The Portugal (Skulen) Family

The surname Portugal is intriguing. Borne by a family deeply rooted in Moldavian Hasidism of Yiddish speech, it evokes by its very letters the Iberian peninsula. The Sephardic genealogical tradition, as documented by landmark scholarly works, recalls that the expulsion of 1492 and forced conversions scattered Iberian Jews across the entire Mediterranean rim and into Central and Eastern Europe, where certain names of origin — Portugal, Castro, Navarro — survived as onomastic fossils within communities that had become Ashkenazi. It must be said plainly, however: no continuous documentary chain links, to our knowledge, the family of the Skulener Rebbe to an attested Sephardic lineage. The hypothesis of Iberian ancestry remains here an editorial conjecture, plausible in light of the diffusion of such surnames but not established by the records.

What is more firmly assured is the family's Bessarabian and Moldavian anchorage, and the precise spiritual chain that dynastic tradition has preserved. The spiritual grandfather of the Skulen lineage inscribes himself in the direct descent of the rebbe Yeshayah Shor of Iași, author of the Kelil Tiferes, himself a disciple of the rebbe Mardochée of Kremnitz, descended from the Maguid of Zlotchov — so many links in the great Hasidic chain issuing from the Baal Shem Tov. The father of Eliezer Zusia, rabbi Yisrael Avraham Portugal (died in 1915), rabbi of the community of Sculeni, bore the honorary title of author of the Shem uSh'aris Yisrael and was the disciple of the Kelil Tiferes. Thus the Portugal lineage roots itself not only in Bessarabian geography but in an intellectual and spiritual filiation carefully transmitted from master to disciple — what the dynastic nomenclature of Hasidism calls the shalsheleth, the chain.

The name of the lineage refers to Sculeni / Skulen, a locality on the Prut, in a region where Judaism had long endured a regime of exception. Carol Iancu has shown how the legal condition of Romanian Jews was, until the aftermath of the First World War, marked by denial of citizenship and state-sanctioned antisemitism inscribed in law. It is in this precarious world — that of Moldavian shtetlach, Hasidic courts, and the markets of the Prut — that the Portugal lineage took form.

Eliezer Zusia Portugal was born on October 17, 1898 in Sculeni, in Bessarabia, the only son of rabbi Yisrael Avraham Portugal. His father, already quite advanced in age at his birth, nevertheless transmitted to him the essentials of his Torah and wisdom before passing away: Eliezer Zusia was scarcely seventeen years old when his father died in 1915, leaving him the sole heir to a considerable rabbinical responsibility. It was at this age, without intermediary, that he assumed his father's succession as rabbi of Sculeni, bearing the pastoral charge of an entire community while still an adolescent.

This precocity is significant. It is not merely a matter of biological transmission — the son succeeds his father, as is frequent in Hasidic dynasties. It presumes an intense formation, received directly from an erudite father, in a household where Torah was the daily bread. The accounts transmitted by the faithful describe a child and then a young man steeped in piety, trained through attendance upon the great masters of Moldavia and Bukovina. His formation would have connected him in particular to the influence of the dynasties of Bohush and Sadigura — branches of the great house of Rouzhyn (Ruzhin), whose aura shone across all of Bukovina and Bessarabia. He was notably an ardent disciple of the rebbe Avraham Matisyahu of Shtefanesht (Ștefănești), a figure of the Rouzhyn branch from whom he received deeply the imprint of spiritual influence, and who would also be the master of his future friend the Ribnitzer Rebbe, Rav Chaïm Zanvil Abramowitz. This mystical companionship between the two men, bound in common devotion to the Shtefaneshter Rebbe, would weave between Skulen and Ribnitz an affective bond that would last their entire lives.

