Esther Jungreis Dies at 80: Known as 'the Jewish Billy Graham'

Esther Jungreis, a Holocaust survivor and extremely popular speaker and author who was known as "the Jewish Billy Graham," died on Tuesday in New York. She was 80.

She died from complications of pneumonia, her son-in-law, Rabbi Shlomo Gertzulin, told The New York Times.

A Hungarian Jew who spent several months in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany as a child, Jungreis' revival-style assemblies urged secular Jews to study the Torah and embrace traditional religious values, according to the Times.

The outings were modeled after Graham's Christian crusades.

Jungreis co-founded the Jewish outreach organization Hineni with her late husband, Rabbi Theodore Jungreis. He led the Congregation Ohr Torah, an Orthodox synagogue on Long Island, the Times reports.

She wrote four books on issues of spirituality and relationships that sought to apply the lessons of the Torah to modern life and often lectured on the subjects well into her later years.

Jungreis was born in 1936 in Szeged, Hungary, to the city's Chief Rabbi Avroham Halevi Jungreis. After surviving Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she and other surviving family members eventually settled in New York in 1947.

In 1960, Jungreis began writing an advice column for The Jewish Press, "Rebbetzin's Viewpoint." It last appeared on Thursday.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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