Menachem Butler

One of the most distinguished rabbinic scholars ever to serve in England arrived there as the result of an almost unbelievable bureaucratic disaster involving the Russian army and a son who had been dead for twenty years. Rav Yisrael Chaim Daiches was born in Lithuania in 1850 and was recognized as an extraordinary Torah prodigy from an early age. Among the great Lithuanian rabbinic figures with whom he became associated were Rav Yehoshua Leib Diskin and Rav Yisrael Salanter, founder of the Mussar movement. He eventually became particularly renowned as an expert on the Talmud Yerushalmi, producing his monumental Netivot Yerushalayim. There is a strong case for describing him as the most eminent rabbinic scholar living in England during the first half of the twentieth century. The story of how he ended up in England is quite extraordinary. In 1879, while Rav Daiches was visiting Vilna, he had a son. Tragically, the child died within a year, but for some reason the death was never properly registered with the Russian authorities. Twenty years later, when the dead child would have reached military age, an official conscription notice arrived ordering Rav Daiches’s son to report for service in the Imperial Russian army. There was one fairly obvious problem – the prospective soldier had been dead for two decades. Unfortunately, explaining this to the Russian authorities was a nonstarter. As a result of the oversight, Rav Daiches faced the prospect of a huge fine — and even paying the fine would apparently have cost him his government-recognized rabbinic position. So he fled Russia by crossing the nearby Prussian border and making his way to England, where a rabbinic position in Leeds had apparently been offered to him repeatedly over the years and which until then he had consistently refused. But in light of his legal problems in Russia, Leeds looked rather attractive. He arrived in Leeds in 1901 – and immediately landed in controversy. Two established immigrant rabbis in Leeds, Rav Sinson and Rav Yoel Leib Herzog — father of the future Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rav Yitzchak Isaac Herzog — were alarmed by the arrival of this formidable Lithuanian scholar and believed he was attempting to impose his rabbinic authority over their communities. So they took Rav Daiches to court. The judge ultimately referred the rabbinic dispute to Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler, who rejected the attempt to force Rav Daiches out of Leeds, although he did warn the newcomer not to interfere in the communities of the other rabbis. Rav Daiches remained in Leeds until his passing in 1937, becoming one of the towering rabbinic personalities of Anglo-Jewry. But he was also a controversial halachic figure, famous for his willingness to be meikil where other rabbis were considerably more stringent. Some of his more machmir rabbinic colleagues even had a particularly nasty nickname for Leeds: they called it “Ir HaNidaiches.”It was a play on Ir HaNidachas (with the Ashkenazi pronunciation), the biblical term for a city condemned for idolatry, with Rav Daiches’s surname substituted into the phrase. Rabbinic humor can be brutal. One of the most extraordinary examples of Rav Daiches’s tendency toward halachic leniency involved a synagogue in Hull, in northeastern England. In 1913, a group of Jewish families bought a former church building in Cogan Street and converted it into what became Hull’s Central Synagogue. Soon afterwards, they discovered something rather inconvenient about their new shul: underneath the church was a crypt, and inside the crypt were buried bodies. This created an obvious halachic problem for kohanim. The congregation’s rabbi, Rav Yaakov Dovid Luria, approached Rav Daiches and Rav Sinson in Leeds to ask whether kohanim could nevertheless enter the synagogue. Rav Daiches ruled that they could. Then, in 1920, Rav Mordechai Zevi Schwartz – later of Cleveland OH – became rabbi of Hull. When he investigated the matter and discovered that there really were bodies buried beneath the synagogue, he was deeply unhappy with Rav Daiches’s heter and wrote asking him to withdraw it. Rav Daiches did not withdraw it. Instead, in 1928 he published a pamphlet – Taharat HaKodesh – containing a lengthy responsum defending his position. Rav Schwartz responded with a pamphlet of his own, Le-havdil Beyn HaTamei Uveyn HaTahor, containing a detailed refutation of Rav Daiches and letters supporting his position from the Warsaw Beis Din and Rav Yitzchak Isaac Herzog. Rav Daiches responded by publishing another pamphlet, aggressively defending his original ruling and producing rabbinic heavyweights of his own in support — including the Rogatchover Gaon. And there was another rabbi who gave his approval: Rav Nachman Shlomo Greenspan. Which brings me to the remarkable letter now coming up for auction at Kedem on November 10. In August 1922, Rav Daiches was in Eastbourne, the seaside resort on England’s south coast, and he wrote a two-page handwritten letter to none other than Rav Nachman Shlomo Greenspan. Rav