Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam

Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam was born in 1905 in Rudnik nad Sanem

Halberstam was born in 1905 in Rudnik, in Austrian Galicia. His father, Tzvi Hirsch Halberstam, was the town's rabbi, and he was a great-grandson of Chaim Halberstam, founder of the Sanz dynasty. He studied with several rabbis in Hungary and Poland and was ordained as a young man.

In 1925 he married Pessel Teitelbaum, daughter of Chaim Tzvi Teitelbaum, and they had 11 children. In 1930 he became rabbi of a Hasidic congregation in Klausenburg, Romania, where he also headed a yeshiva.

During the Holocaust he was sent to a forced labor camp, then to Auschwitz, Warsaw and Dachau. His wife and children were murdered or died soon after the war. He survived a death march and was liberated by Allied troops in 1945.

After the war he built religious schools and kosher kitchens for survivors in displaced persons camps. In 1946 he went to the United States and set up his court in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In 1947 he married Chaya Nechama Ungar, and they had 7 children.

He founded Kiryat Sanz in Netanya and moved there in 1960, and later founded a community in Union City, New Jersey. He established Laniado Hospital in Netanya. He died in 1994, was buried in Netanya, and left the leadership to his two sons.