Friday, November 13, 2026

Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Freund

 Moshe Aryeh Freund (Hebrew: משה אריה פרוינד; 1894–1996)[1] was the Grand Patriarch of the Edah HaChareidis and their Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.[2] He wrote a book called Ateres Yehoshua, a name by which he himself was occasionally called. He was a Satmar hasid. He was born in 1904 in the Hungarian town of Honiad[citation needed], where his father, Yisroel Freund, was av beis din. His mother was named Soroh. At age 18 he married a distant relative.

Before the Second World War he was rosh yeshiva in the Hungarian town of Sǎtmar (now Satu Mare, Romania). The Nazis arrested him and his entire family in 1944. The family was deported to Auschwitz, where only Freund survived; his wife and all of his nine children were killed by the Nazis.

In 1951 he moved to Jerusalem where in 1979, he was elected av beis din of the Edah HaChareidis, a position which he held until his death.

Tuesday, November 10, 2026

Grigory Lipmanovich Sokolov

 



Grigory Lipmanovich Sokolov (Russian: Григо́рий Ли́пманович Соколо́в; born 18 April 1950) is a Russian[1] and Spanish pianist.[2] He is among the most esteemed of living pianists,[3][4][5] with his repertoire spanning composers from the Baroque period such as Bach, Couperin or Rameau up to Schoenberg and Arapov. He regularly tours Europe (excluding the UK).

In March 2009, Sokolov cancelled a planned concert in London because of British visa requirements which demanded that non-E.U. workers provide fingerprints and eye prints with a visa application (he also cancelled his 2008 concert on similar grounds). Sokolov protested that such requirements had echoes of Soviet oppression.[25]

Monday, November 9, 2026

Tzvi’s Substack

 https://tgb613.substack.com/t/nineteen-letters