Two trailblazers of Yiddishkeit who recently left us
I
t’s a sad privilege for me to devote this space to two great personalities, two trailblazers of Yiddishkeit who recently left us: Rav Mordechai Neustadt and Rav Ezriel Tauber, zichronam livrachah — each a veritable Nachshon who jumped fearlessly into the unknown and changed the face of the Jewish world.
Surely more and more will yet be told about the work of these two special men to revive Yiddishkeit in spiritually deprived populations from the Soviet Union to the United States and even Eretz Yisrael. I will only attempt a few words as another marker on their fresh graves.
I was just a child when I first met Mordechai Neustadt. The State of Israel was in its fledgling years, and Reb Mordechai was the madrich of our Agudah youth group in Bnei Brak. Suddenly, he disappeared from the landscape our lives; the energetic young man who’d exerted such a strong influence on us had emigrated to America.
After that I was out of touch with him for decades. Yet despite the years and the thousands of miles that separated us, when I met him again, the spark he’d left within me was immediately rekindled.
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