Twersky's Harvard roommate describes him as serious, intense, and pious. Twersky, who had dual Israeli-American citizenship, was killed while praying at a Jerusalem synagogue.
Rabbi Moshe Twersky, the dean of an Israeli religious school who was murdered by terrorists while praying at a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday, grew up in Boston, the descendant of one of the most prominent rabbinical families in the United States.
"All religions have first families. This is like a Kennedy for the Jewish community. This is royalty," said Professor Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History.
Twersky, 59, was one of four rabbis who were murdered when two Palestinians stormed a synagogue with guns and butcher knives, according to Israeli news reports and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Israeli police killed the terrorists. Three of the victims – Twersky, Aryeh Kupinsky, 43, and Kalman Levine, 55 – were United States citizens who had immigrated to Israel.
Twersky is the scion of major rabbinic families. His grandfather was Rabbi Joseph B. Solovetchik, who established the Maimonides School, a Jewish day school in Brookline, and who is considered the founder of Modern Orthodox Judaism, a denomination that combines traditional Jewish observance with life in the modern world. Solovetchik died in 1993. Twersky's father, Rabbi Isadore Twersky, who died in 1997, was the director of Harvard University's Center for Jewish Studies and also led the Talner Synagogue in Brookline.
Moshe Twersky graduated from Maimonides School, then attended Harvard. He moved to Israel with his family in 1990. He was the dean of Torat Moshe, a religious school for post-high school boys from English-speaking countries.
Allan Nadler, professor of religion and director of the Jewish Studies program at Drew University in New Jersey and a congregational rabbi in Montreal, roomed with Twersky from 1976 to 1978, when Nadler was a graduate student at Harvard and Twersky was an undergraduate.
Nadler described Twersky as "a very serious and intense young man." "Literally, his nose was always in a book," Nadler said.
While Nadler and his other roommates would go out and have fun, Twersky would stay home and study. Nadler said Twersky studied either classics or philosophy, and when he was not studying for his classes, he was studying the Talmud, an important Jewish text. Twersky would wake up by 6 a.m. to say his morning prayers, then study before class, Nadler recalled. "Life was deadly serious for him, and life was all about devotion to studying the word of God," Nadler said.
While Isadore Twersky straddled the worlds of Harvard and synagogue life and studied Jewish texts critically, Nadler said Moshe Twersky chose a different path.
"He had no interest in discussing the academic approach to Judaism, the historical, critical approach as opposed to the believer's approach," Nadler said. "What was paramount for him was the traditional, uncritical...pious, believing approach to sacred texts in Judaism."
Nadler said Twersky would never criticize Nadler or his roommates for their lifestyles. But Twersky was unstinting in his own morality, to the point that he refused to take telephone messages for his roommates other than the name and phone number of the caller. "He didn't want to hear anything he might have regretted hearing," Nadler recalled.
Nadler, who kept in touch with Twersky occasionally over the years, said Twersky was never a warm person. But he had a fundamental honesty, decency and clarity of purpose. "He had clarity about what was important in life and what was trivial. He had zero interest in anything he deemed trivial, which is 99 percent of most people's lives," Nadler said.
Jay Berkovitz, professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at UMass Amherst, called Twersky "a very brilliant man, devoted to teaching, devoted to scholarship, extraordinarily devoted to his students and to his family."
Berkovitz attended the Talner synagogue run by Isadore Twersky. He said the synagogue had a small, tight-knit congregation of people involved in Jewish education, Jewish studies and the professional world. Berkovitz said Moshe Twersky was "fiercely independent" in focusing more exclusively on Jewish studies than his father had. Twersky was affiliated with Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the most traditional segment of the Jewish population. "He more or less went on his own path, devoted himself more intensively to Talmud study than perhaps the family tradition that combined the more academic together with the Talmud study," Berkovitz said.
Lois Dubin, a professor of religion at Smith College, studied under Isadore Twersky at Harvard. Dubin said the elder Twersky "was an absolutely unique figure" as both a professor of Jewish intellectual history at Harvard and an important rabbi in Judaism's Chasidic movement, which stresses spirituality.
"He was absolutely brilliant, charismatic, enigmatic, a great scholar of Maimonides," Dubin said. Dubin said she was in touch with other former students on Tuesday, and they were all shocked at the news.
President Barack Obama, speaking at the White House before a meeting with top advisers about Ebola, called the attack "a tragedy for both nations, Israel as well as the United States." He said the murders "represent the kind of extremism that threatens to bring all of the Middle East into the kind of spiral from which it's very difficult to emerge," according to a White House transcript.
U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Democrat from the 8th Congressional District, which includes parts of the Boston area, said in a statement that the rabbis who were killed "were men of peace who dedicated their lives to the service of others and the dignity of life itself." "Our prayers also go out to the members of the Jewish community in Greater Boston who share a special connection with the Twersky family," Lynch said.
Twersky is survived by his wife, Miriam, five children and 10 grandchildren.
Memorial services are being planned at UMass Amherst Hillel at 5 p.m. on Tuesday and at Maimonides School in Brookline at 7:15 p.m.
