Sign of the Times

Remembering Rabbi Mordechai Dov Altein ztz”l and Rebbetzin Rachel Altein a”h

In a piece recollecting my childhood in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, I mentioned that I had attended the Lubavitch Yeshiva of the Bronx. Housed in a large ramshackle building on the neighborhood’s outskirts, its student body was comprised largely of nonobservant kids, since nearly all my frum contemporaries went to yeshivos out of the neighborhood for what their parents considered a superior education. But my parents felt it was important to support the only local elementary yeshivah and the tzaddik Rabbi Mordechai Dov Altein, who ran it.

During their 40 years in the Bronx, Rabbi and Rebbetzin Rachel Altein raised a family that’s now spread out in six cities on three continents. After the yeshivah closed many years ago, the Alteins moved to Crown Heights (where they returned after a decade of retirement in Israel), and it was there that Rabbi Altein was niftar this past December, at age 100. And now, just four months later, the Rebbetzin too is no longer here, succumbing on April 13 to complications associated with the coronavirus. They had been married for 76 years. Hane’ehavim v’hane’imim b’chayeihem, uv’mosam lo nifradu.

Rabbi Altein was a Lower East Side boy who attended elementary school at Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin and then Mesivta Torah Vodaath. While in high school, he began studying chassidus with Rabbi Yisroel Jacobson, who was chairman of Agudas Chasidei Chabad of America, having been sent in the mid-1920s by the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe to build the presence of the chassidus here. Eventually, Mordechai Dov traveled together with friends (one of whom was Rabbi Berel Levy, founder of the OK kosher supervisory agency, whose son and successor, Rabbi Don Yoel, recently fell victim to the virus) to learn in the central Chabad yeshivah in Otvotzk, Poland.

He returned to these shores as the storm clouds of war gathered over Europe and was soon drafted by the Rebbe, who had also since emigrated here (due in no small part to the efforts of Rabbi Jacobson) into a lifelong career of harbatzas Torah that included establishing and leading yeshivos in Pittsburgh (which flourishes still), Connecticut, and my Bronx alma mater. In 1943, the young mechanech married the daughter of his mentor, Rachel Jacobson, who was very much of an educational force in her own right alongside her role as matriarch of an illustrious family.