Rav Gershon Liebman רב גרשון ליבמן
Novardok musar in France: some forty houses of study, begun after the camps
Born in Staryi Ostropil in Ukraine—hence the name Ostropoler. He learned in the Novardok yeshivot and before the war was with Rav Avraham Yaffen in Bialystok.
He went through the whole war: first a Soviet prison, then German camps. In the Bialystok ghetto he kept an underground yeshiva; in the camp, where men were killed for it, he obtained tefillin and a Torah scroll and gave musar talks—on how a man stays a man as long as he himself wills it. In the autumn of 1945, still in Bergen-Belsen, he opened a yeshiva for the survivors: the letter in which he announced it survives.
In 1948 he moved to France and began building there from nothing. By the end of his life there were some forty Novardok houses of study in France—yeshivot at Fublaines, Armentières and Bussières, schools, a women's division; thousands passed through them. He died in Paris in 1997 and is buried in Jerusalem.
On the timeline
Places
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- Rav Gershon Liebman's letter on the founding of the yeshiva at Bergen-Belsen, Cheshvan 1945 — a yeshiva for the survivors half a year after the liberation
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years 1905–1997, Novardok and Bialystok, the camps, France from 1948
Basis: documents and evidence.