Five-foot giant of Torah and science my father, Matest Agrest (1915-2005)
Five-foot giant of Torah and science my father, Matest Agrest (1915-2005) - Document - Gale Academic OneFile
Five-foot giant of Torah and science my father, Matest Agrest (1915-2005)
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Although he was only five feet tall, I will always remember my father Matest Agrest as a giant. Known as the "Soviet Rabbi," he was a world-renowned scientist who lived proudly according to his principles, even at great risk. Compared to the brutality that the Jews suffered in Europe and the Soviet Union, my father was a lucky man. He lived a long and happy life, always feeling the hand of G-d.
The ninety years of Matest Agrest's life spanned almost the entire twentieth century and personified it in many ways. Two of his autobiographical essays are aptly entitled Expulsion and Second Expulsion. He experience his first expulsion at age one, when his family fled Mogilev in Byelorussia to Lokhvitsa in the Ukraine during World War I. His last expulsion was his forced escape to the United States from Sukhumi, Abkhazia, when that republic joined the war of independence with Georgia in 1992. He lived in the USA until his death in 2005.
Born to a family of Torah scholars, Matest received the best religious education available in the 1920s in the USSR--at the Lubavitch Yeshivah. An outstanding scholar, his role model was his placid maternal uncle Isaac Spokoynaya, who later became a rosh yeshivah in Jerusalem. Matest's father was also a rosh yeshivah. At the Yekaterinosclav (Dnepropetrovsk) Yeshivah, Matest's rosh yeshivah was Rabbi Levi Yitshak Schneerson, the father of the future Lubavitcher Rebbe, the brilliant Menahem Mendel. Although Matest visited the Schneerson home often, he never met Menahem Mendel because he was studying in Europe. The two knew about each other, though, and were interested in each other's ideas. The yeshivah students would say about Menahem Mendel, "If Russia had two more people as intelligent as young Schneerson, it would exceed America in development." (After Matest moved to America, he respected the Rebbe so much that he never requested a visit, not wishing to disturb him. Matest always cherished the dollar bill that one of the Rebbe's emissaries brought to him in Sukhumi. This dollar bill is now buried with my father at the Emanu-El cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.)
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A254014736
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