It is with great sadness that Matzav.com reports the passing of a man whose name may not have been widely known, but whose melody has been sung by generations of Yidden around the world, with the petirah of Tanchum Gershon Portnoy z”l, longtime resident of Lawrence, New York, and composer of the universally beloved tune to “Eitz Chaim Hi.”
Portnoy was 75.
For more than half a century, his haunting and uplifting melody has accompanied one of the most familiar moments in the davening: the return of the Sefer Torah to the Aron Kodesh. In shuls across continents and across the spectrum of Jewish life, a baal tefillah begins the familiar notes, the kehillah joins, and the words “Eitz chaim hi lamachazikim bah” fill the room.
Most of those singing it never knew who wrote it.
It was Tanchum Portnoy.
Remarkably, he was only 22 years old when he composed the melody in the early 1970s. It was recorded on his 1975 album, Tanchumim, with Rabbi Alvin Wainhaus, known musically as Avraham Yanon, singing the piece and Yisroel Lamm arranging and conducting it.
The album listed Portnoy as composer, producer and director. Its title, Tanchumim — consolations — was itself a play on Tanchum’s name.
The song would ultimately travel far beyond the album.
Its simple but deeply stirring structure made it particularly suited to a tzibbur. The phrases were short and memorable, the range accessible, and the melody seemed almost naturally wedded to the words. One person could begin singing and an entire shul could immediately follow.
Over time, congregations developed slight variations. Notes were stretched, rhythms changed and certain turns in the melody were simplified. But wherever it was sung, the tune remained unmistakable.
Eventually, something unusual happened: the melody became so familiar that people began assuming it had always existed.
Music publisher Velvel Pasternak once encountered liner notes that identified Portnoy’s “Eitz Chaim” simply as “traditional.” Pasternak corrected the attribution. But the mistake itself reflected just how thoroughly the song had entered the collective Jewish consciousness.
Portnoy once related that he would travel around the world, enter shuls, and suddenly hear congregations singing the melody he had composed as a young man.
On one occasion, he walked into a shul and heard the congregation singing it precisely the way he had originally intended it to be sung. He stood quietly listening, deeply gratified. Then, rather than announce himself as the composer, he simply joined the congregation, singing and davening alongside everyone else.
The melody was later embraced and popularized by prominent chazzanim and Jewish musicians, including Portnoy’s close friend Reb Shlomo Carlebach. With each passing year, another generation learned it — often without ever knowing there had been a composer at all.
But Tanchum Portnoy’s legacy was about far more than music.
Born on July 22, 1951, in Brooklyn, New York, Tanchum came from a family deeply rooted in Torah. His father, Rav Eliezer Portnoy zt”l, was a talmid of the Mirrer Yeshiva in Europe who played a significant role in the extraordinary efforts that ultimately enabled the yeshiva to escape Lithuania during the Holocaust.
Rav Eliezer had arrived in Mir at just 14 years old, an orphan with neither wealth nor a prominent family background to support him. He threw himself into Torah learning with extraordinary determination and eventually became one of the distinguished members of the yeshiva.
As Europe descended into catastrophe, Rav Eliezer became deeply involved in the desperate efforts to save the Mirrer Yeshiva.
Working with others, he pursued the documents, visas, government permissions and funding necessary to enable hundreds of bnei yeshiva to escape Soviet-controlled Lithuania. Those efforts eventually helped facilitate the Mir’s legendary journey across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railway, through Vladivostok and on to Japan.
Rav Eliezer himself dealt directly with Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat whose transit visas became a critical part of the rescue.
After the American consulate refused visas to the Mirrer talmidim, Sugihara told Rav Eliezer, “The world says that America is civilized. I will show the world that Japan is more civilized.”
Sugihara proceeded to issue hundreds of visas for the Mir.
Obtaining the Japanese documents was only part of the danger. The talmidim still required Soviet permission to leave Lithuania and travel across the USSR, meaning that those attempting to escape had to deal directly with the feared Soviet secret police.
Rav Eliezer put aside his own learning and devoted himself for weeks to the work of pikuach nefesh, traveling between government offices, communal organizations and relief activists in Kovno in pursuit of whatever was needed to save the yeshiva.
He and a companion were among the first to leave Lithuania, around Chanukah of 1940. Rav Eliezer arrived in Kobe, Japan, in January 1941, with the remaining groups of Mirrer talmidim following.
The significance of those efforts was later expressed by Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz zt”l, who had himself escaped with the Mir and would become one of its roshei yeshiva.
“Were it not for Rav Eliezer, we would not be here. Were it not for Rav Eliezer, we would not have escaped the land of blood.”
After the war, Rav Eliezer became a marbitz Torah, teaching at Mercaz HaTorah in Montreal before serving as principal of Yeshivas Rabbeinu Chaim Berlin and later as a rov in Brooklyn. He passed away in 1975 at just 57 years old.
