Rabbi Avram Twersky, a Holocaust survivor and a seventh-generation descendant of the founder of Chasidism, the Ba’al Shem Tov, died May 30 in New York at the age of 74 after a long illness.
During the war, Twersky’s father and brother were killed in their hometown of Chotin in the Eastern European region known as Bessarabia. Twersky himself was interned in several detention camps.
After the war, Twersky moved to the Bronx, where he founded a congregation dedicated to his hometown and the memory of his father, Rabbi Mordechai Israel Twersky.
In the Bronx, Twersky, was an active communal leader, spearheading the drive to preserve the local mikvah and serving as a chaplain with the New York City Police Department.
The heir to the Chernobyl rabbinic dynasty, Twersky was also an ardent supporter of Zionism who was active in annual appeals for the State of Israel.
“He was a rabbi cut from the old-style European cloth,” said his eldest son, Mordechai. “Despite what he saw during the Holocaust, he was a man of unshakeable faith.”
In addition to Mordechai, Twersky is survived by a daughter and another son, three sisters and six grandchildren — as well as by his wife, Pearl Heschel, the daughter of noted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whom he married in 1960.
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.