For about twenty years, Eliezer Zusia Portugal served as rabbi of Sculeni, working to elevate the spiritual level of his flock. The activity that characterized this first period of his ministry was of a nature that speaks much to his conception of the rabbinical function: he wrote pamphlets in Yiddish, specially composed for the spiritual needs of his least learned parishioners, so that Torah would not remain the privilege of the learned. This care for the humblest, this refusal of the elitism of knowledge — here is a first expression of the value of loving-kindness, chesed, which would traverse his entire existence.

When the rebbe of Sadigura, Mordechai Shalôm Yosef Friedman, visited Sculeni and observed the accomplishments of the young rabbi, he warmly invited him to join the great city of Chernivtsi (Czernowitz), the cultural capital of Bukovina, in order to serve a larger community then ravaged by assimilation. Czernowitz at that time had some 21,500 Jews in a total population of approximately 68,400 inhabitants: a cosmopolitan metropolis, a crossroads of languages and cultures, where religious fidelity was threatened from all sides. Portugal accepted, and was soon chosen as chief rabbi of the city, alongside the neighboring courts of Sadigura, Vizhnitz, and Boyan, to attempt to preserve what could still be preserved. This move would soon prove, it is said, the wisdom of the one who had advised it: shortly after the Rebbe's departure, Bessarabia was invaded by the Soviets, under whose yoke the Jews suffered terribly.

The young man distinguished himself, according to accounts and transmitted memory, by two gifts that would mark his entire life: liturgical composition — he was a prolific author of piyyutim and Hasidic melodies (niggunim), whose collections would be gathered later in his works — and an intensity of prayer reputed to be extraordinary, his services extending for hours on end. These two charisms are inseparable in Hasidism: melody is not an ornament of prayer, it is, according to the mysticism of the Baal Shem Tov, its very soul. In this, Eliezer Zusia Portugal fully inscribed himself in the Rouzhyn tradition, where the formal beauty of song and the conduct of the court were held to be vehicles of sanctification.

These biographical elements are for the most part drawn from Memory transmitted by the court and by Hasidic hagiographic literature. The historian gathers them as living tradition, while noting that they are only imperfectly corroborated by independent archives, which for this region and period were often destroyed or dispersed by war.

The decisive test came with the Second World War. Romania under Marshal Antonescu, allied with Nazi Germany, conducted against its own Jews a policy of extermination whose modalities are today well documented. Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the Jews of Europe, and Saul Friedländer, in The Years of Extermination, have established the scale of the disaster: pogroms in Iași, mass deportations of Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, where hunger, typhus, and massacres claimed tens of thousands of lives. Friedländer emphasizes Romania's singular and long underestimated place in the geography of destruction.

Czernowitz, for its part, experienced a particularly turbulent history: annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it was occupied by German and Romanian forces during the war, before being liberated by the Red Army in April 1944. It was in this landscape ceaselessly reshaped by the violence of powers that the Skulener Rebbe had to maintain his pastoral presence. According to the memory of the court, he began, from the first deportations onward, to gather orphaned children — these little ones whose parents had perished on the marches or in the camps, and whom no one claimed anymore.

It is important to underscore here what this act had of the unprecedented in its context. Sheltering wandering Jewish children under a regime of occupation, at the very moment when the authorities were methodically organizing their destruction, amounted to taking an absolute existential risk. For the Rebbe, rescue was not an extraordinary decision dictated by circumstances: it was the logical consequence of a life entirely devoted to kindness and care for the other. The value of chesed — grace, kindness, active generosity toward others — which Hasidism holds to be one of the pillars of the world, found in these obscure acts its most radical expression.

The general historical framework is here solidly established by research; the detail of the Rebbe's individual acts, by contrast, reaches us chiefly through testimony and tradition, and belongs to the register of Memory. Even before the war's end, Eliezer Zusia had begun to shape what would become, in the postwar years, his masterwork.

