Rabbi Yosef Ekstein of Dor Yeshorim Vowed that No Couple Would Know His Pain
Today, Dor Yeshorim is a household word, at least among families with shidduch-aged children. Who in the Torah world looks into a prospective match without first ascertaining genetic compatibility by calling in their numbers to the Dor Yeshorim hotline? But in 1983, when Rabbi Ekstein first set out to prevent others from experiencing what he was so painfully living through himself, people thought he was a dreamer at best — a digger of skeletons at worst.
Maybe it was because he was a war baby — born while the Budapest building where his mother had taken shelter was being bombed — that Yosef Ekstein became such a stubborn fighter, forging ahead with his program in the face of raised eyebrows and skeptical smirks. Yet at the beginning of his personal journey, his only fight was to get through his own pain.
The year was 1965, and Rabbi Ekstein, a Satmar chassid, shochet, and head of kashrus in Argentina, had just become a father to a newborn son. How simple it seemed in this generation, he thought. It was nothing like the situation his parents faced when he had been born.
His father, Rabbi Kalman Eliezer Ekstein, used to tell him, “You survived by a miracle. I don’t know why, but it must be for a purpose.”
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