A Joyful Mother of Children

Talmudic scholar Issachar Shlomo Teichtal was born in Nagyhalász, Hungary, and received rabbinic ordination in 1906. In 1921, he became head of the Moriah Yeshiva in Piestany, Slovakia; there he trained clergy to counter the teachings of liberal Judaism. He published a volume of responsa in 1924. Initially anti-Zionist, Teichtal changed his thinking radically during World War II while hiding from the Nazis in Budapest. His Holocaust-era work, A Joyful Mother of Children, encouraged Jews to return to the Land of Israel in response to the destruction of European Jewry. Teichtal was deported to Auschwitz in 1944.