After the War: The Skulener Rebbe and the Children

In the aftermath of the war, Romania had thousands of orphaned Jewish children, wandering and sometimes taken in by State institutions that threatened to strip them of any Jewish identity. The Skulener Rebbe then undertook the work that remains the heart of his memory: to gather, feed, educate and protect these children, by founding the charitable organization Chesed L'Avraham ("the kindness of Abraham"). According to the tradition of the court and the accounts reported by his followers, he is said to have personally cared for some three hundred children, whom he adopted as his own sons, and who called him "Tatteh" — father in Yiddish. Hundreds of others gravitated within the orbit of his institutions.

The logistics of this work were themselves an act of audacity: when he was able to leave Czernowitz for Bucharest, Eliezer Zusia smuggled his "children" clandestinely to the Romanian capital, then opened an orphanage and multiplied institutions of Jewish education. He did not merely feed and shelter these children: he restored to them a name, a belonging, a transmission. His spiritual testament, passed down by the community, asked that his adopted children show him their gratitude by remaining faithful to Judaism and studying the Torah at every possible moment — a wish that says, better than any discourse, his conception of care for the other: not passive charity, but living transmission.

This activity put him in danger under the communist regime. As early as 1949, the Rebbe was arrested several times by Romanian authorities, but his releases were each time obtained without too much difficulty. The situation hardened radically in February 1959, when the regime accused him and his son Yisrael Avraham Portugal of espionage on behalf of Israel and the United States — an indictment of high treason, punishable by the heaviest sentences. The memory of the court holds that it was precisely during these months of captivity that the Rebbe composed some of his most famous niggunim: the man who, imprisoned, found in melody not a flight from reality but an attestation of faith. His prison songs thus carry, in the Hassidic tradition of Skulen, a double significance: witnesses to the ordeal, they are also witnesses to the victory of the soul over constraint.

Liberation came from a mobilization of remarkable scope. Harry Goodman, vice-president of Agudat Israël, Rabbi Eliezer Silver, president of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States, and the rebbe of Lubavitch, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson, united their efforts. Rabbi Silver traveled several times to Washington to intercede, without success. But after a personal appeal from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he consented to make one final journey to the American capital — and liberation was obtained. Father and son left Romania in the summer of 1959, passed through Belgium, and arrived in America in 1960. The bond woven between Skulen and Lubavitch in this ordeal did not unravel: in Brooklyn, when the Skulener Rebbe had not yet found a minyan among his own followers, it was Lubavitch students who came to pray with him each morning.

Here the historian stands at an intersection: the thread — communist repression of Jewish works, imprisonments, negotiated emigration — is coherent with what is known of the Romanian post-war context; the broad outlines of the liberation (the personalities involved, the role of the American State Department) are sufficiently confirmed by independent sources to move beyond the sole register of tradition. We report them with this nuance, awaiting systematic archival corroboration for the detail of the facts.

The figure of the Skulener Rebbe would be incomplete if we did not do justice to his dimension as an author and thinker. For Eliezer Zusia Portugal was not merely a charismatic rebbe, a rescuer of orphans, and a master of prayer: he was also a man of letters, whose texts constitute two monuments of Hasidic thought in the twentieth century.

The first work, Noam Eliezer — The Sweetness of Eliezer — lends its title to the entirety of his oeuvre as the lineage transmitted it and as it is now accessible as a documentary source. The title itself is a declaration: noam, sweetness, delicacy, grace — a word that appears in the Psalms to describe the beauty of the Divine Dwelling ("the sweetness of the Eternal"). That a Hasidic master should choose this word as his title says something about his relationship to the Torah: not law as constraint, but Torah as a source of sweetness and light. The composition of this collection extends across the whole of his career and gathers his hidushim — the commentaries and doctrinal renewals that the Rebbe formulated on the texts of the Pentateuch, the festivals, and Hasidic thought. Tradition holds that in the court of Skulen, the transmission of these teachings passed equally through orality — the tish, the Sabbath table, the Hasidic discourse — and through the written word.

