Yeḥezkel Taub was born in a Polish shtetl in 1895 to the rebbe of the Yabloner Ḥasidim. Due to the untimely deaths of his brother-in-law and then his father, Taub precipitously inherited the latter’s position at the young age of twenty-four. Soon thereafter, he, along with another rebbe, made the unprecedented decision to move to the Land of Israel to establish a farming community and to encourage their followers to join them. The new settlement—which would later take the name Kfar Ḥasidim and is now a thriving Israeli town—was plagued by troubles, and Taub was eventually forced to turn away newcomers who years earlier had bought plots of land. Desperate, he went to the U.S. in 1938 to raise money; with the outbreak of World War II, he found himself unable to return. Pini Dunner relates what happened next:
For the Yabloner rebbe . . . the emerging news of the Holocaust came as a double blow. Besides the fact that the entire Yabloner community had been obliterated along with the rest of Polish Jewry, there were those—including the extended families of many of the Kfar Ḥasidim pioneers—whom he had sent back from Palestine to Poland because they served no useful purpose in the farming settlement and were a pointless drain on its resources. This had been a non-negotiable condition for the continued involvement of the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency [in supporting] the ḥasidic settlement, and however reluctant the rebbe may have been to go along with it, he had allowed it to happen. In his own mind the rebbe began to believe that the deaths of those who had gone back to Poland were his fault.
The pain was overwhelming. And moreover, where was God in all this? Did He even exist? If He did, was it not crystal clear that He had utterly abandoned the Yabloner rebbe? So many people’s lives had been lost or devastated—and he, Yeḥezkel Taub, had been the agent of their destruction. His entire ḥasidic sect had been wiped out, and those who remained alive in Kfar Ḥasidim, [he presumed], despised him for his role in wrecking their lives.
In late 1944, as the full weight of his distressing predicament became clear, and his anger at God continued to grow, the Yabloner rebbe decided on a drastic course of action. Without Ḥasidim, he decided to himself, he was no longer a rebbe. . . . Meanwhile, his Kfar Ḥasidim project in Palestine was [in his mind] an utter failure—whoever remained there certainly didn’t need him, and it was more than likely that they didn’t want him, either. The best thing for him to do, he concluded, would be to disappear into oblivion in the United States of America, like millions of other immigrants.
And just like that, one day, Rabbi Yeḥezkel Taub—[the] one-time leader of thousands of devoted followers and a trailblazing Orthodox Zionist settler—removed his yarmulke, cut off his sidelocks, shaved off his beard, quietly changed his name, and filed immigration papers to become a naturalized citizen of the United States.
George T. Nagel, as Taub now styled himself, went on to work in construction and then to become a California real-estate developer. But the turns his career took in the final decades of his life, related by Dunner, are even more remarkable.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/270768/amazing-yabloner-rebbe