Greenspan was himself an extraordinary Lithuanian Torah scholar who became one of the important rabbinic figures in England and ultimately served as Rosh Yeshiva of Etz Chaim in London, alongside Rav Eliya Lopian. The letter concerns Rav Greenspan’s candidacy for a rabbinic position. Another candidate had been proposed, a Rav Heller from Lithuania, who was described as a “gaon and tzaddik from the Slabodka Yeshiva.” Rav Daiches was evidently not enthusiastic about Rav Heller getting the job and was supporting Rav Greenspan. I have no idea which rabbinic position they were fighting over, and frankly, more than a century later, it hardly matters. I have tried to identify this mysterious Rav Heller. There are several possibilities, including figures connected with Slabodka, such as Rav Ber Hirsch Heller, father-iin-law of Rav Yaakov Kamenetzky, but so far I haven't found enough evidence to identify which Rav Heller it was with any certainty. What is important is what the letter represents: two major products of the great Lithuanian Torah world corresponding with each other in England, part of the extraordinary transplantation of Eastern European rabbinic scholarship into a British Jewish community that was being transformed by mass immigration. And as the second Taharat HaKodesh pamphlet shows, their relationship continued. During Rav Daiches’s long-running controversy over the Hull synagogue, Rav Greenspan was ultimately one of the distinguished rabbis prepared to put his name behind Rav Daiches’s controversial position. There is one other side to Rav Daiches that is worth mentioning, because we have an unusually vivid description of him from his grandson, David Daiches. First, a word about David Daiches. He was a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, a distinguished professor of English literature, and one of Britain’s leading twentieth-century literary scholars. He wrote major works on Shakespeare and Robert Burns, as well as the classic A Critical History of English Literature. He also wrote extensively about Scotch Whiskey. But it is his memoir of growing up as the son of an Orthodox rabbi in Edinburgh, Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood, that is particularly relevant – especially his description of his distinguished grandfather. As a boy, David knew perfectly well that his grandfather in Leeds was one of the great rabbinic scholars of his generation and a world-renowned authority on the Talmud Yerushalmi. When he went to visit him, he therefore prepared himself for serious conversations in Hebrew and expected profound words of Torah wisdom from the venerable rabbi. But what he got was something completely different. In Two Worlds, David recalled that his grandfather had a particular fondness for what he called “low jokes.” Instead of testing his Hebrew or discussing Talmud, Rav Daiches would tease his grandson about girls, clothes, kilts and bagpipes. He would ask whether David disappeared into the bathroom so that he could secretly drink brandy and smoke cigars, and once suggested that the sixty-five-year-old cleaning lady was pining for young David to take her to the cinema. David describes walking into his grandfather’s study and finding him bent over a huge sefer, stroking his beard and looking like the very embodiment of rabbinic grandeur. David would arrive having prepared himself for an intellectual encounter, only for his grandfather to close the sefer, ask him to fetch a cigar from the cupboard, and start teasing him about some thoroughly un-rabbinic subject. Then David would leave the room, look back through the window from the garden, and see his grandfather immediately return to his sefer, hand on his beard, head gently moving as he studied. Rav Daiches also apparently lived in rather magnificent old-world style. Before dinner he would sit at the head of the table in his slippers, with a little cloth laid out specially for him containing a bottle of cognac, dark rye bread and pickled herring. He would knock back a glass of brandy, eat some bread and herring, and only then would the proper meal begin. Congregants and admirers brought him fine Havana cigars, bottles of brandy, and occasionally a duck or chicken. It is an extraordinary little portrait of a man who, from his photographs and published works, looks every inch the austere Lithuanian gaon — but who apparently had a wicked sense of humor, enjoyed a good cigar and a glass of brandy, and had absolutely no interest in behaving solemnly for the benefit of his grandson. And now this remarkable two-page letter, entirely in Rav Daiches’s own hand and signed by him in Eastbourne in the summer of 1922, has come up for sale. More than a century later, it is a small but fascinating physical remnant of that extraordinary generation of Lithuanian rabbis who brought their Torah scholarship, their rabbinic politics, their controversies — and evidently their sense of humor — to England. Here is the link to the Kedem lot: il.bidspirit.com/ui/lotPage/… Lot 162. Letter of Rav Yisrael Chaim Daiches. Eastbourne, 24 Av 5682 — 1922.

