Stories of Yeshiva College,Gil Student

It was over a decade ago and the large Yeshiva University beis medrash was full of books and tables, but only a few students. It was time for college classes and, at that time, the kollel learned in a different building.

The main beis medrash was never completely empty, but at certain times it came close. I was cutting class and learning in the beis medrash when a thirty-something chassid walked in, looked around, came up to me and innocently asked, "Es dos a yeshiva oy a college?" - "Is this a yeshiva or a college?"

I answered that it was both, to which he responded with a question that has resonated in my mind for years: "Ken zein a lawyer?" - "Can one become a lawyer?" I answered in the affirmative, which seemed to satisfy his curiosity.

This brief exchange, from over a decade ago, exemplifies the identity crisis that encompasses Yeshiva University, and Yeshiva College (the undergraduate school for men) in particular. Is it a professional training ground or a place for instilling Torah values or modern secular studies? The answer offered in the new book My Yeshiva College: 75 Years of Memories is that this institution of many contradictions is different things to different people.

YUdaica

Two years ago, in commemoration of Yeshiva College's 75^th anniversary, an industrious student named Menachem Butler proposed telling the stories of Yeshiva. Not the history of Yeshiva College, but the stories its graduates and instructors have to tell about their experiences in the college and its impact on their lives.

Together with Zev Nagel, the tireless editor of the school's newspaper, The Commentator, Butler set out to publish a special section in each issue of the paper with essays by Yeshiva graduates from throughout the decades. Little did they know that this project would turn into a phenomenon and then a book. What follows are my own perspectives on this enterprise - first as an avid reader, then as a contributor, and finally as the publisher of the resulting book.

One of the secrets to the success of this series, known by the clever name YUdaica, was Butler's ability to find Yeshiva graduates and ask them two crucial questions: Will you write an article for the YUdaica series? And, more important, can you recommend other possible writers?

In this simple way, Butler was able to access a wide range of graduates and obtain contributions from professors, community leaders, prominent rabbis, judges, lawyers, and a number of simply fascinating personalities from a broad spectrum of Yeshiva alumni.

Butler encouraged them to write not just history, but their story. What did Yeshiva mean to them? Which experiences or personalities changed them? Not surprisingly, this led toquite a bit of selective history, in which people wrote from their memories and impressions rather than from historical records. In a sense, this is even more telling about the impact of the school on its graduates.

When the articles started coming in, their topics were wide-ranging: biographies of some of Yeshiva's world-famous roshei yeshiva, reflections on controversial episodes in the school's history, discussions of teachers' educational philosophies, and general musings from illustrious graduates.

The Rosh Yeshiva

At one point during the gathering stage, Butler e-mailed me that he was able to contact Rav Nosson Kamenetsky, whose biography of his illustrious father had recently been publicly banned, and was looking for an idea for an article that he could propose to Rav Kamenetsky to write.

I remembered back to my time in Yeshiva, when Rav Kamenetsky would occasionally come for Shabbos and Yom Tov to visit his revered father-in-law, Rav Dovid Lifschitz. I therefore suggested that he write a biographical article of "Reb Dovid." However, his brother-in-law, Dr. Chaim Waxman, wrote that article, so, remembering a discussion in Rav Kamenetsky's book of R. Shlomo Polachek, the Maichater Illui, I recommended that he write a short biography of the head of the yeshiva that later opened as Yeshiva College.

Who was the Maichater Illui? In Rav Kamenetsky's words:

