BDE: Rav Abba Bronspiegel, zt”l

By YS Gold 

We regret to inform you of the petirah of Haga'on Rav Abba Bronspiegel, a longtime rov in the Boro Park community. He was in his eighties. 

Rav Bronspiegel was born in Demblin, Poland, a city near the great city of Lublin. He was born on the eve of the war, in the summer of 1939. His father was Reb Leib, an ardent Gerer chossid, and his mother was Chanah. His parents owned a textile company, where they worked together and were active in communal life in Demblin. 

Then the war came, and the family went into the ghetto, where Reb Leib was active in helping others. Through incredible miracles, he and his parents survived, along with two brothers. The rest of the family was brutally murdered. 

"I was saved by one day," Rav Bronspiegel recalled. "Had the Germans sent us on an earlier transport, I would have been killed in the extermination camps."

Arriving in America, he married the daughter of the famed Rabbi Elie Munk. 

He learned in Yeshiva Rabbeinu Yitzchok Elchonon, and became a talmid muvhak of Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. It was here that he made up for his years of being deprived of a Torah education. He amassed great sharpness in learning and eventually became a Rosh Yeshiva at RIETS in his own right. 

He was the founder and Rosh Yeshiva of Lander College for Men and delivered shiurim with tremendous amkus. As noted, he was a longtime rov of a shul in Boro Park, located at 19th Avenue and 47th Street. 

He subsequently moved to New Hempstead around twenty years ago, where he built and founded the shul Zichron Yehuda V'Chana on Kakiat Lane. 

In recent years, he moved to Lakewood and had been unwell for a number of years. He raised beautiful generations of bnei Torah and talmdei chachomim. 

The Levaya took place this morning in Lakewood. 

The family will be sitting Shivah at 1012 Lexington in Lakewood.

Yehi zichro baruch.