The second work, Kedushat Eliezer — The Holiness of Eliezer — forms the theological counterpart to the first. The title itself, kedushah, holiness, refers to one of the central concepts of Judaism: the quality of what is set apart, consecrated, torn from the profane to be offered to the divine. In the Hasidic tradition, kedushah is not merely an attribute of the Temple or of priests — it is the vocation of every Jew, at every moment of his ordinary life. Kedushat Eliezer develops this teaching by drawing especially on the festivals of the Jewish calendar: an edition devoted to Hanukkah and the Igrot Kodesh (the Rebbe's holy letters) is today available, bearing witness to how the master of Skulen articulated the annual liturgical cycle and the spiritual life of his community. The work also includes an account of a pilgrimage to the kivrot tzaddikim (tombs of the righteous) associated with the Skulen lineage, undertaken in 2009 by the Skulener Rebbe of the next generation — which illustrates the living continuity between the written work of the founder and the memorial practice of his successors.

These two works belong to the great tradition of talmudic and homiletic learning in Ashkenazi Hasidism. They are not treatises of jurisprudence in the strict sense (halakha), but spiritual commentaries, reflections on the inner meaning of the commandments and festivals — what Hasidism calls derush, edifying interpretation. In this, the Rebbe of Skulen stood in continuity with his masters of the Rouzhyn branch, for whom teaching must touch the soul before it regulates conduct. The value of limud Torah — the study of Torah as an end in itself, as an act of devotion and perpetual renewal — finds here its clearest expression.

It should be noted that these works were not composed in the serenity of a library. Noam Eliezer and Kedushat Eliezer emerge from a life traversed by persecution, exile, and reconstruction. Some of the teachings that compose them were formulated in the most precarious circumstances — and according to the tradition of the court, it was also during months of imprisonment that some of the most striking niggunim that accompany this teaching were composed. The written work and the melodic work answer one another, together forming the testimony of a faith that was not worn away by history.

Finally, the pamphlets in Yiddish written by the Rebbe during his years in Sculeni — these texts adapted to the spiritual needs of the least learned parishioners — extend the same preoccupation: to make Torah accessible to all, from the most erudite to the most simple. This pedagogical concern, far from being secondary, speaks to the humility of a master who writes not for scholarly posterity but for his immediate neighbor.

In the early 1960s, the Skulener Rebbe succeeded in leaving Romania. After a stay in Belgium and emigration to the United States in 1960, he first settled in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the direct orbit of the major Hasidic establishments of New York and in immediate proximity to the headquarters of the Chabad movement — a logical continuation of the relationship forged at the time of his liberation. When asked about his choice of America rather than Israel, the Rebbe once said that he chose to remain close to his "children" scattered throughout the diaspora, an answer that sums up in a single sentence his entire conception of pastoral responsibility.

When the faithful invited him to open a yeshiva, he would respond: "What would my yeshiva add to all those that already exist? Whoever wishes to fulfill a mitsva must ask himself how to bring the greatest pleasure to God." This maxim is revealing. It speaks to the refusal of a prestigious institution, and the deliberate choice of a more discreet, more directly useful work: to the theoretical yeshiva, the Rebbe preferred the network of schools Chesed L'Avraham, which he deployed not only in Brooklyn but also in Israel, where his institutions entered into direct competition with networks of secular education for the children of new immigrants.

In 1961, on his first trip to Israel, the Rebbe was overwhelmed by hundreds of his Romanian "children," now young adults, who rushed to meet him. But he observed with pain that many of them had yielded to secular pressures and abandoned religious practice. This realization affected him deeply: in 1962, he made the decision to make Jewish education in Israel the "crown" of his work, launching the Chesed L'Avraham network in the Holy Land. Involvement in collective life — arevut, the mutual solidarity that Judaism posits as the foundation of the people — took on a concrete and militant form.

