Younger Years
Born in Hassfurt, northern Bavaria, he was the son of Meir and Bertha Neuberger, the youngest of three children. His parents hired a teacher, or melamed, to teach him about his heritage and the Torah.
When Hermann was eight years old, the Neubergers moved to Würzburg with its sizeable Jewish community so that the three children could prosper and learn. When Hermann was only 13, a few weeks after his bar mitzvah, his father died. While in Würzburg the young teenager met Rabbi Samson Rafael Weiss, an affluent Torah scholar who became his mentor. Rabbi Weiss convinced him that the best place for him to be was one of the larger yeshivas, so he traveled to Poland to learn in the Mir Yeshiva.
In 1938 tensions were starting to brew in Eastern Europe and Anti-Semitism was beginning to rear its ugly head. Rabbi Neuberger had a relative in New York who was able to send him immigration papers to come to America. Not wanting to leave others behind, he arranged for papers for some of his close relatives too. As good fate would have it, Mrs. Bertha Neuberger and her two other children had already escaped. He also helped Rabbi Dovid Kronglass, who would later become the Mashgiach of Ner Israel, escape.
Read more about this topic: Herman N. Neuberger
Famous quotes containing the words younger and/or years:
““Let me not live,” quoth he,
“After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff
Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses
All but new things disdain.””
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)