“He wore three crowns,” Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at City University of New York and an expert on the Orthodox and Hasidic worlds, said of Isadore Twersky. “He was a distinguished professor at Harvard. He was the Talner rebbe. And he married the daughter of Rabbi Soloveitchik.”

Moshe Twersky’s brother-in-law is Jonathan Rosenblatt, the rabbi of the Riverdale Jewish Center, a modern Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx, and a great-grandson of Yossele Rosenblatt, regarded as the greatest cantor of the 20th century.

Moshe was also a distant cousin of Rabbi David Twersky, the leader of the best known of the sects headed by the Twerskys — the Skverer Hasidim who have settled in their own village, New Square, in Rockland County, N.Y., a rural shtetl of 10,000 Hasidim. There are more than a dozen Twerskys who head Hasidic branches today, in New York State, Milwaukee, Israel and London.

The Twersky family’s roots go back almost to the founding of Hasidism in the 18th century by the Baal Shem Tov, translated as “master of the good name,” according to Yitzchak Twersky, a distant cousin of Moshe’s who has written three books on his family. Wandering across Eastern Europe, the Baal Shem Tov upended the Jewish world by preaching that an untutored peasant could be as worthy a practicing Jew as a scholar if his prayers were sincere and ardent.

Image Rabbi Moshe Twersky Credit Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, via Associated Press

The original Twersky, Menachem, for a time a student of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, settled in Chernobyl, Ukraine. His son, Mordechai, established a rabbinical court, and his eight grandsons radiated to other Ukrainian towns, said Yitzchak Twersky. These dynasties lasted for a century and exerted a dominant influence on Ukrainian and Russian Jewry.

But with the pogroms of the late 19th century and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the sects scattered to Poland, the United States and Palestine, first under Ottoman control and later governed by Britain.

Unlike other Hasidic dynasties — such as Satmar, where two brothers in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and Kiryas Joel, N.Y., claim the rabbinical throne — all the Twersky rabbis accept one another’s leadership.