Rabbi Menachem Zemba רבי מנחם זמבה
the gaon of Warsaw, a Gerer chasid; died in the Warsaw ghetto uprising
He was born in 1883 at Praga, the suburb of Warsaw, into a family of Gerer chasidim, and taught himself: until he was forty he sold iron in his father-in-law's shop and took no rabbinical post, yet already the scholars of Poland knew that a gaon lived in Warsaw. His books are Zera Avraham, Totzaot Chaim on the laws of the Sabbath, and essays on the Talmud written in a new way: broadly and with an examination of every root.
In 1935 he entered the Warsaw rabbinate and became one of the first men of Agudat Yisrael; the Imrei Emet of Ger and Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin counted him the first of the scholars of Poland.
In the ghetto he stayed with the community. When in 1943 the fighters asked the rabbis whether the uprising was permitted, he answered that now the sanctification of the Name was not death but arms. Polish priests offered to take him out of the ghetto; he refused to leave without the others. He died on 19 Nisan 5703 (24 April 1943), in the first week of the uprising, and was buried in a courtyard; in 1958 his remains were brought to Jerusalem.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Zera Avraham and Totzaot Chaim — the books
Scholarship
- Testimonies from the Warsaw ghetto — the answer on the uprising, the refusal to leave, 19 Nisan 5703
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — Praga near Warsaw, the iron trade, the rabbinate from 1935, the reburial in 1958
Basis: documents and evidence.