The transfer of Hasidic Judaism from Eastern Europe to Brooklyn, after the Shoah, is a well-attested historical phenomenon: it was on these streets that entire courts were reconstituted, from a few survivors, courts that war had nearly annihilated. The Skulen dynasty was part of this movement of resurrection of Hasidic movements on American soil. It was also in Brooklyn that a significant episode of the Skulener Rebbe's relationship with the powerful unfolded: about ten years after his arrival in the United States, he traveled to Washington to meet Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson in order to plead the cause of Jews imprisoned in the USSR. This initiative contributed to the context of what would become the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, one of the great victories of American Jewish diplomacy in favor of the rights of Soviet Jews. The man who, in the 1940s and 1950s, had worked to save children from the grip of the Romanian communist regime continued, in the 1970s, the same struggle for his brothers imprisoned on the other side of the Iron Curtain — a remarkable consistency between local action and commitment to the universal cause of the Jewish people.

Despite the gradual departure of the Jewish community from Crown Heights as insecurity mounted in the 1970s, the Skulener Rebbe, out of deference to the Lubavitcher Rebbe who encouraged Jews to remain in the neighborhood, stayed there until his final years. This gesture — remaining when everyone leaves, out of loyalty to a promise made to a friend — is itself a fact, and not a metaphor.

In 1974, during a private audience with rebbe Schneerson, the latter declared that the Skulener Rebbe had the power to inaugurate the final redemption. The Rebbe resisted this idea with modesty — to which Schneerson replied that he was displaying misplaced anava (humility). This anecdote, transmitted by the Chabad community, says something about the regard in which the great Hasidic masters held Eliezer Zusia Portugal: not only a man of goodness, but a figure of holiness that transcended the boundaries of his own court. It also speaks to the value of individual humility as a constitutive character of the Rebbe — humility that was not passivity, since it coexisted with the audacity of saving orphans under dictatorships.

The Rebbe continued his liturgical and charitable work until his death, which occurred on August 18, 1982 (29 Av 5742). He was succeeded by his son, Yisrael Avraham Portugal (1923–2019), who had studied in his youth at Vizhnitz under rebbe Eliezer Hager, and who led the Skulen court for nearly four decades, from Borough Park. He was the last rebbe of the Shoah era to lead a Hasidic dynasty. Renowned for having composed thousands of niggunim — sometimes carrying a tape recorder to capture the melodies that came to him — he perpetuated Chesed L'Avraham and left his mark on the entire next generation. He died on April 1st, 2019, at the age of 95, leaving behind eight children, several of whom are rabbis at the head of courts located in several American cities: Borough Park, Williamsburg, Monsey, Lakewood — so many hearths of the same light multiplied.

The surname Portugal and the mediating role exercised by the Rebbe — interceding with those in power, negotiating the release of children, mobilizing international networks — invite a longer historical perspective, which this book proposes as a reading hypothesis and not as an established lineage. European Jewish history knew, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the figure of the Court Jew (Hofjude), financial and diplomatic intermediary to princes, whose classical portrait was drawn by Selma Stern and whose most tragic fate was reexamined by Yair Mintzker through the trial of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer.

The Skulener Rebbe obviously does not belong to this world of baroque absolutism: he is separated from it by two centuries and by the entire distance between a prince's financier and a Hasidic master who saved orphans. And yet, collective Jewish memory has often brought together these figures of intercession — those who, at the margins of communities, speak to the powerful to save their own. The great tradition of persecution historiography, from Léon Poliakov to Hilberg, reminds us that the position of intermediary was always ambivalent: both a resource for salvation and exposure to danger. The Rebbe's detention under the communist regime illustrates, all things considered, this ambivalence: he who intercedes exposes himself.

The dimension of relationship to the stranger merits pause here. The episode of the visit to the secular kibbutz in 1961 is, in the Rebbe's biography, of considerable symbolic weight. To go personally to forgive a former Romanian political adversary — a socialist who had been one of his fiercest opponents — is to refuse to let political or ideological categories determine how one regards the other. Tradition reports that this man's descendants later became observant Jews: this may be hagiographic projection, but the act itself — the journey, the gesture, the forgiveness — is attested, and it says something of tolerance as a lived value, not a proclaimed one.

