Zew Wawa Morejno

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Zew Wawa Morejno (born 1916) a rabbi in Poland and the United States.

Morejno was born into a hasidic family in Warsaw. He studied at rabbinical schools in Baranovichi, Mir, Belarus and in Kamieniec Podolski. In 1939 he became a rabbi in Zuprany. He survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, serving as a rabbi in the ghettoes of Ashmyany and Vilnius, and later (1943-44) he was imprisoned in Klooga concentration camp in Estonia.

During the years 1945 and 1946, he served as dean and founder of The Advanced Rabbinical School Netzach Israel in Łódź. From 1948, he served as the Chief Rabbi of Łódź. In 1952, he was removed from this position by the Communist leadership of Łódź over a dispute regarding Jewish cemetery rights in the city.

In 1956, reinstalled as Chief Rabbi of Łódź, he also became the director of the Main Religious Council and the Chief Rabbi of Poland. Shortly, however, he was again removed.

Prosecuted throughout the 1960s by the Communist party for protesting the destruction of Jewish cemeteries in Poland and for the widespread resurgence of political antisemitism culminating in the mass expulsion of Polish Jews in 1968 (March 1968 events), after the Six Day War. As the last rabbi of Communist Poland, in 1973 he emigrated to the U.S. where he became a rabbi in the Hasidic Ger community in Brooklyn, New York.

[edit] Bibliography

Grabski August, Współczesne życie religijne Żydów w Polsce, in: Studia z dziejów i kultury Żydów w Polsce po 1945 r., Warsaw 1997