Chaya Mushka Hornstein

Moras Chaya Mushka (right) and her husband Rabbi Moshe (left) Hornstein

Moras Chaya Mushka (also: Mussia; 1880 – 1942) was a daughter of the Rebbe Maharash, the fourth Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch, and the wife of Rabbi Moshe Hornstein.

Life

Chaya Mushka was born in 1880, the youngest daughter of the Rebbe Maharash and Moras Rivka Schneerson. When the Rebbe Maharash passed away, she was still a young girl, and so her shidduch (marriage match) was arranged by the Rebbe Rashab (Rabbi Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, the fifth Rebbe of Chabad), her brother, since their father had passed away eight years earlier. As the Rebbe Rashab wrote:

For our sister, may she live, we have finalized the shidduch with the mechutan R. Z. Hornstein… My brother the Raza and I met the groom, tested him in learning, and found him good and upright — he is a G-d-fearing man, and we hope he will also be a vessel to receive Chassidus.

She married Rabbi Moshe Hornstein on the 10th of Elul, 1892, and the couple settled near her siblings and brother-in-law. During that period her husband ran a lumber business. They later moved to Anopol in Volhynia, and in 1922 relocated to Warsaw, Poland.

During the Holocaust, Chaya Mushka was taken together with her son and daughter-in-law to the Treblinka extermination camp, where on the 14th of Elul, 1942, she was led to the gas chambers and died as a martyr — al kiddush Hashem (in sanctification of G-d's Name).

Family

• Son: Rabbi Shmuel Hornstein (his daughter, Mrs. Miriam Yuval (Teichman), passed away in 5786 [2026] at the age of 91)
• Son: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Hornstein — married Rebbetzin Sheina, the youngest daughter of the Frierdiker Rebbe (the Previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn)
• Daughter: Sara Lis
• Daughter: Leah Hornstein