A Living Treasure,Rivkah Blau

As we celebrate Shavuot and consider how the Torah travels across the globe and through time, it just the right moment to meet a guide to six generations of this transmission, Rebbetzin Miriam Goldschmidt of Jerusalem.

Rebbetzin Goldschmidt memories go back to her grandfather Rav Nosson Zvi Finkel (1849-1927), the Alter, the venerable one, a powerful personality who led the yeshiva in Slabodka, Lithuania. Her vision goes forward to her great-grandson, whose parents flew from Canada to study Torah in Israel.

In the century and a half since the birth of the rebbetzin famous ancestor, transportation has changed from horse and wagon to jet plane, but Torah life is constant.

During interviews in April and November 2005, Rebbetzin Goldschmidt brought to life a more complex world than the olden days of popular imagination. Her parents, Rav Shlomo Yehuda Leib and Sara Liba Plachinsky, moved for the sake of their children education from Vishkis, where he was the third generation in his family to serve as rabbi, to Dvinsk in Latvia, where they were happy to find a Torah elementary school that was co-ed through fourth grade.

Although two extraordinary scholars, the Rogatchover (Rav Yosef Rosen, author of the Tzofnat Panei ch) and Rav Meir Simcha HaKohen (known for his Or Samei ch and Meshech Hochmah) lived in Dvinsk, the city religious community was small. Since it could not sustain a high school, Miriam went in 1929 to live with her maternal aunt and uncle Rebbetzin Gutel and Rav Isaac Sher in Lithuania.

While Bais Yaakov schools are justly famous, it is important to note that there were schools for girls in Kovna, Telz and Ponevez in Lithuania, and in Riga, Latvia. Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch had already founded a high school for girls in the middle of the nineteenth century. Rebbetzin Goldschmidt has a photograph from the early 1930's of students and teachers from the Kovna and Telz schools on the dock near a boat they rented for a joint trip. A live wire from her youth on, Miriam is in the center of the front row.

In Kovna school began at 8 a.m. with Shacharit led by a student chazzanit. Since they said brachot at home, the students davened an abbreviated tefillah: Baruch Sh mar through Sh oneh Esrei, then Ashrei, Aleinu and Shir Shel Yom. Classes went until 2 p.m. with a break at noon for the girls to eat lunch at home.

There were preparatory classes, then a complete high school and classes beyond. A student who passed the matriculation exams could go on to the university. Although Kovna had more than one gymnasium for secular studies, the religious school was so esteemed that non-observant families also sent their daughters to it.

When an important visitor came to Kovna or to Telz, he spoke at the girls school as well as at the boys yeshiva. Rebbetzin Goldschmidt remembered especially talks by Rav Joseph Carlebach (1882-1942) of Hamburg, the great Torah scholar and rabbinic leader. (Rav Carlebach founded the first Hebrew high school in German-occupied Kovna during World War I, but Miriam was only an infant then. The family continues to enrich Jewish life: his son, Rav Shlomo Carlebach, is a masterful Torah mentor whose daughter Elisheva is a noted professor of Jewish history).

Rav David Carlebach, who later made aliyah, was Miriam first principal in the gymnasium, followed by Mr. Teitz, a religious man who was not a rav. Dr. Valdberg, a medical doctor, taught hygiene and psychology, but also knew history and taught that as well. He had a sense of humor and was an exemplary model of Torah and secular wisdom. Arav, Shmuel Katz, taught German.

At school the girls studied Chumash, Nevi m, halacha, Jewish history, and a full range of secular subjects. Hebrew, Lithuanian, German and Russian were all required; when there was a choice for the fifth language between English and French, Miriam opted for English, which served her well years later in British Mandate Palestine. Students read literary classics, ot like today, she said, hen the young people know so little. Gymnastics, arts and crafts and choir were all part of the curriculum.

When she mentioned that Hebrew was spoken in all the Jewish and secular courses, I commented that it sounded like Yavneh in Telz. es, she said, he two were sister schools.

