Ephraim Oshry

Oshry died on September 28, 2003, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Nearly 1,000 mourners attended his funeral. He is buried in Jerusalem.

While in the Kovno Ghetto and concentration camp, Oshry began writing his responsa regarding the Holocaust, answering difficult questions in such subjects as human nature, God, and Jewish ethics. Before the final battle between the Nazis and the Soviets, Oshry buried his responsa in the ground. After the war, he retrieved them, and in 1959, he published some of the Hebrew responsa under the title She'eilos Uteshuvos Mima'amakim (Questions and Responses from the Depths). This volume was later followed by four additional volumes, the final one being published in 1979. An English volume of the original work (adbridged, with much of the halakhic argumentation removed), was published, titled Responsa from the Holocaust.

In 1952, Oshry moved to New York City, where he became the rabbi of Beth Hamedrash Hagodol. Oshry opened a yeshiva for boys and a yeshiva for girls named Yeshivah Torah V'Emunah in the East Bronx.

In 1950, Oshry moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with his family and yeshiva students.

In 1949, Oshry became engaged to his second wife, Frieda Greensweig, a daughter of Sigeter Hasidim, at the suggestion of her uncle Moshe Friserman, the Tomashover Rebbe. Together they had 6 sons, all of whom became rabbis, and 3 daughters. Frieda died in 2018.

After Kaunas was liberated in August 1944, Oshry and his wife Frieda Greenzwieg, a survivor of Auschwitz, went to Rome. There Oshry started a yeshiva for orphaned refugee children.

When the Nazis invaded Kaunas in 1941 during World War II, Oshry's community was forced into the Kaunas Ghetto and Concentration Camp, where his first wife and children were murdered.

Ephraim Oshry (1914–2003), was an Orthodox rabbi, posek, and author of The Annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry. He was one of the few European rabbis to survive the Holocaust.