Yoel Halpern

Yoel Halpern (1904 – 6 September 1983) was a Polish rabbi. He was the rabbi of Jasło, Poland prior to the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, he was one of the rabbis of Bergen-Belsen and of the British Occupation Zone in Germany. After emigrating to the United States he was a rabbi in Brooklyn, New York.

Biography Rabbi Yoel Halpern was born in Kraków in 1904. His father Rabbi Mattisyahu Chaim was the rabbi of Dobczyce.

Rabbi Halpern received his rabbinical ordination from rabbi Shmuel Engel of Radomshile. He officiated over 1,800 weddings of Holocaust survivors and circumcised more than 1,500 boys. He also permitted hundreds of agunot to remarry. On several occasions the Vaad formed a bais din in Hannover and in other smaller communities in the zone.

In the United States In 1949, the British occupation of North-West Germany ended and the British Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council and its appointees were required to wrap up their operations in Germany. Halpern then emigrated to the United States. He settled in Brownsville and where he was the Rabbi of a synagogue.