Grateful tributes to Rebbetzin Jungreis
Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, z”l, was eulogized last week for her pioneering kiruv work and as a rock of her family.
“The rebbetzin had a special way of reaching the pintele yid (Jewish soul) in every person,” her son-in-law, Rabbi Shlomo Gertzulin, told an overflow crowd at her levaya on Aug. 24 in Agudath Israel of Long Island in Far Rockaway.
The shul’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Yaakov Reisman, said that “her message was always the same — unadulterated, unapologetic Torah principles and hashkafah.”
Through her organization, Hineni, “people who never knew how to say Shema Yisrael, today their children are learning in yeshvas, kollels — frum families, not one, not 100, not 1,000 — they’re building klal Yisroel,” said Rabbi Gertzulin, executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America.
The scion of a celebrated rabbinic family in Hungary, she and her close family were saved in 1944 when the Kastner train, carrying 1,600 Jews to Auschwitz, took them instead to safety in Switzerland.
“She brought Hungary, with her illustrious past steeped in Torah and keeping of the mesorah, with her” to America, said Rabbi Reisman. “She had a dream, that not only would she survive, but that others would too.”
Determined to fight the growing commonality of assimilation and intermarriage in America, “she started a revolution all by herself —no committee, no organization — called Hineni, in 1973,” Rabbi Reisman continued. “She didn’t come up with any new formula, she just reinterated our timeless past.”
Jungreis and her late husband, HaRav Meshulem HaLevi Jungreis, zt”l, were pioneers of frum Long Island, settling in Bethpage, Valley Stream and North Woodmere where, in the early years, they may have been the only Jews fully commited to Torah observance. After the passing of her husband, who was spiritual leader of Congregation Ohr HaTorah in North Woodmere for 33 years, in 1996, she moved to Lawrence, where she lived for 20 years. She davened in Agudath Israel of Long Island and offered many classes there.