Born at the end of 1877, this genius was discovered by a Volozhin Yeshiva student, Aaron Rabinowitz, on a farm near the town of Maichat shortly before his twelfth birthday. Aaron convinced the slight and bashful boy to accompany him to the Volozhin Yeshiva, and introduced him to the Rosh Yeshiva, R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, as a candidate for enrollment in the yeshiva. Surprised that Rabinowitz had brought a mere child to his world-class yeshiva which students usually joined at sixteen or seventeen, R. Berlin made a dig at Rabinowitz and said, 'Why didn't you bring his crib along?!' Aaron replied, 'Let the Rosh Yeshiva test him and decide what size crib he needs.' As the brilliant Torah flashes flitted back and forth between the little boy and the wizened sage, the assistant rosh yeshiva,R. Hayim Soloveitchik, entered the room and joined in. R. Soloveitchik then brought the entrance test to a close by asking Shlomo where he was from, and when he received the reply, "From Maichat," R. Hayim announced: "Then you are the Maichater Illui." The epithet stuck to R. Polachek throughout his lifetime; even his posthumously published sefer of hiddushei Torah was named Hiddushei ha-Illui mi-Maichat.

His final destination was RIETS [Yeshiva's seminary], where he delivered his shi'urim four to five times weekly. He was also a distinguished member of the Agudat ha-Rabbanim, and his presence highlighted its conventions. He was active in raising funds for the assistance of destitute rabbis in Europe through the Ezras Torah organization, and he was a member of Mizrachi.The Maichater Illui was only fifty years old when he was summoned to the Yeshiva on high.

The Early Years

I was fascinated by the essays on the early years of Yeshiva College. Dr. Alvin Schiff, a longtime administrator at Yeshiva, shared his memories of the school in the late 1940's:

Max Bear came from the Samson Raphael Hirsch School in Frankfurt am Main to be the director of the dormitory. Everything about him was unique - his heavy accent, his booming high-pitched voice, his overly sincere desire to make the dormitory livable, and his difficulty in understanding the nature of American Jewish youth, not all of whom were as serious about their studies as he thought they should be.

In my junior year (1945-46), I was the chairman of the SOY Jewish Affairs Committee. As such, I had many discussions with Dr. Belkin about the relationship of the student body to Jewish issues. The period of 1945-47 was the memorable time of the United Nations resolution regarding Israel statehood. I represented Yeshiva University - Yeshiva received university status in 1945 - on the Youth Zionist Actions Committee (YZAC) and encouraged my fellow students to participate actively in pro-Israel programs and activities. Prior to the United Nations vote, YZAC organized a rally in midtown Manhattan, and I rounded up students to participate in it. The dean of YC, Dr. Moses L. Isaacs, who was a member of the Agudath Israel, did not take kindly to my involvement in and encouragement of the student participation in the rally. In fact, he brought the matter up at a faculty meeting, noting that I was disrupting the school schedule. But I was not censured. Interestingly, it was Dr. Belkin who came to my support.

Debate and Rebellion

One of the most contentious episodes was not one discussed in the series but that actually took place in it. Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg wrote about his experiences teaching at Yeshiva in the 1960's and his own spiritual odyssey that led him away from the school. In response to some of Rabbi Greenberg's claims about what occurred at that time, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein wrote in to the newspaper arguing with many of his former colleague's statements, using such strong terms as "sharpest revulsion," "what riles me," and "patently erroneous." This uncharacteristically harsh letter led to a lengthy response by Rabbi Greenberg.

Another controversy described in the series took place during my tenure at Yeshiva. In 1991, The Commentator discovered a plan by the school's administration to close down the graduate school for Jewish Studies. When students learned of this, they took to protesting this decision 60's-style. Michael Eisenberg, the editor of the newspaper at the time, wrote about it:

Like all great stories, this one started serendipitously. I was on line at a bar mitzvah buffet behind two Yeshiva board members and overheard the conversation about the decision to close BRGS. Through persistent questioning, we managed to get the story confirmed by other board members and then we printed The Commentatorissue one day early in an attempt to beat the administration to the announcement. We caught the faculty, students, and administration by surprise. Again, to our amazement, it mattered.

Students began organizing and my phone was ringing off the hook from concerned faculty members.Protests ensued almost immediately, including the first student emonstration I had seen at Yeshiva, which blocked the entrance to Furst Hall with a sit-in for hours. The protest then marched with a beating drum up to President Norman Lamm's office. I still remember the look on R. Lamm's secretary's face as the students entered the office. Frankly, the protests were a mix of angry students who had labored for degrees and thought the carpet was being pulled out from under them and high-minded Jewish academics for whom closing Revel violated their core beliefs about what a Jewish university should be.

