By all accounts, Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz — a Holocaust survivor and beloved teacher at the Upper East Side’s Ramaz School, who died on Nov. 11 at 98 — led an incredible and full life.
“This was not one life,” Rabbi Joshua Bakst, a colleague at Ramaz, where Moskowitz worked for 53 years, told the New York Jewish Week. “This was 17 lives, and he lived every one of them well and without giving up the others.”
Moskowitz’s long, cross-continental journey, which included a childhood escape from the Nazis, an illegal immigration by boat to British-controlled Palestine and, eventually, to New York, where he reunited with his mother, whom he long thought dead. At 20, he built his life anew on American soil, where he worked for decades as a rabbi, a teacher, school principal and a director of Camp Massad in the Poconos.
Born in Czernowitz in what was then Romania and today Ukraine, Moskowitz was the oldest child and only son of Rabbi Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz and “Sheindel Alte” Alma Moskowitz, as he told the Forward in 2010. At a young age, he watched the Gestapo shoot and kill his father, just 30 years old, in their synagogue.
According to Moskowitz’s autobiography, “A Memoir of Sanctity,” he and his mother and sister were then deported to Shargorod ghetto in Transnistria, in what is today Moldova. Moskowitz was separated from his family in the middle of the night, put into a military vehicle and taken to a labor camp, where he was forced to work on a bridge.
The day the project was completed, the Allies bombed the bridge. The Germans relocated, bringing their prisoners with them to a destroyed Odessa train station, where Moskowitz watched as two men jumped out of the window. He followed the men on foot, until they arrived in Romania, where in July 1944, he was put on an illegal rescue boat to Turkey called the Kazbek, and then sailed to Palestine, then under the British mandate.
It was there that Moskowitz spent the remainder of the war, graduated from Mikveh Yisrael Agricultural School, and served in Israel’s pre-state Haganah paramilitary force. He and his friends were dreaming of starting their own kibbutz. But then, Moskowitz learned that his sister survived the Holocaust and was living in Israel — and that their mother was living in New York.
“The incredible and joyful news that by some miracle, my mother had escaped death, shook my peaceful life just as an earthquake would rattle everything in its wake,” Moskowitz wrote in his memoir.
He left his friends and plans behind and, according to Ellis Island records, sailed from Haifa to New York in 1947 to reunite with his family.
“As though hypnotized, I stared at the Statue of Liberty, the skyscrapers, the magic that was the symbol of the ‘Goldene Medinah,’” he wrote, using the Yiddish term for “Golden Land.”
Reunited in New York, the Moskowitz family settled in Brooklyn’s Borough Park, a neighborhood today known for its dense Orthodox Jewish population. He met his wife, Sara Rabinowitz, known as Sue, in a shidduch, or setup, through a rabbi cousin. Sue was the only daughter of a prominent Detroit rabbi, Yosef Ben-Zion Rabinowitz. The couple wed and were married for 25 years before Sue’s death in 1978. They had four children together: Rachel, Avraham, Meshulam and Yoel.
“I’ve heard it said about Holocaust survivors that there are those that did not die and those that came back to life,” his son Yoel recalled at a memorial service held at the Upper East Side’s Congregation Kehillath Jeshurun on Nov. 12. “Mayer Moscowitz came back to life and he lived it with a vengeance.”
Moskowitz eventually became a rabbi, earning his certification from the Lower East Side’s Mesivta Tifereth Yerushalayim. He began teaching at Ramaz in 1960, where his many hundreds of students included the current president of Israel, Isaac “Bougie” Herzog, who shared a condolence letter with the school.
“As his student in Ramaz in the 1970’s, I recall Rabbi Moskowitz characterizing his life as an act of survival,” Herzog wrote. “Indeed the horrors and heroism of his youth molded him to the great teacher he was. But to those of us fortunate enough to be his talmidim [students], Rabbi Moskowitz encompassed far more than a commemoration of the martyrs of the Holocaust and of Israel’s formative years. Rather, he was the pillar of fire before our people, lighting our path forward.”
Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz in 1982. (Courtesy The Ramaz School)
This blending of the many chapters of his life, his friends and family said, is exactly what made Moskowitz special.
“Abba loved to say that Yiddishkeit was not a cafeteria plan,” Yoel Moskowitz said at the memorial service, using the Yiddish word for Jewish way of life. “But there was no bigger smorgasbord than Abba’s version of Yiddishkeit.”
Moskowitz met his second wife, Barbara Gerstel, on a pilgrimage to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland in 1996. Both were leading tour groups for March of the Living, an organization that brings young people on educational visits to the camps and Israel. They were married for 27 years.
In his 80s, Moskowitz and Gerstel went on new adventures: The couple saw a Bruce Springsteen concert at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey (even though he was not familiar with “The Boss,” apart from a week-long greatest hits boot camp) and went snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. Moskowitz also wrote poems in both Hebrew and Yiddish.
As a rabbi, Moskowitz officiated his children’s and his grandchildren’s weddings, overseeing his granddaughter’s 2022 wedding immediately after being discharged from the hospital due to an unexpected health complication.
“Barbara willed him to strength,” Yoel said. “And at the wedding, no one would have begrudged him a walker, a wheelchair, or even a chair to sit in, but he refused. He walked down the aisle with Barbara. He stood for the whole ceremony.”
