My Roots and My Zionism

The first Grussgott was Reb Gedaliah of Kaliv, Hungary, in the 18th century. Gedaliah lived at the time that the secular authorities were assigning last names to Jews. It seems that he was assigned the surname Weiss, but that he chose instead to go by Grussgott, meaning “God’s greetings” in German. This is still how people greet each other every day in Austria and Bavaria. The Spinka Rebbes, direct male descendants of Gedaliah, still go by Weiss, as only one grandson of Gedaliah ended up sticking with the name Grussgott. Gedaliah G. was the first of multiple generations of prominent town Chief-Shochtim (ritual slaughterers) who served as close confidantes to multiple Hasidic Rebbes, in whose courts they served. Gedaliah G. was named for his own direct paternal ancestor Rabbi Gedaliah Buda, who was the chief rabbi of Buda, the capital city of Hungary in the 17th Century. The city of Buda would later join with neighboring Pest to become the Budapest that we know today.

Gedaliah G’s son Shmuel Zvi was Shochet of Kaliv; SZ’s son Shraga Feivel was Shochet of Stratyn; SF’s son Avraham Eliezer was Shochet of Chinidiev, a suburb of Munkatch, and was the personal, traveling Shochet of the Munkatcher Rebbe (more on that below); AE’s son Shmuel Yehuda was a Melamed (religious school teacher), and the General Secretary (Executive Director) of the Jewish community of Bardejov, Slovakia. His son, my Zaidie, Avraham Laizer, was a Shamas (Ritual Director) and Executive Director of various synagogues in New York.

In my days at Yeshiva University, I attended R. Herschel Schachter’s weekly parsha classes each Thursday for a number of years. He would often opine on the following concept, which I also found him relaying in print in the YU magazine Kol HaMevaser from July 2010:

“Oftentimes, people will say, ‘My father belonged to the Agudah, so I belong to the Agudah; my father belonged to the Mizrachi, so I belong to the Mizrachi,’ without taking into consideration that today everything is totally different: that was before Hakkamas ha-Medinah (the establishment of the State) and before Milchemet Sheshet ha-Yamim (the Six Day War)! The Agudah today is not necessarily the same as the Agudah of 50 years ago. Everything is changing in the world. Halachah does not change but its application does”.

Rav Schachter taught us that sticking with the “tradition of your ancestors” can be a lazy cop-out. Times change, and maybe if your ancestor lived today, he would change his mind. The point is that you just don’t know. Indeed, R. Schachter’s own mentor R. Yosef Soloveitchik famously broke from his own illustrious family’s tradition when he switched from the (non-Zionist) Agudah to the (Religious Zionist) Mizrachi movement after the Holocaust, a switch that many others made as well, including my own Zaidie. It’s with that idea in mind that I write here my thoughts about my family’s history and my own Religious Zionism.

Eretz Yisrael and my Family

The first page of the Jerusalem Talmud records the following: Talmud Yerushalmi Berachot 1:1 –

“Rabbi Ḥiyya and Rabbi Shimon Ben Chalafta were........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)