Rabbi Krauss, he said, was a person of sweet and humble character and not a fighter by nature, but “he was not afraid to stand alone.”

Rabbi Weiss recalled that in the mid-1990s, when women from his Hillcrest, Queens, congregation began holding separate prayer services with Torah readings for bat mitzvahs, the local Orthodox rabbinical association, the Vaad Harabonim of Queens, issued a resolution barring such services. Rabbi Krauss was one of only two dissenters and came under vitriolic criticism by his colleagues.

“You can hurt me, you can insult me, but at the end of the day this is not about me,” he told reporters at the time. “We’re standing up for these women, and if we win, the whole community wins, and if we lose, more is lost than we can ever know.”

A descendant of a line of rabbis going back more than 10 generations, Simcha Krauss was born on June 29, 1937, in Czernowitz, in what is now Ukraine, and grew up in the Romanian city of Sibiu. His father, Abraham Krauss, was the city’s chief rabbi; his mother, Pearl Ginzberg was a traditional rebbetzin and homemaker.

The family survived the Holocaust, but with Communists taking over Romania, the family fled to the United States in 1948. The elder Rabbi Krauss was appointed leader of a congregation in Upper Manhattan, near the George Washington Bridge.

Simcha studied at Yeshiva Chasam Sofer in Brooklyn and then, after high school, at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin, which ordained him and where he studied with Rabbi Hutner. He also received a bachelor’s degree in political science from City College of New York and a master’s in that subject from the New School in Manhattan.

His first pulpits were in Utica, N.Y., and St. Louis, and he simultaneously taught political science at local colleges. Those positions were followed by his appointment as leader of Young Israel of Hillcrest, his Queens congregation, where he remained for 25 years. He taught classes at Yeshiva University and was active in the Religious Zionists of America, serving as its president for a time. His wife, Esther (Wiederman) Krauss became the founding principal of Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls in Teaneck, N.J., where its students could study Talmud, whose labyrinthine legal arguments had traditionally been reserved for boys and men.