The Lithuanian yeshivot between the wars

The twenty-odd years between the wars were the time of the Lithuanian world of learning at its strongest.

The First World War scattered the yeshivot: the front ran through those very towns, and almost every one moved—Slabodka, Mir, and Rabbi Boruch Ber's Knesses Beis Yitzchok, which passed through Minsk, Kremenchug and Vilna. By the early 1920s they had gathered again, and their best years began.

The arrangement was one that had not existed before Volozhin. The yeshiva is not tied to a community: it is an institution in itself, lives on donations, gathers men from all over Eastern Europe, and often has nothing to do with the town whose name it bears except an address. Each had its own face, and they differed not in subject but in method.

Grodno. Rabbi Shimon Shkop from 1920: Brisker analysis together with the Netziv's clarity. Sha'arei Yosher is a book not about rulings but about what a ruling is made of.

Kamenetz. Rabbi Boruch Ber Leibowitz, Rabbi Chaim of Brisk's closest disciple, from 1926: through him the Brisker method passed to the next generation in its pure form.

Baranovich. Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman from 1921—a disciple of both Rabbi Chaim and the Chafetz Chaim; the yeshiva was small, and notes of his shiurim were studied all over Europe.

Mir. Rabbi Yeruchom Levovitz, the mashgiach: a post that exists in no other system of study. The rosh yeshiva answers for the analysis, the mashgiach for the person, and asks not what you know but what is becoming of you while you know it.

All of it rested on men and not on buildings, and so it ended quickly. Rabbi Yeruchom died in 1936. Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Boruch Ber both in 1939, in the first months of the war, still their own deaths. Rabbi Elchonon was shot at Kaunas on 11 Tammuz 5701. The Mir yeshiva went out through Vilna, Kobe and Shanghai and survived entire—the only one. The rest was destroyed along with the towns whose names those yeshivot bore.

The books survived, and the students. Through Rabbi Chaim Shmulevitz, Rabbi Dovid Povarsky and Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe all of it passed into the yeshivot of the Land of Israel and America—and stands there still.