Similarly, when the Rebbe welcomed into his institutions children whose parents had been, for some, Jews who were little or not observant, without ever holding it against them, he was practicing what Hasidism calls ahavat Yisrael — love of every Jew as such, without condition of merit. This value, central to the thought of the Baal Shem Tov, ran through the entire Portugal lineage like a red thread.

Finally, the question of dynastic transmission merits a few words. The succession of Skulen, following the death of Yisrael Avraham Portugal in 2019, gave rise to several short parallels: the sons of the second Rebbe each exercise in a different city — Borough Park, Williamsburg, Monsey, Lakewood — multiplying the centers of the same tradition. This multiplication is the form that, in twenty-first-century America, the vitality of a lineage takes: not centralization around a single throne, but the diffusion of the same teaching in multiple places. The third generation — rabbi Yeshaya Yaakov Portugal, the eldest, who passed away in September 2024 — already saw the torch passed to his brothers, perpetuating the chain.

We offer this parallel of intercession as a meditative conjecture, a bridge cast between the memory of the name Portugal and the long history of Jewish mediators — not as a genealogical assertion.

The lineage Portugal (Skulen) offers, in a single trajectory, a condensed version of Jewish destiny in the twentieth century: roots in the Hasidic world of Bessarabia and Bukovina; engulfment in the Romanian catastrophe of the Shoah, whose scale Hilberg and Friedländer established; heroic rescue of surviving children; ordeal of imprisonment under communism; refoundation and resurrection on American soil. The figure of Eliezer Zusia Portugal, the Skulener Rebbe, condenses this tragic and luminous arc: master of prayer and song, author of Noam Eliezer and Kedushat Eliezer , rescuer of orphans, man who chose prison rather than abandonment, and who, once freed, went to forgive his enemies.

Among all the virtues that Judaism has carried through the centuries, the Portugal lineage best expressed that of chesed — active kindness, generous grace toward others, which tradition sometimes calls chesed shel emet when it seeks no reciprocity. This chesed was not among the Portugals an ideal proclaimed in treatises: it was a daily practice, a logistics of care, a network of orphanages and schools, entire days spent interceding for unknown men and women, and ultimately a will asking his adoptive children to remain faithful to the Torah. The value took the name of the institution: Chesed L'Avraham, the kindness of Abraham — a reference to the ancestor who, according to the Bible, ran toward strangers to welcome them into his tent.

This chesed embodied itself in what the lineage also remarkably cultivated: engagement in collective life. Saving orphans under occupation, opening schools for immigrants in Israel, pleading in Washington for Soviet Jews, forgiving an ideological adversary — all acts that do not withdraw into private piety but engage with the world as it is, with its powers and injustices. In this, the Portugal lineage participates in that long Jewish memory of individuals who refused to let catastrophe have the last word — memory that Hasidism itself, born in the distress of Eastern European Jewry, carried in the form of joy, song, and divine service as a response to suffering.

The historian must here acknowledge his limits. The framework — Romanian persecutions, Transnistria, communist repression, emigration to Brooklyn — is firmly established by research. But the detail of the Rebbe's and his family's individual acts reaches us chiefly through the transmitted memory of the court and hagiographic literature. Future archival work — Romanian registers, Securitate files, archives of emigration and rescue organizations — would doubtless allow us to confirm, nuance, or clarify what tradition has faithfully preserved. The written works, Noam Eliezer and Kedushat Eliezer, constitute in their turn primary sources whose systematic doctrinal analysis remains to be undertaken. In the meantime, this Great Book holds both threads without confusing them: the Memory of a people who remember its righteous, and the History that, patiently, seeks their proof.