BDE: Rabbi Moshe Yitzchak Vorst, 85, OBM

With great sadness we report the passing of Rabbi Moshe Yitzchak Vorst OBM, the Head Shliach to the Netherlands and a holocaust survivor. He passed away on Wednesday night, the 28th of Elul, 5783.

He was 85 years old.

Moshe Yitzchak was the son of the former Rotterdam Chief Rabbi Levie (Lou) Vorst . His grandfather Isak van Gelder was a rabbi in The Hague. As a child, nicknamed Ies, Vorst spent part of the Second World War in the Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen camps. After the war, his father remarried a friend of his biological mother and five more children followed.

In the 1960s, Vorst emigrated to work as an engineer to help build the port in the Israeli coastal city of Haifa . There he came into contact with the Hasidic movement Chabad and started his training as a rabbi.

Moshe Yitzchak married Dobbe Rubinson in 1964 in Brunoy, France.

A few years later, the now married Vorst moved to the Netherlands to help build up the Jewish community in the Netherlands. He was involved in the founding of the Jewish school community Cheider and the Jewish community in Amstelveen .

Vorst was a member of the Dutch Board for Rabbinical Affairs (Wa’ad Harabaniem), chief envoy of Chabad in the Netherlands, and active as head of the Jewish Youth Association Tikwatenoe. He was the first Dutch rabbi to join Chabad. In his work he strove to help Jews reconnect with Jewish religious traditions.

He is survived by his wife, Dobba and children Mrs. Chana Kalmenson (Aubervilliers, France), Rabbi Dovid Bentzion Vorst (Brunoy, France), Rabbi Yehuda Vorst (Rotterdam), Mrs. Sarah Katzman (The Hague, Netherlands), Menucha Romano (Eretz Yisroel), Mrs. Nechama Cohen (Yerushalayim), Rabbi Menachem Vorst (Charlotte, NC), Mrs. Bracha Leah Weingarten (Lansing, MI), Mrs. Chaya Benjaminson (Crown Heights), Mrs. Rivkah Galperin (Windsor, Ontario), Mrs. Devorah Esther Levin (Nijmegen), and Mrs. Mushky Lent (Manchester, England).