Shmarya Yehuda Leib Medalia

Shmarya Yehuda-Leib Medalia (Shemaryahu Medalia, ; 1872 – April 26, 1938) was the Lubavitcher chief rabbi of Moscow between 1933 and 1938. He was sentenced to death and shot in 1938 during The Great Terror in the Soviet Union.

Biography

Shmarya Yehuda-Leib Yankelevich Medalia was born in Kretinga to a family of Lubavitcher Hasidim. He was an alumnus of the original Slabodka yeshiva. He is described in the Yizkor book of Vitebsk as a popular and influential, musical and scholarly preacher of a sanguine disposition, but stern on matters of Yiddishkeit. He had six sons and five daughters, who all lived to adulthood, among whom were scholars, a rabbi, and a shochet. On one notable occasion he refused to start a Jewish prayer service unless stationed Bolshevik militiamen left, crying, "This is a desecration of Shabbos!"

Between 1899 and 1903, he served as the rabbi of Tula, Russia; and between 1905 and 1917, in Vitebsk. After Tula he served in Krolevets. Between 1927 and 1931, he again served in Tula. In 1930 he left Vietbsk due to a tax dispute. In 1933, he received the appointment to serve as the rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue. By 1938, Medalia had become the unofficial primary spiritual leader of the Jewish community in the Soviet Union. His son Moishe was also arrested.

His high-profile led the central offices of the NKVD in Moscow to directly handle his case rather than the distributed NKVD troikas. He was accused in court of communicating with Lubavitcher rebbe Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn who had been arrested and exiled from the USSR in 1927. He was also accused of cheating people and late night drunkenness.

His family finally received notice of his 1938 execution by the NKVD in 1964, with declassified KGB documents in 2008 revealing more details.