JERUSALEM — Rabbi Moshe Greenberg, a religious educator who survived a brutal Gulag in Siberia and secretly taught Judaism under an oppressive Soviet regime, has died in Israel. He was 84.
The Hasidic Chabad Lubavitch movement in which Greenberg was a member said he died on Tuesday.
Greenberg was born to a Hassidic family in Moldavia at a time when Jews were oppressed and Jewish practices were forbidden by the Soviets, Chabad said on Thursday.
At the age of 14 he went to Tashkent in Uzbekistan to study Judaism at a secret Chabad seminary. While there, he became part of the "Chabad underground," a network that worked to maintain and teach Jewish traditions, which the Soviet's had outlawed, said Menahem Brod, spokesman of Chabad in Israel.
The Soviets banned the practice of Jewish rituals and the teaching of Judaism and those caught doing so were severely punished, Brod said.
Greenberg was caught trying to escape the Soviet Union at the end of World War II and was banished to a Siberian forced labor camp for seven years.
Chabad says he kept and taught Jewish traditions in the Gulag, the infamous Soviet prison system, despite the danger.
Even with the scarce food rations and hard labor, Greenberg adhered to strict Jewish dietary laws while incarcerated, Chabad said.