College and Yeshiva

My own contribution to the series concerned a 1993-4 debate in the school newspaper between two very different faculty members - respected rosh yeshiva and rosh kollel Rav Aharon Kahn and popular English professor Dr. Will Lee. They debated the role of secular studies in Yeshiva, with Dr. Lee espousing the importance of secular studies and Rav Kahn arguing that Torah, and Torah alone, should be the primary focus of the students. As an introduction to this essay, I quoted a passage from a speech of R. Bernard Revel, the first president of Yeshiva, in which he implied that the purpose of the college in Yeshiva was to allow the students learning Torah an opportunity to gain a secular education. In other words, secular studies is only ancillary to learning Torah.

Shortly afterward, Dr. Lee published his own contribution to the YUdaica series - a careful analysis of R. Revel's speeches and writings:

Among the explicit "aims" for the new college, Revel underlined perhaps his most profound motivation: "the synthesis of the Jewish personality, bringing into harmony the mind of the Torah-true student youth and the modern mind." Revel wanted "an atmosphere where the age-old verities and the fruits of modern knowledge may be coordinated and compatibly absorbed." He wanted "a harmonization of spirit and culture, of faith and knowledge." A few years after YC opened, he proudly claimed that the college and the yeshiva together were already "blending the age-old faith and learning together with the tested knowledge of the world today." Jewish culture and religion represented an "integral phase" in the moral and spiritual development of mankind. The non-Jewish aspects of the "wisdom of the ages" therefore complemented Jewish wisdom. Revel's confident founding of a genuine college reflected both his visionary idealism and his practical conclusions about the needs of traditional Jews, but it also reflected his own intellectual journey and his level of comfort with the pursuit of knowledge of all kinds.

While I like to flatter myself in thinking that this article was written in response to mine, it more likely took months of painstaking research and had nothing to do with me. Regardless, I now concede that my single quote is less reflective of R. Revel's full range of thought than Dr. Lee's extensive analysis.

The Combined Story

The many different stories in this series, and its resulting book, demonstrate the many different people who shaped Yeshiva and its students. Yeshiv University President Richard Joel writes in his introduction to the book:

For me, most striking about this volume is how many of the articles tell the story of individual teachers and role models instead of the story of Yeshiva College as an institution. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Yeshiva has always been that as a small college our students were intimately exposed to the warmth, caring, and valuable counsel of their teachers, rebbeim and administrators.

We have been graced by a cadre of roshei yeshiva who deeply believed that the highest levels of Torah can be taught in America.In addition to their superior levels of Torah knowledge, the roshei yeshiva described in this volume, and countless others who are still waiting their due publicity, were inquisitive intellects who inspired their students to be inquisitive and use their Torah knowledge to make real contributions to society.Although each vignette is of great value on its own, when the articles in this volume are viewed together as a unit, they become all the more significant. As a unit, the snapshots found in this volume depict not only the growth and development of Yeshiva College, but the emergence of a strong, proud and vibrant Orthodoxy.

While it is true that "ken zein a lawyer" - Yeshiva offers an excellent education that provides a wide array of career opportunities - the school does much more than that. It shapes lives, molds opinions and provides training and guidance for many of the leaders of the Jewish community.

Gil Student is president of Yashar Books and maintains a popular blog at www.hirhurim.blogspot.com.

Read Comments (1)

Stories of Yeshiva College , Gil Student

More on the Maitcheter
Date 09:07, 07-9, 06

An extended eulogy on the Maitcheter appeared in the Rabbi Yitzchok Elchonon publication "Heidenu". It was penned by one of his talmidim, my father z"l, Rabbi Moshe Goldberg - later rabbi in New Orleans. The hesped is written in Hebrew and contains much biographical material.

Kadish Goldberg
Kibbutz Tirat Zvi