My Roots and My Zionism

The first Grussgott was Reb Gedaliah of Kaliv, Hungary, in the 18th century. Gedaliah lived at the time that the secular authorities were assigning last names to Jews. It seems that he was assigned the surname Weiss, but that he chose instead to go by Grussgott, meaning “God’s greetings” in German. This is still how people greet each other every day in Austria and Bavaria. The Spinka Rebbes, direct male descendants of Gedaliah, still go by Weiss, as only one grandson of Gedaliah ended up sticking with the name Grussgott. Gedaliah G. was the first of multiple generations of prominent town Chief-Shochtim (ritual slaughterers) who served as close confidantes to multiple Hasidic Rebbes, in whose courts they served. Gedaliah G. was named for his own direct paternal ancestor Rabbi Gedaliah Buda, who was the chief rabbi of Buda, the capital city of Hungary in the 17th Century. The city of Buda would later join with neighboring Pest to become the Budapest that we know today.

Gedaliah G’s son Shmuel Zvi was Shochet of Kaliv; SZ’s son Shraga Feivel was Shochet of Stratyn; SF’s son Avraham Eliezer was Shochet of Chinidiev, a suburb of Munkatch, and was the personal, traveling Shochet of the Munkatcher Rebbe (more on that below); AE’s son Shmuel Yehuda was a Melamed (religious school teacher), and the General Secretary (Executive Director) of the Jewish community of Bardejov, Slovakia. His son, my Zaidie, Avraham Laizer, was a Shamas (Ritual Director) and Executive Director of various synagogues in New York.

In my days at Yeshiva University, I attended R. Herschel Schachter’s weekly parsha classes each Thursday for a number of years. He would often opine on the following concept, which I also found him relaying in print in the YU magazine Kol HaMevaser from July 2010:

“Oftentimes, people will say, ‘My father belonged to the Agudah, so I belong to the Agudah; my father belonged to the Mizrachi, so I belong to the Mizrachi,’ without taking into consideration that today everything is totally different: that was before Hakkamas ha-Medinah (the establishment of the State) and before Milchemet Sheshet ha-Yamim (the Six Day War)! The Agudah today is not necessarily the same as the Agudah of 50 years ago. Everything is changing in the world. Halachah does not change but its application does”.

Rav Schachter taught us that sticking with the “tradition of your ancestors” can be a lazy cop-out. Times change, and maybe if your ancestor lived today, he would change his mind. The point is that you just don’t know. Indeed, R. Schachter’s own mentor R. Yosef Soloveitchik famously broke from his own illustrious family’s tradition when he switched from the (non-Zionist) Agudah to the (Religious Zionist) Mizrachi movement after the Holocaust, a switch that many others made as well, including my own Zaidie. It’s with that idea in mind that I write here my thoughts about my family’s history and my own Religious Zionism.

Eretz Yisrael and my Family

The first page of the Jerusalem Talmud records the following: Talmud Yerushalmi Berachot 1:1 –

“Rabbi Ḥiyya and Rabbi Shimon Ben Chalafta were walking in the valley of Arbel (in northern Israel) before morning, when the dawn began to break. Rabbi Ḥiyya said to Rabbi Shimon: ‘Great Rabbi, such is the Redemption of Israel: at first, a little light, until it grows steadily greater and brighter’. [Rabbi Hiyya then proceeds to quote the many beats and plot turns of the Book of Esther, until arriving at the verse (8:16)]: ‘And for the Jews there was light and joy, and gladness and honor.’”

Fits and starts, Rabbi Hiyya teaches us. Redemption comes in fits and starts. In the words of John Milton, from Paradise Lost: “Long is the road, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light”.

This passage is a major prooftext for Religious Zionists. I forced myself to reinternalize it after October 7th, while I was wallowing in depression over that horrific event – that our 80-year effort to reestablish our Homeland was always destined to be a protracted struggle. But it does end in light. My parents live in Northern Israel, about an hour drive from the Valley of Arbel.

