The End of the Yeshiva World of Eastern Europe

By 5699 Eastern Europe was the world centre of Jewish learning: Slabodka, Telz, Mir, Radin, Kletsk, Baranovich, Kamenetz and Ponevezh in Lithuania and Belarus; Chachmei Lublin and a hundred hasidic courts—Ger, Belz, Bobov, Alexander, Satmar—in Poland; and the Beis Yaakov network founded by Sarah Schenirer in Krakow for girls.

All of it vanished almost at once—in three or four years. In June and July of 5701 the mass shootings began in Lithuania. Rabbi Avrohom Yitzchok Bloch, head of the Telz yeshiva, was murdered with his students. Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman, head of the Baranovich yeshiva and the closest disciple of the Chofetz Chaim, was killed in Kovno on 11 Tammuz 5701; witnesses recorded that on the way he told his students that Heaven evidently considered them righteous, since their bodies were chosen as atonement for all Israel. Rabbi Menachem Ziemba, the last of Warsaw's great rabbis, refused to leave the ghetto, supported the uprising and died in Nisan 5703.

Libraries, manuscripts and the living chain from teacher to student were lost with them. Of tens of thousands of yeshiva students, hundreds survived—and those hundreds became the foundation of the new Torah world.