Yehuda Geberer: What’s the History of the American Yeshiva World?

Transcripts are produced by Sofer.ai and lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

David Baskevkin: Hi friends and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore a different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host David Bashevkin and this month we’re exploring the American yeshiva world. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18Forty.org, that’s 18Forty.org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings and weekly emails. I think one of my favorite books that I have ever read genuinely in my entire life, like what are the books that have really shaped my Jewish identity the way I look at the world, so there are a few of them.

I think Samuel Freedman, a previous guest on 18Forty, and his book Jew vs. Jew, which came out just a little more than 25 years ago, kind of talks about some of the contemporary conflicts. If it’s not a book that you have ever read, I would really urge you to get a copy of it; it’s called Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. It is an absolutely crucial book. It’s not the type of book that you’ll agree or disagree with because he really, I think, does an excellent job of presenting both sides of these very very contentious episodes and why they kind of animated the larger American Jewish community.

That is one book. There’s another book—we also had him on briefly, though I’d love to have him on again—The Jewish Self by Rabbi Jeremy Kagan. Absolutely just transformative book. I think the best presentation of contemporary theology, but not in a like heavy academic philosophical way, in a way that’s really talking to you, the reader, and it’s based on the writings of Rav Tzadok and the Ramchal.

It’s just extraordinary. He’s written other books that have gone on to win awards. I fell in love with this because I read it when I was studying in yeshiva in Ner Israel in Baltimore. And again, that is The Jewish Self by Jeremy Kagan.

There is a third book that really I want to discuss today because it relates so directly to the topic that we are exploring, which is the American yeshiva world, and that is a book that really details the history of the yeshiva world not beginning on American shores, but really in Europe, and that is Shaul Stampfer’s book Lithuanian Yeshivas of the 19th Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning. This is a book that regardless of your level of affiliation, your background, your relationship to the American yeshiva world, you love it, you hate it, you have critiques, whatever it is, everybody’s got feelings and opinions that they feel like they need to share. Whatever your stance is, I would urge you do yourself a favor, whether it’s on Shabbos or slowly over the week—you know we always try to encourage reading on Shabbos—I read this over Shabbos. This is a book that just mixes history and memoir.

It’s so wonderful. Again, Shaul Stampfer: Lithuanian Yeshivas of the 19th Century. And I want to share this story because it’s really a story and I don’t want it to be misunderstood; this is not, as my students would call it, a T4 flex. T4 being an abbreviation for therefore, where you just kind of tell a story that makes you look good.

I look good in this story, but that’s not why I’m telling it. It’s really a story that is a testament both to Professor Stampfer’s character as well as a fascinating insight into the yeshiva world. So Professor Shaul Stampfer’s father was a rabbi in Portland, Oregon, Rabbi Joshua Stampfer, born in 1921 and he died in 2019. It was around that time that I was invited to serve as scholar-in-residence over Shavuos in Portland, Oregon.

We had a blast. I stayed at my dear friend Meira Spivak and Chanan Spivak. And I had an amazing Shabbos and I’m giving a gazillion shiurim. I’m still kind of young on the scholar-in-residence circuit so I’m just coming, I’m like, oh you want to speak through the night, sure no problem, and I gave a host of different shiurim.