My great (x4) uncle, R. Avraham Weiss-Grussgott of Munkatch – the first grandchild of Gedaliah Grussgott – moved to the Land of Israel late in his life. He is buried in Teveria, the city which overlooks the Valley of Arbel. I have been to his grave with my aunt Dina, who lives in the Galilee nearby.

R. Avraham’s grave is a minor pilgrimage site for Hasidim, as he was the grandfather of the first Spinka Rebbe. R. Avraham was raised by the first Kaliver Rebbe, who adopted him and his siblings as his own children, after their father Shmuel Zvi, the Shochet of Kaliv, had died young. When the Kaliver Rebbe was still a young boy, he had taken a Hungarian shepherd’s song and turned it into a somber and moving Hasidic melody which constitutes a sort of anthem of the Exile. Song here, with lyrics at :40:

I envision R. Avraham singing this niggun (melody) with his Rebbe, and longing for Eretz Yisrael…

The terrorists of Hezbollah – the so-called “Party of God”, Yemach Shemam – sit just north of the Valley of Arbel, with thousands of rockets still aimed at our people. Thank God, they are now weaker than they’ve ever been, but they are still there. They claim that we have no roots in that Land. R. Avraham of Munkatch lived and died in the Land of Israel decades before the modern-day Zionist movement began. For all the ignorant college kids who find it fashionable to claim that we Jews are modern day interlopers in that land: I have personal, familial proof that we are not. And so do so many other Jews.

The multi-volume “Sefer Alei Zikaron”, a compendium of history and anecdotes about the religious Jews of Hungary, writes that Avraham Weiss-Grussgott moved to the Land of Israel “in order to cherish its dust”. This is a traditional poetic expression for making Aliyah, based on a passage from the Book of Psalms: Tehillim 102:14-15 –

אַתָּ֣ה תָ֖קוּם תְּרַחֵ֣ם צִיּ֑וֹן כִּי־עֵ֥ת לְ֜חֶנְנָ֗הּכִּי־בָ֥א מוֹעֵֽדכִּֽי־רָצ֣וּ עֲ֖בָדֶיךָ אֶת־אֲבָנֶ֑יהָ וְאֶת־עֲפָרָ֥הּיְחֹנֵֽנוּ

“You shall rise up and have mercy on Zion, for this is the time to favor it, for the appointed season has arrived. For Your servants have desired its stones, and they have cherished its dust”.

These verses are codified into law by Maimonides: Mishneh Torah Laws of Kings Chapter 5 –

גְּדוֹלֵי הַחֲכָמִים הָיוּ מְנַשְּׁקִין עַל תְּחוּמֵי אֶרֶץיִשְׂרָאֵל וּמְנַשְּׁקִין אֲבָנֶיהָ וּמִתְגַּלְגְּלִין עַל עֲפָרָהּ. וְכֵן הוּא אוֹמֵר (תהילים קב טו) כִּי רָצוּ עֲבָדֶיךָ אֶת אֲבָנֶיהָ וְאֶת עֲפָרָהּ יְחֹנֵנוּ

“The great sages would kiss the borders of Eretz Yisrael, they would kiss its stones, and roll in its dust, in accordance with the verse in Psalm 102:15: ‘Behold, your servants hold her stones dear, and they cherish her dust’”

From Munkatch to Mizrachi

My great-great grandfather R. Avraham Eliezer Grussgott (not to be confused with his own aforementioned uncle, also named Avraham, who is buried in Tiberias) was the personal, traveling Shochet and right-hand man of the Munkatcher Rebbe, the Minchas Eluzar, R. Chaim Elazar Shapira ztv’k’l. The Rebbe would travel regularly around Eastern Europe to meet with his followers, and he would bring Avraham Eliezer along with him on the road so that he could eat meat from his trusted Shochet, and not have to rely on local kosher standards that he couldn’t vouch for. This was a common practice of the Rebbes of old.

R. Shapira was the father of Orthodox anti-Zionism – See the book “Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism” by Professor Aviezer Ravitzky who writes that the Satmar Rebbe simply adopted the anti-Zionist framework of his mentor, the Munkatcher, and expanded upon it.

