[1] His father, Elazar, died while Menachem was still a young boy and the orphan was brought up by his grandfather Rabbi Avraham Ziemba.

Rabbi Avraham had been a chassid of the Kotzker Rebbe and a student of the Chiddushei Harim, and was now a follower of the Sfas Emes of Gur.

Even years later when he was world-renowned as a Torah scholar, Posek and master of Hasidic thought, he still considered himself a simple Chasid of the rebbe of Ger.

When he visited Ger, he was called by his first name and refused to sit at the Rebbe's top table, an honour reserved for visitors of note.

As Rabbi Ziemba grew up in Warsaw, he gained a reputation as a formidable Talmid Chacham (scholar) and dazzling genius.

Aside from his newfound political prominence, Rabbi Ziemba became a Halachic decisor of great importance, answering questions from around the world, as well as from Poland.

At its first Knessia Gedola (great gathering), he was not yet forty when chosen to serve as honorary secretary in the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah.

At the third Knessiah Gedolah in 1937 in Marienbad, Austria, which played witness to the last massive gathering of European Orthodoxy before the Holocaust, Rabbi Ziemba was at the height of his fame.

In January 1943, in a meeting of the Warsaw Jewish leadership, Rabbi Ziemba proclaimed that traditional martyrdom (Kiddush HaShem-Sanctification of the Divine Name) was no longer an option as a response to German persecution.

He said to a group of ghetto leaders, “In the present we are faced by an arch foe, whose unparalleled ruthlessness and total annihilation purposes know no bounds.

Halachah [Jewish law] demands that we fight and resist to the very end with unequaled determination and valor for the sake of Sanctification of the Divine Name.”[1]With the outbreak of World War II and the German invasion of Poland, Rabbi Ziemba became the single most important force in the Warsaw Ghetto.

This struggle for aspiration and longing for life is a mitzvah to be realized by means of nekamah, vengeance, mesiras nefesh, and the sanctification of the mind and will.’[3]Rabbi Ziemba was given two opportunities to escape from the ghetto.

With the air thick with smoke and nearly impossible to breathe, Ziemba and the people with him decided to try to run across the street, past SS men manning machine guns, to the building where the "Volia Rav", Rabbi Ber, was hiding.

Believing it to be safe, Ziemba, holding his five-year-old grandson Yankele Ber by the hand, tried to make a run for dear life.

His body was flown to Israel and after a funeral attended by all the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah and tens of thousands of people, he was finally laid to rest on Har HaMenuchot.