Mishpacha Archives)

T he Kaliver Rebbe has lived through nearly a century of miracles but when he took a fall last February he felt like he’d reached the end of his zechuyos. The venerated 94-year-old sage lay semiconscious and heavily sedated in the ICU while his few chassidim and many more admirers stormed the heavens hoping for a miracle. But according to his doctors it seemed as if the holy man — whose life has been a triumph over Hitler — was about to succumb to the grim medical prognosis.

But as he has done so many times in the past Rav Menachem Mendel Taub (not to be confused with his second cousin Rav Moshe Taub the Kalover Rebbe from Williamsburg) somehow pulled through. “I was just getting weaker and weaker beginning to fade away ” the Rebbe related in a moving conversation in his Jerusalem home last week as he was preparing for the Festival of Miracles. “My body was full of tubes and the doctors forbade me from eating or drinking which made me even weaker.” The Rebbe was eventually discharged and sent home where the chassidim made him a mini hospital. “I lay in bed for weeks totally helpless and not knowing if I’d make it to the next day ” the Rebbe says of that harrowing period just months ago.

It started with a fall as the Rebbe was preparing to head out to the Katamon neighborhood to be menachem avel the children of his close friend the Erloyer Rebbe ztz”l. As he got up from his chair he fell to the ground — which sparked a months-long painful ordeal of tubes and treatments during which he was bedridden and declining.