My great-grandmother, who we affectionately referred to as Bobby Yetty, was an adherent of Satmar. She was proud to be a great-great granddaughter of R. Zvi Elimelech of Dinov, the Bnei Yissaschar. Bobby Yetty would cry on Tisha B’Av and describe the destruction of Jerusalem as if she had lived through it herself. She would not cry publicly about her first husband Yitzchak, who was killed in the Holocaust. But she would cry on Tisha B’Av. Bobby Yetty was fond of espousing a teaching from the Midrash that all future technologies to ever be invented already existed in King Solomon’s Jerusalem, only to be rediscovered and reinvented later.

As a child, I thought: My pious Bobby envisions ancient Jerusalem like something out of “The Jetsons”, a utopian place with flying cars and robots! The millennia-old Jewish attachment to, and idealization of, our ancient Homeland was imprinted deeply within my Bobby’s soul, and was transmitted to her from her own ancestors over the course of our long exile.

That cosmic and timeless sense of attachment to the Land is just one vignette of personal testimony to what lives within the collective unconscious and shared memory of all of us. Bobby Yetty’s daughter, my dear grandmother Bobby Nelly, may she be well, made Aliyah six years ago at the age of 90. She lives in Protea Village, Bnei Dror, Israel. The Munkatcher Rebbe, my great-great grandfather’s mentor, also loved Eretz Yisrael. He made a famous pilgrimage there in 1930, where he was moved to tears at the Kotel. He declared that while the rest of the world functions under God’s general Providence, the Land of Israel alone is the “Palace of the King”, and as such, it operates under the direct Providence of the Ein Sof, the highest mystical facet of the Divine.

On that trip to Israel with the Rebbe was his teenage future son-in-law Baruch, a young Ilui (prodigy) who was already designated/engaged to be married to the Rebbe’s only child, his beloved daughter Frima. Their wedding, a few years later, would be attended by some 30,000 people; a Jewish royal wedding.

R. Shapira’s successor as Munkatcher Rebbe was his son-in-law R. Baruch Rabinovitch, the father of the current Munkatcher Rebbe in Brooklyn, the renowned R. Moshe Leib Rabinovitch Sh’lita. R. Baruch broke with his father-in-law’s ideology, and became sympathetic to Zionism. After the Holocaust, he scandalized the Munkatcher movement by “abdicating the throne” of Rebbe to become a “modern, Zionist” Rabbi – he became the Chief Rabbi of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and would later become the Chief Rabbi of the city of Holon, in Israel. The Hasidim still half-jokingly refer to him as “The Rebbe, Yemach Shemo” (The Rebbe, cursed be his name!) After the tragic passing of his first wife Frima from an illness, he married a more “modern Orthodox” woman, and they owned a pet dog (which was perceived as a Western, assimilated thing to do). That was apparently quite the scandal!

R. Baruch’s son R. Moshe Leib would then break with his own father’s Zionism, and back into Munkatch to become the next Rebbe. This proves R. Schachter’s point above that every individual in every generation must make their own determination about their ideology, and not just say that they’re blindly following their father or grandfather.

My Zaidie, who was a friend and great admirer of R. Baruch, said that he was the greatest Talmid Chacham (Torah scholar) that he had ever personally known; and he knew a lot of them! I think that my Zaidie saw in R. Baruch an affirmation of his own life’s journey: “From Munkatch to Mizrachi” (Religious Zionism), if you will.  R. Baruch Yehoshua Yerachmiel Rabinovitch zt’l, the “Divrei Nevonim” (the title of his Magnum Opus), remains an exceptional and underrated Torah giant and genius, whose life and legacy are worthy of much further study. As my Zaidie did, I also see in him an affirmation of the continuity between my personal heritage and my religious identity.

Different Jews love Eretz Yisrael in different ways, but October 7th has reminded us of the degree to which the Land binds us all together; from Satmar Hasidim like my Bobby Yetty, to secular Kibbutznikim. It is my sincerest hope and prayer that my own children should see Israel dwell in peace, speedily and in our days. May we merit to soon see the Redemption of Israel that Rabbi Hiyya and Rabbi Shimon Ben Chalafta foresaw on their predawn stroll in the Valley of Arbel, two millennia ago. Amen.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)