A Chassidic Dyansty's Story of Survival and Rebuilding

This is a biography like few others. It is the story of a distinguished rabbinic and chassidic family of Hungary, a family that exemplified scholarship, piety, generosity and aristocracy of merit. The author, the renowned Muzsayer Rebbetzin, was a niece of the revered Satmar Rav zt”l and her husband was the scion of a great rabbinic family in his own right. As we read about their spiritual strength, we come to understand how they could live through the horrors of the Holocaust with their faith and optimism intact, and how they could find the reserves of spirit to rebuild when the fires and chimneys ceased their grisly work.

For the lasting message of this remarkable and inspiring memoir is that there is always hope, that the Jewish spirit is never extinguished and Jews don’t surrender. To the Nazis, “The Final Solution” was their plan to annihilate the Jewish Nation. But for the Jewish people there is always hope, because the Creator pledged, “I will not have rejected them to obliterate them, to annul My covenant with them, for I am HASHEM.” This is the true secret of the astounding growth of Torah life, and the heroes and heroines of this extraordinary book exemplify those who planted the seeds and nurtured them to maturity.

A highlight of this panoramic book is a chapter on the miracles that brought the Satmar Rav to safety.

Rebbetzin Rubin begins with the idyllic world of pre-War Eastern Europe, taking us warmly and movingly into the world of chassidic courts and rabbinic responsibility. When the extermination began, she was a young newlywed. Her father, a Polish national, had been one of the first to be dragged away, and she and her husband were plunged into a life of terror, separation, and slavery -- but never hopelessness! Always they knew that there was a Merciful Father and that there would be a future -- if not for them, then for others.

Providence decreed that Grand Rabbi and Rebbetzin Rubin be part of that future, as they survived to create a thriving community in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. In telling her story, the author tells the story of Jewish eternity. It has seldom been told as well.