For decades, much of Rav Eliezer’s remarkable story remained little known.
Late in his own life, Tanchum made preserving that story one of his great missions.
In the summer of 2025, exactly 50 years after his father’s passing, Tanchum and his wife, Sara, published Or Eliezer, an extensive sefer that brought together Rav Eliezer’s Torah writings, hespeidim, photographs, historical documents, family memories and a detailed reconstruction of his role in the Mir’s wartime escape.
Tanchum understood that the generation that had personally known his father was disappearing and that even among Rav Eliezer’s descendants, the full story was becoming increasingly unfamiliar.
He was determined that it not be lost.
Included in Or Eliezer was Tanchum’s own English essay, “A Son Reflects,” in which he described his father’s extraordinary transformation from a lonely 14-year-old orphan into a Torah leader whose actions helped save hundreds.
“This is the story of my father — a man who arrived at the gates of the Mir Yeshiva at fourteen years old, utterly alone, and declared he would create his own lineage. It is the story of a boy who went hungry more often than not, moving from family to family for meals, bearing the physical scars of malnutrition beneath his collar. But more than that, it is the story of how one young man’s relentless pursuit of greatness positioned him to save an entire world.”
Tanchum wrote movingly about the lesson he drew from his father’s actions during the Holocaust: Emunah did not mean passivity. His father believed in miracles, but understood that human beings sometimes had to become the instruments through which those miracles occurred.
Describing his father’s memories of young men from other yeshivos desperately trying to escape Vilna without the necessary documents, Tanchum wrote that they “had trusted in miracles; he had trusted in miracles too, but understood that sometimes G-d’s miracles come through human hands holding pens and passports.”
For Tanchum, his father had done more than save hundreds of individual lives. By helping save the Mir, he had helped preserve a Torah world that would be rebuilt after the Holocaust and spread across the globe.
Rav Eliezer had once told his son that as an orphaned teenager, he had gone to Mir determined “to make his own lineage.”
Tanchum concluded his reflection with a powerful observation:
“He used to tell me he came to Mir to make his own lineage. He did much more than that. He ensured that hundreds of others would live to create their own.”
There was a striking symmetry between father and son.
Tanchum spent his final years working to ensure that the name of his father would not disappear from a story that remained alive.
His own story unfolded in almost the opposite way.
Tanchum’s name gradually disappeared from a melody that remained vibrantly alive.
He had composed “Eitz Chaim” at 22. More than five decades later, children who had never heard his name were singing it because their fathers sang it, and their fathers had heard it from their fathers or rebbeim. It had ceased to feel like a composition and had begun to feel like an inheritance.
The words themselves could hardly be more fitting.
“Eitz chaim hi lamachazikim bah, v’somcheha me’ushar. Deracheha darchei noam, v’chol nesivoseha shalom.”
And then:
“Hashiveinu Hashem eilecha v’nashuvah; chadeish yameinu k’kedem.”
Tanchum Portnoy was niftar over Rosh Hashanah, as Klal Yisroel entered the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah, the days whose very essence is teshuvah — return.
“Hashiveinu Hashem eilecha v’nashuvah.”
Return us, Hashem, and we will return.
“Chadeish yameinu k’kedem.”
Renew our days as of old.
His melody is not ancient. Its origins are known. The original recording survives. His name appears on the album. And yet, for countless Yidden, the tune already belongs to the kedem of their memories. They cannot necessarily remember learning it. They simply remember knowing it.
Away from his musical legacy, Tanchum is remembered by family, friends and members of the Five Towns community as a man of tremendous warmth, kindness and generosity. A longtime resident of Lawrence, New York, he was a beloved member of the Five Towns community.
He is survived by his wife, Sara; his children, Eli, Amichai, Ilan and Gali; and their families.
The levayah was held on Tuesday at Eretz HaChaim Cemetery in Beit Shemesh, where the kevurah took place.
Shivah on Thursday will be held at 1118 Warren Street in New Milford. Selichos and Shacharis will be at 7:15 a.m., with Mincha/Maariv at 6:45 p.m. Visitors are asked not to come between noon and 1 p.m., between 5 and 6 p.m., or after 10 p.m.
Shivah on Wednesday, Friday, Motzoei Shabbos and Sunday will be observed at 148 Sutton Place South in Lawrence, New York. Shacharis on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday will be at 8 a.m., with Mincha/Maariv on Wednesday at 6:45 p.m.
For more than 50 years, Tanchum could enter a shul almost anywhere and hear something he had created as a young man being sung back to him. Sometimes, he would stand quietly and listen. Then he would join in, just another Yid singing as the Torah was returned to the Aron Kodesh.
Now, Tanchum will no longer be standing among those singing.
But the melody will be.
Yehi zichro baruch.
{Matzav.com}
