Auction 48
Lot 225:
Signature of ownership: “Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam Avdak of Cluj” on a blank first page of an unknown work. Additional notes in a European language—not checked thoroughly.
Size: 13.5x20cm.
Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam of Sanz-Klausenberg (the author of the signature) lived 1904-1994 and was the son of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch of Rodnik. He was the grandson of the ADmor Rabbi Baruch of Gorlitz and great-grandson of the Divrei Haim of Sanz. He was a student of Rabbi David Zvi Zehman of Sokla. His father died when he was 14 and he gave an hours-long eulogy. He was son-in-law of Rabbi Haim Teitelbaum of Sighet, the Atzei Haim, and he learned with him. He served as rabbi of Klausenberg from 1926 at the Chassidic community which split because of the Zionist proclivity of the local rabbi, Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Gelzner. He became rabbi of Rodnik, succeeding his father, but he did not move there.
He survived the Shoah after losing his wife and 11 children, and then he work in the Organization for Religious Life in the DP camps. He moved to New York in 1947, then to Union City and established his yeshiva there. His second marriage was to the daughter of Rabbi Shmuel David Unger of Nietra. He moved to Israel and established Kiryat Sanz in Netanya in 1960. He was known as a great talmid chacham, but most of his writings were lost in the Shoah. Some of his writings are in other authors’ collections. He established Mifal HaShas to encourage knowledge of Shas, and he came up with many ingenious ways to encourage public Torah knowledge such as the development of the title “Moreinu”, which every avrech receives upon learning around 1000 pages of Shas. He worked to instill the Rabbeinu Tam shita for sunset and bein hashmashot, and established the Laniado Hospital in Netanya.
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