The Hasidic Rebbe of Sadagora, Rabbi Mordechai Shalom Yosef Friedman, died in Tel Aviv last Thursday at the age of 83. He was buried Thursday night at Tel Aviv’s Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery with a crowd of thousands following his bier. The eldest surviving member of the illustrious Hasidic house of Rizhyn, and a member since 1929 of Agudat Israel’s Council of Sages, Friedman headed a small community from his modern style north Tel Aviv synagogue. His organization included yeshivot, synagogues and other religious institutions in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak.
Friedman was born in 1897 in Sadagora. His father was Rabbi Aharon of Sadagora, a lineal descendant of the famous founder of the Hasidic house of Rizhyn, Rabbi Israel. It was Aharon whom Theodor Herzl envisaged in his “Altneuland” as the “bishop” of a new Jewish State, and in his diaries Herzl gives an account of contacts he had with the rabbi.
Mordechai, who succeeded his father at the age of 16, was also sympathetic to the Zionist ideal despite his membership and activism in the non-Zionist Agudat Israel organization. During the 1930s he persistently advised his followers to flee Europe and was responsible for inspiring various groups of Hasidim to settle in Palestine. He himself visited Palestine several times and finally settled in Tel Aviv six months before World War II broke out.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
