Rabbi who helped rekindle Jewish life in Poland dies

Rabbi Yechezkel Besser, the “spiritual father” of the Polish Jewish revival, has died.

Besser, who died Feb. 9 at age 87, is widely credited with focusing Jewish attention and resources on the remnant of Polish Jewry to have survived the Holocaust. In particular he worked with philanthropist and cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder to build more than 20 Jewish schools in Poland and Eastern Europe.

Besser, a Chassidic rabbi who made his money in real estate and had a shteibel (a small synagogue) on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, met Lauder in 1987 when Lauder was serving as the U.S. ambassador to Austria. The rabbi, who had escaped his native Poland in the days following Kristallnacht, had started returning to his homeland to try to rekindle the Jewish world he saw destroyed by the Nazis.

“In some ways it was a perfect partnership,” said Warren Kozak, the author of a book on Besser titled “The Rabbi on 84th Street.” “He gave Ronald the knowledge and background necessary in terms of East Europe, Talmud and Judaism. Ron had the resources the rabbi needed.”

Besser, who was born in Katowice, Poland, in 1923 and immigrated to the United States after World War II, helped guide the billionaire cosmetics magnate as he launched the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation in 1988 to start building schools, which have now educated over 100,000 Eastern European Jewish youth.

Besser, who also revitalized the Daf Yomi project in the United States, in which Jews learn the entire Talmud by studying one page a day over the course of seven years, never took a salary from Lauder, according to Kozak.

Until his health started fading a couple of years ago, the rabbi had an office right next to Lauder’s in the Estee Lauder Building in midtown Manhattan.

“Right in the heart of corporate America, you’re in this very fancy office and all of a sudden there was this Chassidic rabbi there,” Kozak said.

Michael Schudrich, the U.S.-born chief rabbi of Poland who was hired by Besser, credited him as “the spiritual father of everything that was rekindled and re-emerged here in Poland.”

A funeral service was held in Brooklyn, and the rabbi was buried in Israel. A memorial service was also slated to be held in his memory at the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw.