Rabbi Shmuel Sperber

Rabbi Shmuel Sperber, born in 1905 in Brasov (Kronstadt) in Siebenbürgen in Rumänien. His father David Sperber was a rabbi in Brasov and Av Beit Din (chairman of a Beth Din rabbinical court. In his youth, Shmuel Sperber studied in the yeshivas of Oyber-Visheve under the wings of Rabbi Eliezer David Grünwald and Rabbi Mendel Hager. After his ordination (semichah) as a rabbi and his marriage, he lived in the Romanian city of Iasi, where on June 29, 1941, the Isai Death Train with 13,000 victims marked the conclusion of the largest pogrom against the Jewish population in Romania. Already in 1931, after anti-Semitic attacks, Smuel Sperber decided to emigrate to England. Once in England, he enrolled in the law faculty of the University of London and also founded a yeshiva, Ohr Torah. With the arrival of the first transports of German-Jewish children in England on the eve of the Holocaust, Rav Sperber became actively involved in their comfort and education. At the same time, Rav Sperber became active in the Mizrachi movement and opened a camp in North Wales to prepare some 200 children for life on a kibbutz. He later moved to Manchester, where he continued to work with youth, and then returned to London. There he became an associate professor at the University of London. In 1971 Rabbi Shmuel Sperber settled in Israel.