A series of 3 remarkable original photographs, taken in Jerusalem in the early 1960s, are up for auction next week at Kedem in Jerusalem. They document a fascinating and somewhat surprising episode in the history of the Satmar community, involving a Chassidic Rebbe who had once been one of the closest members of Rav Yoel Teitelbaum’s inner circle, but who in the photos is sitting with senior representatives of the Zionist establishment to help establish a new Chassidic community in Israel. The Rebbe in the photographs is Rav Chanania Yom Tov Lipa Mayer-Teitelbaum, the Sassover Rebbe, a blood relative of Rav Yoelish, and ultimately they became even more closely related by marriage. He was born in 1904, the son of Rav Chanoch Henoch Mayer, the Sassov-Keretzky Rebbe, and Rebbetzin Esther, daughter of Rav Chanania Yom Tov Lipa Teitelbaum, the Kedushas Yom Tov of Sighet. Rav Yoelish was also a son of the Kedushas Yom Tov, which made him Rav Chanania Yom Tov Lipa Mayer-Teitelbaum’s uncle. In 1924, Rav Chanania married Rav Yoelish’s daughter, Chaya Roiza. After his marriage, Rav Chanania lived very close to Rav Yoelish and became one of his most trusted associates. He was his right-hand man in administering the yeshivas in Orshiva, Krula and Satmar. He also served as the rabbi of Semihaly and as the head of the Beis Din of Satmar. To be clear: Rav Chanania wasn’t some distant relative who happened to have a connection with Satmar. He was intimately involved with Rav Yoelish, his family, and his institutions, and was deeply embedded in the world that would eventually become synonymous with Rav Yoelish’s uncompromising opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel. During the Holocaust, Rav Chanania and his wife Chaya Roiza escaped through Romania and they reached Eretz Yisrael in 1943. Rav Yoelish escaped later, ultimately reaching safety through the famous Kastner rescue train. After arriving in Jerusalem, Rav Chanania established the Torah institutions of Satmar there. During the War of Independence he left Eretz Yisrael, and eventually moved to America, where he once again joined his father-in-law. Then, in 1953, his wife Chaya Roiza died having not had any children. Two years later, the childless Rav Chanania remarried. His second wife was Bluma, widow of the remarkable Lithuanian Torah scholar Rav Mordechai “Mottel” Pogremanski. With this marriage, and the children they had together, Rav Chanania began a new chapter in his life, rebuilding the Sassover Chassidic dynasty in America. But the story took another fascinating turn at the beginning of the 1960s. Rav Chanania returned to Israel, where he decided to establish a new Chassidic community between Ganei Tikva and Kiryat Ono. The new neighborhood would be called Kiryat Yismach Moshe, and establishing it required something that would have been utterly contrary to the approach championed by his former father-in-law: direct cooperation with the institutions of the State of Israel and the Zionist establishment. The man sitting opposite the Sassover Rebbe is the legendary Zionist pioneer Yosef Weitz, one of the most important figures in the history of the Jewish National Fund and Zionist land acquisition in Eretz Yisrael. From 1960 until 1964 Weitz was the first director of the Israel Lands Administration. At this historic meeting, the Sassover Rebbe and Yosef Weitz were discussing the establishment of Kiryat Yismach Moshe. Behind them, hanging prominently on the wall, are large topographical maps of Israel. On the reverse of the photographs are official stamps identifying them as photographs produced by the photographic service of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. At the time, this meeting must have been highly controversial. Rav Yoel Teitelbaum’s opposition to Zionism was more than just a theological disagreement with Zionist ideology. His position demanded the total separation of his followers from the Zionist state and its institutions, which became one of the defining principles of Satmar. And yet, sitting across the table from one of the most senior officials responsible for administering land in the State of Israel, was Rav Yoel’s own former son-in-law and close blood relative, a man who had served as his right-hand man and as head of the Beis Din in Satmar, and who had personally established Satmar’s Torah institutions in Jerusalem. I want to stress that the Sassover Rebbe clearly wasn’t becoming a Zionist by meeting Weitz, and these photographs don't suggest that he was. But the photos do reveal that by this stage of his life his approach to dealing with the State of Israel and its institutions had diverged significantly from the uncompromising separation advocated by his former father-in-law (who was still alive and very vocal about his anti-Zionism). That is what makes these images so fascinating. They capture a moment when one of the closest members of Rav Yoelish’s family and former inner circle sat down with representatives of institutions that Satmar regarded as ideologically illegitimate, and worked with them to establish a Chassidic community in the State of Israel. Kiryat Yismach Moshe was indeed established, and Rav Chanania Yom Tov Lipa headed it as its rabbi. He died in 1966, only a few years after these photographs were taken. Today his son, Rav Yosef David Teitelbaum – who studied under the famous Klausenberger Rebbe, who also broke away from Rav Yoelish’s uncompromising attitude towards the State of Israel – serves as the Sassover Rebbe and as Rav of Kiryat Yismach Moshe. Whatever one thinks about the ideological issues involved, these photographs are an extraordinary physical record of a little-known chapter in the complicated relationship between the Charedi world, the Satmar dynasty, and the State of Israel during its early decades. Here is the link to the Kedem lot: il.bidspirit.com/ui/lotPage/… Lot 307. Rav Chanania Yom Tov Lipa Mayer-Teitelbaum, the Sassover Rebbe. Jerusalem, early 1960s.