The baal tefillah at the Caulfield Bais Medrash in Melbourne, Australia, on Motzei Shabbos strode up to the amud with vim and vigor, his energy giving onlookers no impression that he is well over 100 years old. R’ Berish Aurbach yb”l was there to daven for the amud on his mother’s 103rd yahrtzeit, and nothing was going to stop him.

R’ Berish lost his mother, Rivka Aurbach (nee Blass), in Biala, Poland in 1920 when he was just a few months old. She had been stricken with typhus and never recovered.

Berish comes from a chasidic family which had lived in the Polish town of Biala Podlaska for hundreds of years, which is known for its connection to the Gerrer chasidus.

Berish had three older brothers and a sister, as well as a half-brother from his father’s second marriage. His family life was comfortable, and to this day he can recall the Torah that he learned as a youth in his local Polish Talmud Torah.

He was one of the last people to be smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto just prior to Pesach 1943, shortly before the uprising which led to the extermination of its inhabitants at the hands of the Nazis. Aside from his sister who had immigrated to Palestine before the war, all of Berish’s family members were killed in the Holocaust.

Realizing he had nobody left in Poland, Berish contacted an uncle who lived in Australia, who sponsored his visa, allowing him to start a new life on safe shores.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)