Israel Matzav

Video from memorial for Rav Moshe Twersky HY"D

Greetings from JFK Airport in New York. I'm on my way home. (If you're reading this and are a close enough friend to have my cell phone number, you can try to call. My conference call seems to have disappeared...).

Here's some video from Tuesday night's memorial for Rav Moshe Twersky HY"D (May God Avenge his blood). I am in this video (at least my back is - they were above us in the women's balcony as were all the Boston television stations). Can you find me? Where's Waldo?

Let's go to the videotape.

More about Tuesday's event (with a little you don't know already if you read the post I put up around 6:00 am Israel time) here.

“I can still feel that hug today,” Danny Langermann, a lifelong friend who attended the memorial service at Maimonides School, said of a long-ago embrace. “And if there is anything I will carry with me for the rest of my life, it is that hug.”

Earlier in the day, Barry Shrage, president of Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, remembered Twersky as a scholar who dedicated his life to teaching, and whose death resonated widely.

“This is felt as a body blow to the Jewish community in Boston,” he said.

Twersky leaves his wife, Miriam, who runs the Hadar Seminary for Women in Jerusalem, and five children between the ages of 23 and 33. The couple has 10 grandchildren, Israel officials said.

He was buried Tuesday at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem.

Twersky attended Maimonides , New England’s first Hebrew day school, which was founded in the 1930s by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, his grandfather and a leading Jewish theologian.

At Maimonides, leaders said the school was “engulfed in grief and outrage.”

And at Harvard University, where Twersky’s late father, Isadore, directed the Center for Jewish Studies from 1978 until 1993, news of the deadly attack was met with shock and anger.

“I know that I speak for all of us in the CJS community when I say that we are heartbroken at the news of this unspeakable act of sacrilegious cruelty,’’ said Eric Nelson, the current director of the Harvard center. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the Twersky family at this terribly sad and difficult time.’’

Isadore Twersky was known for his scholarship on the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and was the spiritual leader at Maimonides School.

He died in 1997 at age 67.

On Tuesday, Mosheh Twersky was hailed as a beloved teacher in his own right.

Read the whole thing.  For those who are into such things, there is a collection of Moshe's classes (mostly but not exclusively Talmud) here.

Labels: Jerusalem, Palestinian terrorism, personal stuff, terror victims

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:48 PM