Rabbi Yoel asked Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman to build a rescue organization. It became a road through Vienna and Rome into new Jewish lives.
A refugee does not become free when a border opens. There must still be a visa, a train or airplane, a country willing to receive him, a bed during the waiting months, food, doctors, papers, a school for the children, and work after arrival. Rav Tov was built to carry Jews through that entire distance.
A new problem in 1973
Jews were beginning to emerge from the Soviet Union, but many who reached the West did not want to be directed automatically to one destination. They wanted the freedom to join family or begin again in the country of their own choosing. That choice created an immediate human problem: who would receive them, represent them, and sustain them while governments decided where they could go?
At Rabbi Yoel’s behest, Rav Tov was founded in 1973. He entrusted the work to Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman, who became its founding executive and remained its chief organizer for decades. What began as a largely volunteer effort grew into an international rescue and resettlement network.
Vienna, then Rome
Vienna and Rome became waiting rooms between danger and a new home. Rav Tov arranged travel, visas, entry papers, temporary housing, food, medical care, and the long negotiations that allowed a family to move onward. Its representatives worked with officials and kept branch offices and partners across Europe, North America, and Eretz Yisroel.
The work continued after arrival. Refugees who had no English, employment, relatives, or familiarity with American life needed apartments, schools, language classes, doctors, and a first job. By 1978, a Rav Tov kindergarten in Brighton served more than one hundred Russian children. The organization also arranged brissim and Jewish marriages for families reclaiming practices that Soviet rule had denied them.
The road turns toward Iran
When the Iranian Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War placed another Jewish population in danger, the machinery built for Soviet refugees was turned toward them. Rav Tov helped obtain Austrian visas, brought people through Vienna, supported them during the wait, and pursued asylum and placement in the United States. Federal records later described the organization as instrumental in securing Iranian Jews who at first could not leave legally.
One refugee, remembered in a later firsthand account as Mina, described receiving an Austrian visa through Rav Tov, reaching Vienna, and then entering the United States as an asylum seeker. Her journey was one among many. The languages, countries, and dangers had changed; the obligation had not.
Children in the waiting rooms
Some Iranian children and teenagers spent many months in Vienna before they could join relatives in America. Rav Tov helped support an educational program that prepared them for the schools they would enter and gave them a Jewish framework while their future was still suspended between embassies.
Placement meant more than finding an address. It meant matching children and families with schools and communities suited to them. They were not asked to become Satmar. The rescue belonged to Klal Yisroel; the refugee’s life was not an opportunity for institutional recruitment.
Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman
Rabbi Yoel commissioned the undertaking; Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman built its daily machinery. Government records identify him as Rav Tov’s founding executive, and community accounts remember the Rebbe asking him to take responsibility for the work. He negotiated with governments, cultivated the organization’s European relationships, raised the money, and kept individual cases moving through a system that could easily strand a family for months.
In 2006, Austria honored him for more than three decades of leadership and for Rav Tov’s partnership in rescuing Jews in danger. The decoration recognized an achievement measured not only in negotiations or offices, but in the thousands of people who crossed a border and found someone waiting on the other side.
What Rabbi Yoel built
Rav Tov began with a particular crisis, but Rabbi Yoel had built it around a larger Jewish instinct. A rescue organization could not belong to one nationality, one language, or one congregation. Once the road existed, it had to remain open for the next Jew who needed it.
Russian families, Iranian families, and refugees from other distressed countries passed through the same network. That continuity made Rav Tov one of the clearest expressions of Rabbi Yoel’s teaching about chesed: the wellbeing of Klal Yisroel is not somebody else’s department.
People and institutions in this story
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Sources
Continue with the books and memories
Rav Tov at eighteen — Congressional Record
A 1991 congressional tribute describing Rav Tov’s 1973 founding, Vienna and Rome offices, refugee services, Iranian rescue work, and Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman’s leadership.
Open source ↗Rav Tov — Office of Refugee Resettlement report
The federal refugee agency’s account of Rav Tov’s travel, visa, housing, medical, education, language, employment, and resettlement work in Europe and America.
Open source ↗Rav Tov’s Russian work — The Jewish Observer
A 1978 description of Rav Tov’s Soviet-refugee mission, its Brighton kindergarten, and its work arranging brissim and Jewish marriages.
Open source ↗Iran, then and now — a refugee remembers
Mina’s account of obtaining an Austrian visa through Rav Tov, traveling to Vienna, and receiving asylum in the United States.
Open source ↗Iranian students in Vienna — Jewish Voice & Herald
A 1985 report on Iranian students waiting in Vienna and the educational program Rav Tov supported before their placement in American yeshivos.
Open source ↗Beyond the Myths: Satmar’s Inner Sanctum
A communal account of Rabbi Yoel establishing Rav Tov, financing the journey from danger to settlement, and placing refugee children in schools appropriate for them without requiring them to become Satmar.
Open source ↗Austria honors Rabbi Moshe Dovid Niederman
The Congressional Record marking Austria’s 2006 decoration for Rabbi Niederman’s decades of leadership and partnership in rescuing Jews in peril.
Open source ↗