JERUSALEM (JTA) — Rabbi Mosheh Twersky, the grandson of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, was identified as one of the victims in a Jerusalem synagogue attack.
Twersky, 59, was among the three dual Israel-U.S. citizens killed in the Tuesday morning attack during services at the Bnei Torah Kehillat Yaakov synagogue in western Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood.
He was the dean of the Torat Moshe Yeshiva, an advanced level English-speaking yeshiva attended mostly by post-high school students from English-speaking countries.
Soloveitchik, known as the Rav, was the founder of modern Orthodoxy. Twersky was the son of rabbi and author Yitzhak Twersky of Boston.
At least seven worshippers also were injured, some seriously. One of the two police officers injured in a shootout with the assailants died Tuesday night. The assailants were killed at the scene.
Twersky was the first of the victims to be identified. The other three were named early Tuesday afternoon.
They are Aryeh Kupinsky, 43, and Kalman Zeev Levine, 55, residents of Har Nof who were born in the United States, and Avraham Shmuel Goldberg, 68, an immigrant from Britain.
The police officer was identified as Zidan Saif, 30, of the Druze village of Kfar Yanouch in the Galilee.
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