And I came home and it was really lovely. And probably six months later I got an email from Professor Stampfer and in that email email it said hi out of the clear blue sky somebody whose books are in my pantheon like they’re it Professor Stampfer emailed me and said hi I was visiting my father in Portland Oregon I was davening in the local orthodox shul and I saw your source sheets lying around and I had given a class called R-rated responsa some of the juicy more salacious stories and incidents that are discussed in responsa literature responsa literature is a genre that I hope our listeners or should become familiar with it’s really fascinating it’s the questions that are sent in real time to rabbis to answer and we don’t have that so much anymore because everyone voice notes or calls their rabbi but we have a huge body of literature called responsa literature shailos and teshuvos where people are sending in questions and I kind of compiled a bunch of the very juicy R-rated ones just really wild stories it’s late Shavuos night you got to keep people up at three in the morning so I went through that and he emailed me and said I thought it was absolutely lovely and it’s nice to know that there are people who are kind of transmitting a more historical perspective give some understanding of what life was like for Jews in Europe before the war centuries ago it was an absolutely lovely email which to me again just to return back I’m not saying that oh wow I give the greatest shiur I’m not pitching to be a scholar in residence I think it was absolutely a remarkable testament of a world-renowned professor’s character that you are davening in a local shul while visiting your father you pick up a source sheet which I do all the time you see what’s lying around there you read through and you like it okay that’s not unusual what is unusual and to me a genuine testament to Professor Stampfer’s character is then he googled my email address and sent me a good word a kind word of encouragement do you know how much that meant to me at that time to get an email from a world-renowned scholar saying keep up the good work you’re doing wonderful I mean something that has always stayed with me and any opportunity I or really anyone has to encourage somebody who’s entering you know the world of education the world of Torah trust me you have a thousand people telling you don’t do it don’t go into it it’s not stable you’re not going to make enough money etc etc those are voices too that are important but I think it’s important to be the person who sees somebody who’s doing high quality work at a young age and you take the time to contact them and share a kind word I mean to me what a jaw-dropping act of chesed so it was from that email exchange that I had asked him I said you know I’m going to be in Israel this summer this is going back a few years can we get together and he was incredibly gracious still incredibly gracious and we met together in his home one of the things that we spoke about I said look you have this incredible book and I asked him I said of all of the history of the Yeshiva world of everything that you examined of all the memoirs and the drama and the wildness what is a story that kind of stayed with you that inspires you about the early Yeshiva world I don’t know if he even thought for a moment but he came up with a very clear story and that is a story that took place in the Telshe Yeshiva I’m not exactly sure when the circumstances because it has to do with one of the great fights that broke out in Telshe Yeshiva and any Telshe alumni especially from the sixties the seventies they’ve got some wild stories and that goes back a ways because he introduces this section about the Telshe Yeshiva where he writes as follows Telshe was unusual not only in its administrative setup but also the intensity of the conflicts that raged within the Yeshiva Telshe was unique in that its students were very passionate very excited and there were fights that broke out in the Yeshiva and some of these are really juicy they’re wild there were fights that began in the late 1800s a lot of them were battles over whether to incorporate what is known the Musar movement the Musar movement was a movement that is normally attributed to Rav Yisrael Salanter but it was a movement that was really trying to get within the structures and institutions of the Yeshiva world and encourage the students of the Yeshiva world to spend time daily on character refinement that is a very superficial one sentence answer but it led to massive battles because the question was why should we need supplemental character refinement isn’t the whole purpose of Torah study and the whole enterprise of studying Talmud shouldn’t that be enough that alone allow one to refine one’s character might not work for everyone okay so the sick people the messed up people they’ll study these volumes that discuss character refinement and focus on their individual character but your average person in Yeshiva the argument went and this was a battle starting in the 1840s believe it or not 1840 is really when I believe Rav Yisrael Salanter started teaching and kind of began the Musar movement 1840 hey-o there are people who connect it to kind of the significance of 1840 but either way there’s this movement and in the Telshe Yeshiva I’m talking about the Telshe Yeshiva that was in Europe not the transplant of the the yeshiva that now exists in Cleveland where I know many alumni from the Cleveland branch of the Telz Yeshiva. They continued in this tradition of the intensity of the conflicts that rage within the yeshiva. So people were getting very worked up over whether or not to include a set time every day or whatever it was for the study of mussar.

And people got very upset particularly when they appointed Rav Aryeh Leib Chasman as the mashgiach, that’s like the spiritual director, even though many of the people who had that position were the biggest in learning in the yeshiva. But they appointed him and right away people got upset. He started to have very strict rules. He was upset that they were talking about Torah during davening and he started to make regulations and decrees.

One of them, if you don’t come to the mussar study at the right time, you’re going to get punished as if you had skipped shiur. People were like, “What? Come on. We skip mussar seder all the time.” That’s a tradition that still continues in yeshivas. People miss mussar seder.

What are you going to do? We’re learning all day and there’s a half hour that I’m going to miss. Okay, nu nu. So people got upset. These are battles that still rage albeit in a different form within the yeshiva world.

So that was one battle and there was a second battle, a more famous battle that happened in 1905 where genuinely an open rebellion broke out among the students. And here I want to read directly from Professor Stampfer’s “Lithuanian Yeshivas of the 19th Century”. And this is what he writes, it’s just fantastic. Shortly before Chanukkah in 1905 an open rebellion broke out among the students which they called a khapke.

I think I’m pronouncing that correctly. The khapke used to begin, I love this, I love hearing the pranks and the mischief that people pulled in yeshiva. This is part of the yeshiva tradition too. People who are looking from a distance they look at yeshiva students, and it’s true, they have incredible commitment, incredible discipline, but what makes it so incredible is that the people who are studying yeshiva they’re human beings.

They could make a ruckus, they could get passionate, we see this all the time. What makes yeshiva remarkable is that these aren’t angels, these are regular teenagers half the time, they’re people in their early 20s. So what broke out in 1905? The khapke used to begin with a sha! Sha! And the hundreds of students would be studying aloud much louder than usual and then suddenly everyone would be quiet. And a whisper ran through the throng, sha, and silence reigned so absolute that one could hear a buzzing of a fly.

I think there are some musicians who now do this at their concerts. It was a sign of the coming storm and at the end of the time set for the studies what did they do? After they were all quiet they would start to throw down the benches and shtenders and leave the yeshiva hall in complete disarray. It was a total mess. So either way, coming back to my meeting with Professor Shaul Stampfer, so I asked him, “What’s the most inspiring story?” And he actually said it was one of these battles that took place in Telshe.

I’m not a hundred percent sure which battle, but I’m fairly confident it’s the one in 1905. And the students basically took over the yeshiva. They kicked out the staff and said, “You’re not welcome here, we’re in charge now.” The battle got so intense. And this is a revolutionary time as Professor Shaul Stampfer points out as well.

There are revolutions taking place in Russia that kind of crept into this revolutionary feeling within the yeshiva. So what inspired him? So he said this amazing story. He said, Rav Eliezer Gordon whose whole life, he’s the Rosh Yeshiva of Telz, he’s the Rosh Yeshiva, he’s the head of this yeshiva, and really a towering person but his whole life is wrapped up in the yeshiva. And the students take over, they kick out all the staff, they’re not letting people in.

And he thinks to himself, he says, “Oh no, what are the students going to eat? They’re not going to have food. They’re not going to be able to sustain themselves.” Okay, there’s this rebellion taking place but he’s worried about the talmidim, the rebels. So what does he do? He starts throwing in challah rolls through the window to make sure that the students have what to eat. And Professor Shaul Stampfer turned to me, he said, “That story captures something about the bond of students and the Rosh Yeshiva and really even in moments of utter chaos there is still this sense of responsibility and just giving of chessed, of kindness, even when they overrun the yeshiva, to making sure that they are taken care of.” And I absolutely love that story.

And I thought about it even in the contemporary world. Thank God, we don’t have, not ever, we certainly still have fights that break out in yeshivas. That’s absolutely a fact and ones that go on and can go on for years and it can get very ugly and yeshiva is not a safe haven from politics. Every yeshiva has skeletons in the closet of politics and who was passed over and who should have been the Rosh Yeshiva and who should have been in charge.

That’s part of the joy and the lore and the culture of the yeshiva world is knowing these stories. Like I remember when this book came out called Making of a Gadol which is a ton of fun. It’s written by Rav Natan Kamenetsky and it caused a little bit of a stir in certain corners of the yeshiva world. Here’s the truth.

Most yeshiva guys already knew these stories. If you’re paying attention, most of the stories in there, especially for me, my teachers are quoted in so many footnotes in there. We know… We know these stories.

I mean every Yeshiva has their stories of the politics and the drama and the chaos. We’re not ignorant, we’re not naive, we’re a part of the world and it makes me smile when I hear about this, but what makes me smile even more than the politics and the drama is the chesed that builds Yeshivas. Many years ago in public, somebody had asked me, I forgot what it was, a Yeshiva that inspires them and I mentioned a Yeshiva that I never attended as a Yeshiva, but one I grew up going to the camp there and that’s Yeshiva Darchei Torah. Darchei Torah, which is in Far Rockaway, which is one of the largest elementary schools and high schools in the Yeshiva world, certainly it’s probably one of the largest outside of Lakewood.

It’s massive, thousands of students, run by Rabbi Yaakov Bender. And I’ll be honest, and I’m saying this with a great deal of love, when I went to camp there, Simcha Day Camp by the sea, where I’m sure many of our listeners remember they had these blue hats, this was a different time in the Orthodox world, genuinely. But I’ll be honest, and I don’t think Rabbi Bender would be offended by this, but back then, this is thirty plus years ago, it was a little bit of a dump. I mean that, it was not only a dump, it was kind of a dangerous neighborhood, I remember kids got beat up on the way going back and forth, it was not a great place.

Whatever, I don’t need to go into details of the old Simcha Day Camp, which let me be absolutely clear, I loved and the first time I was ever published was publishing articles in the camp newspaper, The News and Shmooze, where I wrote under the name the insane investigator. Back then, the editor in chief was known as the raving reporter and I used to write a column in the camp newspaper that was a take on Ms. Frizzle’s Magic School Bus, but instead of taking them inside of the body and all those Ms. Frizzle Magic School Bus books, which I hope our listeners are familiar with because they’re wonderful, I would have the magic Simcha Day Camp bus and it would go on all these adventures.

It was very sweet and very fun. But I remember years later I drove past the Yeshiva and it was magnificent. You go to it now, I mean it is magisterial, the building, the quality of education that you get there is jaw-dropping. And I pointed out that if you trace the beginnings, what changed Darchei Torah from kind of a dumpy campus, kind of the school that when I was growing up kids didn’t really go there, it was not all that popular, I did not go to Darchei Torah, I went to South Shore, it was not at all popular.

And what changed it? It comes down, and I believe this to be true, the divine assistance that comes from chesed. Rabbi Bender would always embrace children with disabilities, whether they were in a wheelchair or they’re struggling with different severe forms of autism or Down syndrome, whatever it was, Rabbi Bender would open the doors for everybody. In fact, I know a list of people who got kicked out of different schools and they would go to get an English high school diploma, Rabbi Bender would let them in just for the afternoon to get an English diploma. They were kicked out of every high school in the world, where did they end up? In Darchei.

And his doors were always open and it happens to be that Rabbi Bender took in this child and a father of this child, Chaim Shlomo, who was extraordinarily financially successful, was the one who dedicated and donated their high school building. And that was the beginning of them establishing a high school and turning into this magisterial campus that they have now that services thousands and is honestly one of the most beautiful Yeshiva campuses that exists in the world, honestly. Where did that start? It’s the same way that Professor Stamfer, what inspired you, it came from a Rosh Yeshiva, not Rabbi Leizer Gordon, in this time it was Rabbi Bender, looking at a non-ideal situation, children with disabilities, and saying we have to take care of you too. Whether it’s throwing in challah rolls through a window or making sure that children who need special attention are going to be taken care of, the divine assistance I believe that led to the flourishing of the Yeshiva world is the olam chesed yibaneh, is that it was built on chesed.

It was a world that did not turn away anybody. And in this sense, I think one of the reasons why the Yeshiva world, especially in the United States, culturally became the paradigm and became much stronger as a community than the Modern Orthodox world, that’s hard to deny. I think a lot of that has to do with that sense of chesed, the commitment to chesed of no child is going to be left behind. Everybody deserves a Yeshiva education.

The kink in the armor of the Modern Orthodox world is that they in the early years in the sixties, this is beginning to change now, they did not spend enough time on elementary school education, on children’s education. You know what’s really difficult? Articulating what should a nine-year-old be exposed to. And the Yeshiva world paid very close attention to children’s education very early on and were really trailblazers in the world of special education, of making sure that kids with learning disabilities, with cognitive disabilities, with developmental disabilities, they really were the trailblazers in ensuring. that everyone has access to not only a Jewish education but the environment that a Jewish education provides.

