JERUSALEM — The car crawled slowly through the streets of Har Nof, a loudspeaker on its roof, broadcasting psalms and announcing the funeral at 2 p.m. of Rabbi Moshe Twersky, one of four Jewish men killed at prayer on Tuesday morning when two Palestinians armed with a gun and butcher knives stormed a neighborhood synagogue complex.
The death toll rose to five late Tuesday when a traffic police officer, Zidan Saif, 30, from a Druse village in northern Israel, died at a hospital after being wounded in a shootout with the assailants on the steps of the synagogue. The officer was married and the father of a 4-month-old son.
Rabbi Twersky, 59, a native of Boston, was the most prominent of the victims, as the head of the Toras Moshe yeshiva in Jerusalem, which caters to English-speaking Torah students, and the scion of a celebrated Hasidic dynasty.
He and the other three worshipers killed in the attack — Rabbi Kalman Zeev Levine, 55, and Aryeh Kupinsky, 43, who were both dual Israeli-United States citizens, and Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, 68, who came to Israel from England — all lived on Rabbi Shimon Agassi Street, the site of the neighborhood synagogue, Kehilat Bnei Torah.
A quiet, residential road lined with modest apartment buildings in beige Jerusalem stone, this part of Har Nof spills down a steep hillside, its streets linked by steps and the slopes dotted with playgrounds. Ashkenazic Jews with European roots live alongside Sephardic Jews of North African descent, and the neighborhood is also popular with more recent Orthodox immigrants from English-speaking countries.
Residents described a street filled with people who run neighborhood charities that lend or distribute clothing, money and even vegetables. But several residents also expressed fears and frustrations that Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem could also work and move freely in the neighborhood. “They walk around here like kings,” one woman complained.
In a day of funerals Tuesday, the first was for Rabbi Twersky, who is survived by his wife, Bashi Miriam, five children and 10 grandchildren. He was the grandson of a Hasidic grand rabbi, Meshullam Twersky, the Talner rebbe of Boston, who was already well settled in the United States by the end of World War II, when most European Hasidim immigrated to the United States.
His father was Isadore Twersky, who, in an education unusual for a Hasidic son, attended the secular Boston Latin School and became a Harvard professor of Hebrew literature and the founding director of the New Harvard Center for Jewish Studies.
Isadore married Atarah Soloveitchik, the daughter of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, considered by many the greatest rabbinical scholar of the late 20th century and a longtime teacher at Yeshiva University.
“He wore three crowns,” Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at City University of New York and an expert on the Orthodox and Hasidic worlds, said of Isadore Twersky. “He was a distinguished professor at Harvard. He was the Talner rebbe. And he married the daughter of Rabbi Soloveitchik.”
Moshe Twersky’s brother-in-law is Jonathan Rosenblatt, the rabbi of the Riverdale Jewish Center, a modern Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx, and a great-grandson of Yossele Rosenblatt, regarded as the greatest cantor of the 20th century.
Moshe was also a distant cousin of Rabbi David Twersky, the leader of the best known of the sects headed by the Twerskys — the Skverer Hasidim who have settled in their own village, New Square, in Rockland County, N.Y., a rural shtetl of 10,000 Hasidim. There are more than a dozen Twerskys who head Hasidic branches today, in New York State, Milwaukee, Israel and London.
The Twersky family’s roots go back almost to the founding of Hasidism in the 18th century by the Baal Shem Tov, translated as “master of the good name,” according to Yitzchak Twersky, a distant cousin of Moshe’s who has written three books on his family. Wandering across Eastern Europe, the Baal Shem Tov upended the Jewish world by preaching that an untutored peasant could be as worthy a practicing Jew as a scholar if his prayers were sincere and ardent.
The original Twersky, Menachem, for a time a student of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, settled in Chernobyl, Ukraine. His son, Mordechai, established a rabbinical court, and his eight grandsons radiated to other Ukrainian towns, said Yitzchak Twersky. These dynasties lasted for a century and exerted a dominant influence on Ukrainian and Russian Jewry.
But with the pogroms of the late 19th century and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the sects scattered to Poland, the United States and Palestine, first under Ottoman control and later governed by Britain.
Unlike other Hasidic dynasties — such as Satmar, where two brothers in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and Kiryas Joel, N.Y., claim the rabbinical throne — all the Twersky rabbis accept one another’s leadership.
“In the Twersky family, everyone gets along,” Yitzchak Twersky said. “All the descendants of Chernobyl get together at weddings or they make a tish together,” he continued, referring to a rabbi’s Sabbath table with followers. “This is very rare in the Hasidic world.”
Rabbi Twersky immigrated to Israel in 1990 and prayed in the neighborhood synagogue regularly. His funeral departed from the yeshiva he ran, and he was buried in Har Hamenuhot, the Mount of Rest, the main cemetery not far from Har Nof, on the western edge of Jerusalem.
An hour later, thousands of men and boys thronged the street in front of the synagogue for the joint funeral of the three other Jewish victims.
Rabbi Levine was born Cary William Levine in Kansas City, Mo., the son of a lawyer, and he became ultra-Orthodox after moving to Israel soon after he married. He is survived by his wife, nine children and five grandchildren, according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
“My father would study all day long and would return home at night only to learn some more until he would fall asleep in his chair,” his son, Rabbi Yerachmiel Levine, said in a eulogy.
Aryeh Kupinsky is survived by his wife and five children, ages 5 to 16. About two years ago, a daughter, Chaya Chana, died in her sleep at the age of 13.
Mr. Kupinsky was born in Rhode Island and moved with his parents and siblings to Detroit before they immigrated to Israel in 1982, when Mr. Kupinsky was 11. Though he was not an ordained rabbi, Mr. Kupinsky taught religious studies and served in the rabbinate of the Israeli military, in a unit that identified casualties, said a brother, Rabbi David Yaakov Kupinsky.
Avi Nefoussi, 28, a volunteer medic whose parents live next door to the Kupinsky family, said he entered the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue after the attack on Tuesday and found Mr. Kupinsky lying dead on the floor. “I looked at him and thought, ‘Why you?’ ” Mr. Nefoussi said. “Is this how it is supposed to end?”
Rabbi Goldberg was born in Liverpool, England, and worked in publishing in London before moving to Israel in 1993. He is survived by his wife, six children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Rabbi Yitzhak Mordechai Rubin, the rabbi of Kehilat Bnei Torah, where the attack took place, eulogized the three victims in front of the synagogue before their bodies were taken for burial as dusk fell.
“We are here, standing before three sacred men,” he said, “the best of our congregation, wise scholars whose blood was spilled like water. As we count the number of widows and orphans who have been added today to the nation of Israel we tally four widows and 24 orphans all on one street.”