(Rebbetzin Chaya Ausband in Wickliffe, Ohio, confirmed that Hebrew was used throughout the day at Yavneh in Lithuania, and said that teachers wrote to students in Hebrew during vacation to keep up their skills.)

Kovna was a city surrounded by the Neman River on one side and the Vilia River on the other. Miriam lived in Slabodka, a suburb separated by the Vilia River from the larger city. Rav Sher, her uncle, headed the yeshiva that was called by the name of the neighborhood, much as we say akewood when we mean ais Medrash Govoha today.

A wooden bridge that spanned the water provided excitement at the end of the winter. When the river, which was frozen from after Sukkot until Pesach, began to thaw, chunks of ice built up; if they crashed into the bridge, it splintered. My father, who studied in Slabodka, had told us about once getting off the bridge just before it was swept away. I did not include this story when I wrote his biography because I thought readers might find it hard to believe. ot at all, Rebbetzin Goldschmidt told me. t happened more than once until an iron bridge replaced the wooden one. When I mentioned that Mark Twain said the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable, she laughed. This sophisticated nonagenarian knew who Mark Twain was.

Many leaders of religious life in the twentieth century studied in Slabodka; some recorded their memories of how Rebbetzin Goldschmidt grandfather, the Alter, encouraged each person to develop his talents and to make his unique contribution for Torah. It was not an enclosed life; although Torah was the center, Rebbetzin Goldschmidt said people were expected to be aware of what goes on in the world and to appreciate the best efforts of the human mind.

From the biblical account of man creation the Alter emphasized gadlut ha dam, the responsibility and opportunities we each have for creativity. He touched the lives of rabbanim and roshei yeshiva, among them Rav Yitzchak Hutner, Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, Rav Aharon Kotler, Rav David Liebowitz, Rav Yaakov Ruderman and Rav Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg.

The heads of the yeshiva were not removed from the ordinary concerns of life. People came to the Shers with all sorts of questions, even consulting with the rebbetzin on what clothing to buy. Rav Sher would meet with an engaged couple before the wedding to discuss how to create a good marriage. He recommended that a husband and wife eat breakfast together, to find time to talk and share their lives.

(At a recent conference sponsored by the Center for the Jewish Future for teachers of taharat hamishpacha, one recommendation was to institute premarital counseling for engaged couples the practice of Rav Sher seventy years ago.)

When Miriam graduated in 1933 it was already evident to her that Hitler was a danger to the civilized world. She wrote a paper in her final term on how ominous the situation was in Germany.

The man she would marry was a student in 1933, first at the branch of the yeshiva in Hebron, then in Slabodka. Fortunately, the stay in Hebron meant that Rav Goldschmidt had a Palestinian passport, which enabled the young couple to move at the end of 1940 to what was then called Palestine.

Rebbetzin Goldschmidt learned how some of the Jews in Hebron, including her husband and his brother, had been saved from the Arab pogrom of 1929. Arabs carrying knives surrounded a house where a hundred people were hidden. The British police watched, but did nothing. The Arab owner of the house told the would-be attackers that they must adhere to their culture tradition of hospitality and not harm his guests. When the British police saw an Arab stopping Arabs, they began to shoot and the attackers fled.

But the pictures of handsome young men and beautiful young women on the walls of the rebbetzin's apartment included relatives and friends who were not so fortunate and were murdered in Hebron or in Europe during World War II.

When the her granddaughter from Toronto arrived with her infant son for a visit, Rebbetzin Goldschmidt's face lit up while she played with the laughing baby. In the hundred and fifty-six years between the birth of the Alter and the birth of this tiny new descendant, more than one enemy had tried to destroy our people. This great-great-great-grandson of the Alter will, God willing, grow up to make his contribution to the Jewish future.

Dr. Rivkah Blau is the author of "Vesamachta Bechayecha," the Hebrew edition of her biography of HaRav Mordechai Pinchas Teitz, which has just been published in Israel by Urim.

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