The lineage of the Portugal family, better known as the Skulen Hasidic dynasty (in Yiddish Sḳulener, after the small town of Sculeni, in Bessarabia, on the bank of the Prut), belongs to that constellation of Hasidic courts born in the crucible of Moldavia and eastern Romania at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its name, Portugal, speaks of a distant Memory: it signals, like so many Iberian patronyms borne by Ashkenaze families of the Carpathians and the Danube, the remembrance of a Sephardic branch absorbed over the centuries into the world of Yiddish — an onomastic trace of wanderings that long predate the History this book recounts.
That History is dominated by a figure of singular intensity: Eliezer Zusia Portugal (1898–1982), the Skulener Rebbe, whose life traces the tragic arc of Romanian Jewry in the twentieth century — the Romania of pre-war persecutions whose legal and social roots Carol Iancu has charted [Iancu, 1978], the catastrophe of the Shoah that struck Transnistria and Bessarabia, and then the grip of Communist rule. The Skulener Rebbe was not only a spiritual master and a liturgist: he was, after the war, a rescuer of orphans, the man who gathered and sustained hundreds of uprooted Jewish children, at the cost of arrest and imprisonment. When he was at last able to emigrate, he re-established his court in Brooklyn, where his charitable work, Chesed L'Avraham, and the Hasidic court were carried on by his son Yisrael Avraham Portugal (1923–2019).
The present work aims to distinguish, section by section, what belongs to the verifiable archive from what belongs to the Memory transmitted by the faithful, without conflating hagiographic devotion with the work of the historian.
The patronym Portugal is intriguing. Borne by a family deeply rooted in Moldavian Yiddish-speaking Hasidism, it evokes by its very letters the Iberian Peninsula. The Sephardic genealogical tradition, as documented in reference works, recalls that the expulsion of 1492 and the forced conversions scattered Iberian Jews across the entire Mediterranean basin and as far as Central and Eastern Europe, where certain names of origin — Portugal, Castro, Navarro — survived as onomastic fossils within communities that had become Ashkenazic. It must nonetheless be stated plainly: no continuous documentary chain connects, 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 patronyms but not established by the records.
What is better established is the family's Bessarabian and Moldavian rootedness. The name of the dynasty refers to Sculeni / Skulen, a locality on the Prut, in a region where Judaism had long been subject to an exceptional legal regime. Carol Iancu has shown how the legal condition of the Jews of Romania was, until after the First World War, marked by the denial of citizenship and a state antisemitism inscribed in law [Iancu, 1978]. It is in this precarious world — that of the Moldavian shtetlach, the Hasidic courts, and the markets of the Prut — that the Portugal lineage took shape.
According to the Hasidic tradition of the court, Eliezer Zusia Portugal was born in 1898, in the region of Sculeni, into a family steeped in rabbinic scholarship and Hasidic piety. Accounts transmitted by the faithful describe a precocious child, orphaned of his father at an early age, raised in the company of the great masters of Moldavia and Bukovina. His formation would have connected him to the Hasidic currents of the region — notably to the influence of the dynasties of Boyan and Sadigura, branches of the great house of Rouzhyn (Ruzhin), whose aura radiated throughout Bukovina and Bessarabia.
The young man distinguished himself, according to these same accounts, by two gifts that would mark his entire life: liturgical composition — he was a prolific author of piyyutim and melodies (niggunim), later gathered into collections — and an intensity of prayer reputed to be extraordinary, his services extending for hours on end. Having become a rabbi and spiritual guide, he established a court in Sculeni itself, then in Chernivtsi (Czernowitz), the cultural capital of Bukovina, where the war would come to find him.
These biographical elements belong for the most part to the transmitted Memory of the court and to Hasidic hagiographic literature. The historian receives them as living tradition, noting that they are only imperfectly corroborated by independent archives — archives which, for this region and this period, were frequently destroyed or scattered by the war.
The decisive test came with the Second World War. Marshal Antonescu's Romania, allied with Nazi Germany, carried out an extermination policy against its own Jews whose particulars are now well documented. Raul Hilberg, in La Destruction des Juifs d'Europe, and Saul Friedländer, in Les Années d'extermination, have established the full scale of the disaster: pogroms in Iași, mass deportations of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina to the camps and ghettos of Transnistria, where hunger, typhus, and massacres caused tens of thousands of deaths [Hilberg, 1988] [Friedländer, 2008]. Friedländer underscores Romania's singular, and long underestimated, place in the geography of destruction [Friedländer, 2008].
It is against this landscape of ashes that the vocation which would make the Skulener Rebbe famous was forged. Deported himself to Transnistria, according to the memory of the court, Eliezer Zusia Portugal is said to have, in the very heart of the ghettos, begun gathering orphaned children — little ones whose parents had perished on the death marches and in the camps. The continuity between this first rescue work, carried out in the Transnistrean hell, and his postwar action forms the guiding thread of his biography.
