Menachem Mendel Taub, Grand Rabbi and Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 96

With his pleasant alto, Rabbi Taub was identified with a plaintive Hasidic standard, “Sol a kokosh mar.” It is a lament for Jewish exile, and he sang it on many occasions, most prominently at a ceremony in March 2014 on the Danube to mark the 70th anniversary of the wartime murder of 565,000 Hungarian Jews.

He published a collection of over 500 first-person accounts by Holocaust survivors. It is called “Shema Yisrael: Testimonies of Devotion, Courage, and Self-Sacrifice.” And he burnished his reputation for scholarship with a 13-volume work on the Torah and Jewish holidays.

When President Trump decided in 2017 to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a choice matched by only a handful of nations, Rabbi Taub issued a message of praise.

“I want to wish you from the depths of my heart that you should have great success. Don’t worry if people are talking bad about you. The Almighty is with you.”

Rabbi Taub was born in 1923 in the Transylvanian town of Marghita, now in Romania. He had six siblings. His father, Rabbi Yehuda Yechiel Taub, was a prominent Hasidic leader. In 1944, the family was deported to Auschwitz. All six siblings were killed.

Rabbi Taub spent time in other concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, and after liberation, reunited with his wife, Hana Sara, in Sweden. They immigrated to the United States and settled in Cleveland, but by 1962, had moved to Israel, where they re-established the Kaliv community, first in Rishon LeZion and then in Bnei Brak, outside Tel Aviv.

Hana Sara died in 2010, and he married Sheindel Malnik of Bnei Brak. At Rabbi Taub’s funeral, it was announced that his stepgrandson, Rabbi Yisrael Mordechai Horowitz, would succeed him as the Kaliver rebbe.