The Vaad Hatzala and the transplanting of the yeshiva world
American rabbis fought for visas for the heads of Europe's yeshivas. Those who came opened in America what had burned in Lithuania and Poland.
In November 1939 the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada set up the Vaad Hatzala, a rescue committee, at first for the yeshivas that had fled from Poland to Lithuania. Rabbi Eliezer Silver of Cincinnati led it. They worked with whatever came to hand: Curaçao entry visas, Chiune Sugihara's Japanese transit permits, money through neutral countries, later parcels and bribes.
On 6 October 1943, three days before Yom Kippur, some four hundred rabbis marched to the Capitol and the White House—the only Jewish march in Washington during the war. Roosevelt did not receive them and left by a side door. But the noise helped: three months later, on 22 January 1944, the War Refugee Board was created by executive order, and it saved tens of thousands, mostly in Hungary and Romania.
The surviving heads of yeshivas arrived and began again. In 1943 Rabbi Aharon Kotler opened Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey, with fourteen students; today it is the largest yeshiva in the world. Telz settled in Cleveland, Mir in Brooklyn. In 1944 Torah Umesorah was founded and built a network of Jewish day schools across the country.
America, which the yeshiva world had once refused to enter, calling it a "treife country", became its principal home.
Sources
Documents of the period
- Records of the Vaad Hatzala, Union of Orthodox Rabbis, 1939–1946 — visas, transits and the money routes of rescue
- Executive Order 9417 establishing the War Refugee Board, 22 January 1944 — created three months after the rabbis' march
Basis: documents and evidence.
People and places
New York · Rabbi Aharon Kotler · Rabbi Eliezer Silver · Igrot Moshe · Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzenski · Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky · Rav Avraham Yaffen · Rav Chaim Pinchas Scheinberg · Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam of Bobov, the Third