Rabbi Moshe Nemanow, a scholar and expert on Hebrew manuscripts who worked for the Chabad Research Center and Kehot Publicaton Society, Brooklyn, passed away Tuesday, May 1, after a lengthy illness. He was 74.

Moshe was born in the small town of Yegoryevsk, a suburb of Moscow, to renowned chasidic mentor, Rabbi Nissan, and his wife, Masha Rivka Nemanow, in 1937. Despite the harsh realities of Soviet oppression and wartime austerity, young Moshe was raised in the warmth of the traditional chasidic home. In 1946, when Soviet authorities allowed Polish Jews displaced by the War to return home. The Nemanows, along with hundreds of other Russian-born Chabad Chasidim took advantage of this softening of Soviet policy, and were able to leave as well. After staying in the Poking DP camp, the Nemanows settled in the Parisian suburb of Brunoy. There, Moshe studied under the tutelage of his father in the newly opened branch of Tomchei Temimim, the Chabad-run network of yeshivos

In 1961 Moshe moved to Brooklyn to further his studies, and two years later, he met and married his wife Miriam Schusterman. A scholar  with vast knowledge of traditional Jewish texts, Rabbi Nemanow worked as a proofreader and typesetter at the Ezra Printing Company owned by his father-in-law, Rabbi Mordechai Schusterman. When the Ezra Printing Company was closed in 1987, Nemanow began to work directly under the auspices of the Kehot Publication Society, the Lubavitch publishing house.

Rabbi Gavriel Schapiro, of Chabad’s Central Library, recalls his late colleague’s expertise in preparing manuscripts for print. “He was able to properly source the material quoted in a given discourse,” Shapiro recalls. “Even when dealing with lacunae in a manuscript, [Nemanow] was able to fill in the missing content.”

Kehot editor Rabbi Avraham D. Vaisfiche and son-in-law of Rabbi Nemanow recalls the dual nature of his father-in-law’s personality. “He was at once, both modest and unassuming, yet intensely personal.”

Rabbi Zalman Marcus, Director of Chabad of Mission Viejo, California, recalls his father-in-law as a man that “didn’t take up any space,” but focused all of his energies towards living “in the moment and ... for the mitzvah.”

Rabbi Nemanow is survived by his wife, Mrs. Miriam Nemanow, and daughters Mrs. Chanie Moscowitz, Mrs. Sara Paltiel, Mrs. Bassie Marcus, Mrs. Rochel Kantor, Mrs. Sheiny Vaisfiche, as well as his brother, Rabbi Yitzchak Nemanow and sister, Mrs. Rochel Pewsner.