Brooklyn, NY – Oldest Living Lubavitcher Chassid Dies At 101

Brooklyn, NY – Rabbi Menachem Mendel Morosov, the oldest living Lubavitcher chassid, passed away on Jan. 17 in New York. He was 101 years old, just six weeks shy of his 102nd birthday.

Morosov was born in the White Russian village of Lubavitch—the cradle of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement—on March 16, 1916. He was born just as traditional Jewish life in the Russian Pale of Settlement was coming to an end, just as World War I and the Russian Revolution were about to unleash lawlessness, pogroms, famines and disease throughout the region.

He experienced two World Wars and the darkest days of Stalinist terror, when his father, older brother, and countless other friends and relatives were arrested and taken away forever. Against all odds, he survived, leaving the Soviet Union with falsified Polish papers in 1946, before settling in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1953.

His father was Rabbi Elchonon Dov “Chonye” Morosov, secretary of the sixth Rebbe—Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory—and a key figure in the Rebbe’s network of underground synagogues, yeshivahs and schools in the Soviet Union.

It was by virtue of the position of Morosov’s father that “Reb Mendel,” as he was mostly known, was able to witness pivotal moments in the Lubavitcher movement’s history, retaining a storehouse of memories that he shared copiously and entertainingly with generations of listeners.

Growing up in Stalin’s Soviet Union, fear was an overarching part of life for Morosov, who witnessed his father’s first arrest, in 1927, from which he returned, and second arrest, in 1938, from which he did not. His father, Reb Chonye, was tortured, together with Morosov’s eldest brother, Shmuel. Both were executed in 1938.

Despite these and other horrors, Morosov—known for his sharp wit and intellect—was a happy and joyous man, regularly outdancing and outsinging people throughout his life and well into his 90s. In New York, he served as a teacher and mentor of Chassidus at Oholei Torah for decades, staying involved in the day-to-day operations of the massive school even after his retirement.

In his later years, while his body began to show signs of age, his mind did not. When he could no longer make it to synagogue on Shabbat, family members arranged a weekly minyan to come to his home.

Instead of being a sad affair, “Mendel Morosov’s minyan” became a popular destination for anyone in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn on a Shabbat morning, where they could share a hearty l’chaim with Reb Mendel while hearing him teach a new song or hold forth on a century of Lubavitcher history.

One might expect someone so venerable as Reb Mendel to bend beneath the weight of the past, to be grave of character, to be critical and stern. Not so Reb Mendel.

On the contrary, he exuded the energy and charm of a mischievous child, a charm that sparkled in his eyes, and which was only enhanced by the sprightly white beard that framed his face. If there was one serious lesson that he constantly sought to impart, it was this: Never take yourself more seriously than you ought.

In Chabad, self-abnegation is an ideal often associated with the hard work of contemplative prayer, toil of the heart and mind. But Reb Mendel personified a self-abnegation that was at once lighter and more profound.

In his later years, he would often share a self-deprecating anecdote of his own devising (needless to say, this works much better in Yiddish):

I recently received a notification from above. They said they needed me. I asked, why would they want me? And they responded that above they are looking for a chassidic mentor, a mashpiah. Said I, there are many great mashpe’im there already, R. Nissan [Nemenov, d. 1984], R. Shlomo Chaim [Kesselman, d. 1971] etc.; why do they need me? No, they responded, they don’t need a mashpiah in heaven, they need one in hell.

Many of his anecdotes had punchlines that made a similar point. Never take anything for granted. We are all limited; we are all fallible. If we are placed on a pedestal, we should never lose sight of the distinction between our real selves and our public image. None of us know everything there is to know about anything. Complacency is egotism. So is over-seriousness.

Morosov lived through a century of Chabad history, following three successive Rebbes from the movement’s eponymous village of Lubavitch in the Tsarist era, to Rostov and Leningrad under Soviet rule, and ultimately, to New York, where under the leadership of the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—Chabad would be transformed into an international force