The general historical framework is here solidly established by scholarship [Hilberg, 1988] [Friedländer, 2008]; the details of the Rebbe's individual acts, by contrast, reach us primarily through testimony and tradition, and belong to the register of Memory.
After the war, Romania counted thousands of Jewish orphan children, wandering, sometimes taken in by state institutions that threatened to sever them from any Jewish identity. The Skulener Rebbe then undertook a work that remains at the heart of his Memory: gathering, feeding, educating and protecting 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 thus saved several hundred children, restoring to them a name, an education and a sense of belonging.
This activity placed him in danger under the communist regime, hostile to any autonomous religious organization and suspicious of emigration networks. According to transmitted Memory, the Rebbe and his son were arrested and imprisoned by the Romanian authorities — an episode that became one of the great deeds of his hagiography: the man who chose prison over the abandonment of children. His release is said to have been obtained, again according to these accounts, through international interventions, within the broader context of the negotiations that permitted, in the 1950s and 1960s, the emigration of Romanian Jews to Israel and the West.
Here the historian stands at an intersection: the framework — communist repression of Jewish works, imprisonments, negotiated emigration — is consistent with what is known of the Romanian post-war context; but the precise facts (the exact number of children, dates, circumstances of the detention) rest essentially on the testimony of the community and call for caution. We report them as tradition, pending systematic archival corroboration.
In the early 1960s, the Skulener Rebbe managed to leave Romania. After a period in Israel, he settled in the United States, in Brooklyn, in the neighborhood of Crown Heights and then within the orbit of New York's great Hassidic communities. It was there that he refounded his court, transplanting to America the dynasty of Skulen and, with it, the Chesed L'Avraham work, now deployed as a charitable institution in service of needy Jewish families, new immigrants, and children.
The transfer of Eastern European Hassidic Judaism to Brooklyn, following the Shoah, is a well-documented historical phenomenon: it was on these streets that entire courts, nearly annihilated by the war, were reconstituted from a handful of survivors. The dynasty of Skulen is part of this movement of resurrection of Hassidic traditions on American soil. The Rebbe continued his liturgical and charitable work there until his death in 1982.
His succession fell to his son, Yisrael Avraham Portugal (1923–2019), who led the court of Skulen for nearly four decades. Renowned for his longevity and for the same intensity of prayer as his father, he perpetuated Chesed L'Avraham and made Skulen one of the recognized Hassidic courts of Borough Park, in Brooklyn. Upon his passing in 2019, leadership passed to the next generation of the Portugal family, ensuring the continuity of the lineage.
The framework — emigration, refoundation in Brooklyn, filial succession — is probable and broadly consistent with the known history of post-war Hassidic dynasties; the principal dates are commonly accepted, and we present them as such.
The patronym Portugal and the mediating role exercised by the Rebbe — interceding with the authorities, negotiating the release of children, mobilizing international networks — invite a longer perspective, which this book proposes as a reading hypothesis rather than 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 classic portrait was drawn by Selma Stern [Stern, 1950] and whose most tragic fate was reexamined by Yair Mintzker through the trial of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer [Mintzker, 2017].
The Skulener Rebbe obviously does not belong to this world of baroque absolutism: he is separated from it by two centuries and by all the distance that lies between a prince's financier and a Hasidic master who rescued orphans. And yet, collective Jewish Memory has often brought together these figures of intercession — those who, on the margins of their communities, speak to the powerful in order to save their own. The great tradition of the historiography of persecution, from Léon Poliakov [Poliakov, 1955] [Poliakov, 1951] to Hilberg [Hilberg, 1988], reminds us that the position of intermediary was always ambivalent: at once a resource for salvation and an exposure to danger. The Rebbe's detention under the communist regime illustrates, all proportions kept, this ambivalence: the one who intercedes puts himself at risk.
We offer this parallel 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 Portugal (Skulen) lineage offers, in a single trajectory, a condensed portrait of the Jewish fate in the 20th century: rootedness in the Hasidic world of Bessarabia and Bukovina; engulfment in the Romanian catastrophe of the Shoah, whose scale Hilberg and Friedländer have established [Hilberg, 1988] [Friedländer, 2008]; heroic rescue of surviving children; the ordeal of imprisonment under communism; and finally, 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, rescuer of orphans, a man who chose the prison cell over abandonment.
The historian must here acknowledge his limits. The framework — Romanian persecutions, Transnistria, communist repression, emigration to Brooklyn — is solidly established by research [Iancu, 1978] [Hilberg, 1988]. But the details of the Rebbe's and his family's individual acts reach us primarily through the transmitted memory of the court and hagiographic literature. Future archival work — Romanian registers, Securitate files, archives of emigration and rescue organizations — would no doubt allow us to confirm, nuance, or refine what tradition has faithfully preserved. In the meantime, this Great Book holds both threads without conflating them: the Memory of a people who remembers its righteous, and the History that, patiently, seeks its proofs.
