Kaliver Rebbe Sings Sol O Kokosh Mar At Danube River

More then 200 rabbis on Monday March 24th 2014 commemorated the 70th anniversary of the extermination of Hungarian Jewry by the Nazis, during a memorial in Budapest.

The commemoration was organized in the framework of the two-day annual conference of the Rabbinical Center of Europe, (RCE), an organization dedicated to assist rabbis across the continent. The conference brought more then 200 rabbis from across Europe and Israel in the Hungarian capital in order to discuss issues relating to assimilation and communal attrition. The Rabbis marched several blocks along the banks of the Danube River to the Shoes on the Danube Promenade, a Holocaust memorial site. The memorial is the site of a massacre by Hungarian fascists who lined Jews up along the river, made them remove their shoes and shot them, allowing their bodies to land in the Danube.

According to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, some 568,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

Holocaust survivor Chief Rabbi Menachem Mendel Taub, the ‘’Kaliver Rebbe’’ were also in attendance. The Kaliver Rebbe, who was born in Transylvania, returned on Monday to the country that expelled him and his family to Auschwitz, which he left alone at the end of the war after serious torture.    "The SS took us from the bunker, 20 people," he said. "They didn't bring us any food or drink for two days. We had a small pocket with breadcrumbs, and each of us took our the crumbs and put them on the floor, so that if someone was already starving to death, they would still have something to live on."

Rebbe Isaac Taub of Kalov, zy"a, (1751-1821) overheard this Hungarian song being sung by a gentile shepherd boy. He recognized the tune to be from the ancient Holy Temple in Jerusalem. He "bought" the song from the boy, and the boy immediately forgot the song once the Rebbe learned it. He added the words in Hebrew about Temple, recognizing the story of the bird to actually be a parable of the exile of the Jewish people, and the importance of waiting for God to take us home, and not to take matters into our own hands.

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