NICE, France — Rabbi Nisson Pinson, a Russian transplant to North Africa who headed up Chabad-Lubavitch activities in Tunis for almost five decades, died Monday in his late 80s. Discrepancies among family accounts pin his age between 86 and 89.
Veteran Tunisian Rabbi Passes Away After Decades Serving North African Jewry
NICE, France — Rabbi Nisson Pinson, a Russian transplant to North Africa who headed up Chabad-Lubavitch activities in Tunis for almost five decades, died Monday in his late 80s. Discrepancies among family accounts pin his age between 86 and 89.
Born in Russia at the height of Communist oppression, Pinson new little of Jewish freedom in his early years. While he learned in an underground cheder, or Jewish school, his father, Nachum Yitzchak Pinson ñ a Lubavitch Chasid who struggled to keep the spark of Judaism alive behind the Iron Curtain ñ was exiled to Siberia where he later died.
After his father’s arrest, Pinson joined the small exodus of Jewish students to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, where the KGB was reportedly more lax in their enforcement of bans against the practice of Judaism. He learned in an underground yeshiva there and later directed it with Rabbi Mendel Futerfas.
While in Samarkand, he married Rachel Raskin, the daughter of Rabbi Yitzchok Raskin, a Lubavitch activist who was killed by Soviet authorities for spreading Jewish observance.
