By Daniel Keren
A recent Living L’Chaim – Inspiration for the Nation podcast hosted by Yaakov Langer was recently taped in Israel where he interviewed the former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel – Rabbi Yisroel Meir Lau in the aftermath of the October 7th Simchas Torah massacre by Hamas terrorists (yemach shemam) of Israelis in the south of Israel.
One of the interesting anecdotes that Rabbi Lau revealed to Yaakov Langer was the fact that he was descended from a long line of rabbis on his father’s side going back hundreds of years. When his father Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau, hy”d, realized that he was not going to survive the Nazi onslaught of Polish Jewry, he begged his older son Naftali to keep an eye out for his younger brother Yisroel.
The father explained that he understood that Naftali was not going to carry on the family tradition of being a rabbi because of the disruption that the Second World War had made in his life. But his younger brother could still continue the Lau heritage.
Naftali who would later become the Israeli Consul-General in New York City, risked his life to protect his younger brother and make sure that he after the liberation of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp would come to Israel where under the guidance of his uncle and later a student of his martyred father, Yisroel Meir Lau indeed became a rabbi.
And not only did young Yisroel Meir Lau gain simcha, but he became the sixth Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the Holy Land and today his son Rabbi David Lau is the current Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel.
To view this 50-minute podcast, google either “My Impossible Journey from Death Camps to Chief Rabbi of Israel” or https://youtu.be/2gVaohg6yJ0?si=gc7H5L-dapYv1rvL
Reprinted from the January 26, 2023 edition of The Jewish Connection.
