Third Bobover Rebbe

Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam (1908–2000) was the third Rebbe of the Bobov Hasidic dynasty, whose roots lay in the Galician town of Bobowa in southern Poland. The eldest son of Ben Zion Halberstam, the second Bobover Rebbe, who was killed by the Nazis in 1941, he took up leadership after the Holocaust had devastated the dynasty's Polish heartland. Fleeing occupied Poland during the war, he made his way through Bochnia, Budapest, and Bucharest, and afterward reached the United States. Beginning modestly with a small yeshiva of sixteen boys in Manhattan, he gradually rebuilt Bobov's network of institutions, eventually anchoring the court in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn and extending it to Israel and London. His teachings were later gathered in the volumes Kerem Shlomo and Divrei Shlomo. He died in 2000 and was succeeded by his son, Naftali Halberstam.