Rabbi David Bornsztain of Sochatchov רבי דוד בורנשטיין מסוכטשוב
the third rebbe of Sochatchov; one of the spiritual heads of the Warsaw ghetto
The son of the Shem MiShmuel and grandson of the Avnei Nezer. He was born on the new moon of Elul 1876 in Nasielsk. He was rabbi in Wyszogrod, where he set up a yeshiva, and from 1918 to 1926 in Tomaszow Mazowiecki.
He took the court in 1926, after his father's death: first in Pabianice near Lodz, then in Lodz itself. He set up the Beit Avraham network of yeshivas, named for his great-grandfather.
In the autumn of 1939 he moved with his family to Warsaw and found himself in the ghetto: he worked in a factory and went on teaching. In Elul 1940 he issued a printed call to repentance. He died on 8 Kislev 1942 of heart failure in hiding, during the great deportation, and is buried in the cemetery on Gesia Street—among the last burials there, some three hundred people. His book is the Chasdei David, novellae on the Passover Haggadah; most of the manuscripts were lost, and what survived his students published.
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Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- The Chasdei David—novellae on the Passover Haggadah — the book he is named by; what survived was published by his students
Documents of the period
- Testimonies on the burial in the cemetery on Gesia Street in Warsaw — among the last burials in that cemetery, some three hundred people
Scholarship
- The entry on Rabbi David Bornsztain in the register of Polish Jewish communities — the dates of his life and the rabbinate in Tomaszow Mazowiecki from 1918
Basis: documents and evidence.