For anyone unfamiliar with a religious Jewish community, the best reference point may actually be a college town. My wife and I spent many of our higher education years in Cambridge, England, and Princeton, New Jersey, and we think that the parallels to Monsey are thought provoking.
First off, the members of both communities are passionately and singularly preoccupied. Whereas in Cambridge, professors and students focus on the scholarly pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, in Monsey, rabbis and talmidim focus on the scholarly pursuit of Torahor knowledge of God for its own sake. In Princeton, status accrues to the individual with the oldest car and the longest list of publications. Monsey may lack Princeton’s neo-European architecture and Old World orthodoxies (obviously, no one here believes that Jewish history is a “myth”), but the car of choice is used, the average Joe has written at least one sefer, and our great ones or gedolim live in small wooden cottages.
Princeton’s most renowned resident, Albert Einstein, would minimize the intellectual capital wasted on the trivialities of dressing in the morning by keeping a dozen identical suits and pairs of shoes in his closet. Dressed primarily in black and white, Monsey denizens are similarly single-minded. Indeed, no one is certain if our rosh yeshiva sleeps.
Yeshivas Kol Ya’akov or the Voice of Jacob College sits midway up the gentle slope rising westward from the center of town. A veritable Monsey institution, it has been in existence for some twenty-five years. For Jews who wish to return to a normative Jewish life (my wife and I are midtown Manhattan émigrés) it is Ellis Island and Harvard all wrapped up in one.
The fact that this single institution can simultaneously function as an entry point into the normative Jewish community and an educational platform through which a returnee can achieve the level of scholarship required to be mainstreamed into Orthodoxy’s most esteemed learning institutions says a great deal about the resilience of the pintele Yid or Jewish soul. For what took numerous generations to contort into faux European appears to be mostly rectifiable through a few years of dedicated study.
Kol Ya’akov’s alumni, which today number in the thousands and occupy positions of leadership around the world, are wont to reminisce about the yeshiva’s early years when a smaller structure than the one used today was bursting at the seams and the rosh yeshiva was finally forced to turn applicants away. “I’m willing to sleep under the rosh yeshiva’s desk,” one boy pleaded, only to learn that the spot was already occupied.
While the demand for admission to Kol Ya’akov remains high and expanding the physical plant tops the yeshiva’s priority list, today’s new students can generally count on a sleeping in a bed.
Named after HaRav Ya’akov Kamenetsky, zt”l the co-leader of American Orthodoxy (with HaRav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l) for the better part of the 20th century, the yeshiva was founded and is run to this day by the rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Leib Tropper. He is a follower of and close adviser to Rav Feinstein’s son, HaRav Reuven Feinstein, shlita.
Notwithstanding the awe-inspiring names and titles, anyone trying to conjure an image of our rosh yeshiva would be ill-advised to turn to Hollywood stereotypes. Forget the even-keeled Spencer Tracy of “Boy’s Town.” Ditch the placid Dalai Lama. This religious leader won’t be found in central casting. The rosh yeshiva’s roots are firmly planted in the Yiddishkeit of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and like the Talmud tractates on which he was weaned, he is nothing if not complex. He will be the first to tell you that he is “driven” and that he needs to be “better organized,” and his closest associates, like the yeshiva’s executive director, Rabbi Moshe Raice, will wearily nod in agreement while making the point that the rosh yeshiva is a Torah genius and kiruv miracle worker.