Yonasan Steif

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"Blood for goods" Background Auschwitz · The Holocaust · Hungary:WWII · History of the Jews in Hungary People and events Aid and Rescue Committee · Kurt Becher · Joel Brand · Adolf Eichmann · Malchiel Gruenwald · Heinrich Himmler · Rudolf Kastner · Kastner train · Yonasan Steif · Joel Teitelbaum · Rudolf Vrba · Vrba-Wetzler report · Alfréd Wetzler Sources Yehuda Bauer · John S. Conway · Ben Hecht · Raul Hilberg · Miroslav Karny · Ruth Linn Categories Blood for goods · The Holocaust This box: view • talk • edit

Rabbi Yonasan Steif (1877-1958) was a senior dayan of Budapest, Hungary, before the Second World War, a man whom Rabbi Moshe Feinstein referred to as the gadol hador (spiritual leader of the generation). He was a world-renowned posek and halachic authority.

He served as senior dayan together with Rabbi Israel Welcz. The Rosh Beth Din was Rabbi Efraim Fishel Zussman Sofer. While Rabbi Steif may have assumed the role of rosh beth din as the year 1944 approached, he was not such for most of his tenure. Nor was he Orthodox chief rabbi of Budapest. The last incumbent to hold that office was Rabbi Koppel Reich, who died in 1929.

Rabbi Steif was rescued from death in the Holocaust in 1944 as a result of a deal between a Hungarian Zionist official, Rudolph Kastner, and a deputy of Adolf Eichmann. He journeyed on a special train bound for neutral Switzerland along with other prominent Jews including the Satmar Rebbe, the Debreciner Rov and Adolph Deutsch, head of the Budapest branch of Agudath Israel.

He and his wife Blima had two children; a son named Tzvi and a daughter named Esther. His son died in the Holocaust together with his young son Aron while trying to escape the Nazis. The rest of his family, including his wife, his daughter-in-law Breindel with her two other sons and his daughter Esther with her two young sons were rescued with Rabbi Steif, on the special train mentioned above. His son-in-law Aron Bleier (Esther's husband) was in the concentration camps at the time but miraculously survived and was re-united with the family after the war. A third son was born to them in 1950.

He resettled and was appointed as rabbi of Kehal Adas Yereim in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, which had been founded by Orthodox Jews of Vienna living in New York, and he was known as the Wiener Rov (rabbi of Vienna). He died in 1958. He was a major posek, he wrote halachic responsa, works on the Talmud and two works setting forth the obligations of gentiles, one called Sefer Mitsvos Ha-Shem, "The Book of G-d's Commandments".