The Return of a Prodigal Rebbe

Yeḥezkel Taub was born in a Polish shtetl in 1895 to the rebbe of the Yabloner Ḥasidim. Due to the untimely deaths of his brother-in-law and then his father, Taub precipitously inherited the latter’s position at the young age of twenty-four. Soon thereafter, he, along with another rebbe, made the unprecedented decision to move to the Land of Israel to establish a farming community and to encourage their followers to join them. The new settlement—which would later take the name Kfar Ḥasidim and is now a thriving Israeli town—was plagued by troubles, and Taub was eventually forced to turn away newcomers who years earlier had bought plots of land. Desperate, he went to the U.S. in 1938 to raise money; with the outbreak of World War II, he found himself unable to return. Pini Dunner relates what happened next: