Rabbi Krauss, he mentioned, was an individual of candy and humble character and never a fighter by nature, however “he was not afraid to face alone.”
Rabbi Weiss recalled that within the mid-Nineties, when girls from his Hillcrest, Queens, congregation started holding separate prayer companies with Torah readings for bat mitzvahs, the native Orthodox rabbinical affiliation, the Vaad Harabonim of Queens, issued a decision barring such companies. Rabbi Krauss was one in all solely two dissenters and got here beneath vitriolic criticism by his colleagues.
“You’ll be able to harm me, you may insult me, however on the finish of the day this isn’t about me,” he advised reporters on the time. “We’re standing up for these girls, and if we win, the entire neighborhood wins, and if we lose, extra is misplaced than we will ever know.”
A descendant of a line of rabbis going again greater than 10 generations, Simcha Krauss was born on June 29, 1937, in Czernowitz, in what’s now Ukraine, and grew up within the Romanian metropolis of Sibiu. His father, Abraham Krauss, was town’s chief rabbi; his mom, Pearl Ginzberg was a conventional rebbetzin and homemaker.
The household survived the Holocaust, however with Communists taking up Romania, the household fled to america in 1948. The elder Rabbi Krauss was appointed chief of a congregation in Higher Manhattan, close to the George Washington Bridge.
Simcha studied at Yeshiva Chasam Sofer in Brooklyn after which, after highschool, at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin, which ordained him and the place he studied with Rabbi Hutner. He additionally obtained a bachelor’s diploma in political science from Metropolis School of New York and a grasp’s in that topic from the New College in Manhattan.
His first pulpits had been in Utica, N.Y., and St. Louis, and he concurrently taught political science at native schools. These positions had been adopted by his appointment as chief of Younger Israel of Hillcrest, his Queens congregation, the place he remained for 25 years. He taught courses at Yeshiva College and was lively within the Non secular Zionists of America, serving as its president for a time. His spouse, Esther (Wiederman) Krauss turned the founding principal of Ma’ayanot Yeshiva Excessive College for Ladies in Teaneck, N.J., the place its college students may examine Talmud, whose labyrinthine authorized arguments had historically been reserved for boys and males.
Supply: NY Times