In Zeide’s Shadow 

For those of us whose parents were survivors, grandparents were a rarity. I wasn’t zocheh to know my paternal grandfather, the Chotiner Rebbe (Rav Mordechai Yisrael Twersky) Hy”d, who broke from the line of the firing squad that was leading his kehillah to their deaths and jumped into the Dniester River in order to toivel before his murder. But I had the priceless treasure of my earliest years with my maternal zeide, Grand Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, the Kopyczynitzer Rebbe zy”a.

The Rebbe was born in Husyatin in 1888, lived in Kopyczynitz, Galicia, where his father was rebbe, traveled to Vienna after World War I, and managed to get from Vienna to New York in 1939, before the outbreak of the Holocaust. While in Vienna, his home became a center for the thousands of refugees who fled to Austria, and he took hundreds of Jewish orphans under his wing as well. When he moved with his family to America and settled in Lower Manhattan, he continued to bring chizuk, refuos, and yeshuos to Klal Yisrael until his death in 1967. With his sharp mind, his expertise in all areas of Torah, and his extraordinary chesed, he was considered one of the gedolei hador in both Europe and in America, with a wide-reaching global impact — all emanating from a tiny shul on the Lower East Side, and later in Boro Park.

My father, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Twersky (the Chotiner Rav of the Bronx) a”h, had been orphaned at the age of 14, and survived ghettos, torture, labor camps and death marches, finally coming to America in 1946. In 1961, he married my mother, Chaya Pearl Heschel. a daughter of the Kopyczynitzer Rebbe.

Even though my zeide was niftar before my third birthday, I’ve always considered him a guiding force in my life, and have received “regards” from him at various junctures along the way — throughout my youth, teenage years, and well into my adult life. Whatever I do, wherever I go, whomever I speak with, there always seems to be a connection to Zeide — and not only how he assisted thousands of people all over the world, or how he altered people’s lives forever. What is most fascinating to me is how he’s always been a shadow in my own life.