Yechezkel Taub was born on Oct. 7, 1895, in Nowe Miasto (Neishtot in Yiddish), a small town in Poland just east of Płońsk, north of Warsaw. His father, Rabbi Yaakov Taub, was “Rebbe” of Jabłonna (Yablona), a small rural town close to Warsaw that was home to a vibrant Orthodox Jewish community. Revered across Poland as a mystical Hasidic leader, Rabbi Yaakov was a great-grandson of the original Yechezkel Taub—after whom he named his newborn son—the illustrious Rebbe of Kuzmir (Kazimierz Dolny), progenitor of several Hasidic dynasties, most famously the Modzitzer sect, renowned for their love of music and for their numerous beautiful musical compositions sung at Sabbath and festival gatherings.
Rabbi Yaakov's father, Rabbi Yosef Moshe Taub (d.1866), had moved to Jabłonna from Nowe-Miasto, where his father Rabbi David Tzvi Hirsch Taub had founded a branch of the Kuzmir sect. Pious and devout, Rabbi Yosef Moshe was married to a descendant of Rabbi Yisrael Hopstein, the legendary Maggid of Kozhnitz, and he set up his own branch of the Kuzmir dynasty in Jabłonna, becoming known as the Yabloner Rebbe. Tragically he died young, leaving his 6-year-old son, Yaakov, to be raised by his grandfather.
In 1882, Rabbi Yaakov married Beila Gurman, and in the years that followed they had five children—Yechezkel and four daughters. Unusually, it was Rabbi Yaakov's son-in-law, Chaim Yosef Halevi Vanchotzker, married to his oldest daughter, Michal Rachel, who was groomed to be the successor, rather than his son, Yechezkel. When Chaim Yosef unexpectedly died at a young age, the burden of expectation suddenly fell upon Yechezkel. Nevertheless, this unpredicted turn of events was not of great concern. At the time of Chaim Yosef's death, Rabbi Yaakov was still in his 50s, and it would surely be many years before Yechezkel would inherit the Rebbe's title and responsibilities.
But Rabbi Yaakov was not in good health. Soon after WWI began, he moved from Jabłonna to Warsaw, to be closer to Poland's best medical doctors and facilities. Sadly, it was to no avail. In the summer of 1920, at the age of 60, Rabbi Yaakov passed away, and Yechezkel, not quite 25 years old and barely prepared for the position, suddenly found himself at the head of one of Poland's prestigious Hasidic sects.
With the help of his wife, Pearl, a Kozhnitz descendent whom he had married in 1915, and his widowed elder sister, Michal Rachel, Yechezkel threw himself into the task of leading and inspiring his followers, intent on living up to the legacy of his father and the Kuzmir Hasidic heritage. Genuinely concerned for the welfare of his followers, he was very warm and personable, in addition to being learned and highly intelligent. He became involved in every aspect of his followers' lives, making sure that the rich helped the poor, and that the less well-off devoted time to community affairs so that they wouldn't feel like takers. The Hasidim adored him and flocked to his weekly Friday nighttischgatherings, where he sang with them and regaled them with Torah discourses. The new Yabloner Rebbe was considered a rising star among the Hasidic Rebbes of Poland, and a future leader of Polish Jewry.
Yet everything changed in 1924, with the visit to Jabłonna by a distant relative of the young Rebbe, the charismatic Rabbi Yeshaya Shapira, a crown prince of the Polish Hasidic world. Rabbi Yeshaya's late father, R. Elimelech Shapira, had been the revered Rebbe of Grodzisk, whose followers numbered in the tens of thousands and were spread across Poland. Tragically, Rabbi Elimelech's eldest three sons had predeceased him, so he remarried in his60s and had two more sons, the first of whom, Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman of Piaseczno, would later become immortalized as Rebbe of the Holocaust-era Warsaw Ghetto, whose inspiring sermons to demoralized ghetto inhabitants, recorded on scraps of paper, were recovered from the rubble of the ghetto after the war, and published in a book titledEsh Kodesh(“Sacred Fire”).