And I think if you’re asking and we’re about to explore the history of the Yeshiva world, to me at least, the foundation of what allowed for the flourishing of the Yeshiva world is Olam Chesed Yibaneh. It is a verse in Psalms and Tehillim in the 89th chapter, I believe, where God talks about how do we build the world? Ki amarti olam chesed yibaneh. What we need to build is a world of chesed, and this is how we build worlds and this is how we rebuild worlds. And if there is anything that the Olam HaYeshivos, the Olam HaTorah, the world of Torah, the world of the yeshivos, if there’s anything that has contributed to its flourishing and success, which is one of the most miraculous stories in all of Jewish history, the flourishing of the Yeshiva world.

It’s jaw-dropping and it was in our lifetime. It’s a story that begins centuries ago, but the absolute just flourishing of Torah culture, of Torah study, giving people different access points, to me, where does this begin? It begins with acts of chesed. It begins with a commitment that everyone deserves a Yeshiva education. So it is with that introduction that I am so excited to introduce our conversation with someone who I am privileged to call a friend, a friendship that began on a park bench in Beit Shemesh before either of us had podcasts, before either of us were really doing much of anything, my friend Yehuda Geberer, who is an outstanding Torah scholar in his own right, but really has done a tremendous amount of bringing Jewish history to the masses, whether it is through his podcast that I love it, I listen to it all the time, it helps me prepare, really wonderful, it’s called Jewish History Soundbites, and he goes through these major episodes in Jewish history and you should absolutely check that out.

But even better, he’s a phenomenal tour guide and any of our listeners who are looking for the best tour guide to take you or a group through Europe or Israel, or really anywhere, I think he’s done tours in America. He’s just a fountain of historical wisdom and you can check out more of his work at yehudageberer.com. Yehuda is spelled Y-E-H-U-D-A, Geberer is G-E-B-E-R-E-R. Yehudageberer.com where you can just avail yourself of all of his incredible work and scholarship.

He had a long-running column in Mishpacha magazine, wrote about Jewish history and just every column, anything that comes out is just a fountain of wisdom, substance, history, but written in a very accessible way, which is why I am so excited to introduce our conversation on the history of the Yeshiva world with my dear friend Yehuda Geberer. Yehuda, it is so exciting to introduce you and you have served as kind of the historian of the Yeshiva world. I invited you on to give a history and to kind of ground how did we get to this place in the American Yeshiva world? But I wanted to begin at the beginning, and in my mind and in kind of the own self-telling of yeshivas, of where did we begin, it is the founding of what we colloquially call as the first Yeshiva and that is Yeshivas Volozhin. Do we have a date of when Volozhin was founded?

Yehuda Geberer: 1802 or 1803, sometime around there.

David Baskevkin: 1802, 1803, which is a revolutionary time, not quite 1840, but still a revolutionary time. But I wanted to begin with a question. What was the innovation of Yeshivas Volozhin? Why is that the starting point where the Yeshiva movement kind of grounds itself and say the first Yeshiva was Volozhin? Surely people were learning Torah before 1802. Surely people were learning Torah in groups before 1802.

So what made Volozhin as a Yeshiva different than the models of Torah study that existed beforehand?

Yehuda Geberer: It’s a good opening question because we do call Volozhin, in Hebrew it sounds even more grand, the Em HaYeshivos, the mother of all yeshivos. And the way I always phrase it is Volozhin is the first modern Yeshiva. It’s certainly not the first Yeshiva. Some people may be uncomfortable with calling Volozhin modern, but that’s fine.

Yeshivos existed as long as the Jewish people existed because yeshivos are basically where people congregate, for most of history male people congregate to study Torah until the 20th century rolled around, then we have yeshivos for women too, the Bais Yaakov and all that, but I assume that most of this podcast we’re focusing on male study. So where people gather to study Torah, that’s a yeshiva, and it has for most of history been referred to as a yeshiva. So Volozhin certainly can’t be called the first yeshiva. It was the first modern yeshiva where pretty much every yeshiva today is based on that model.

So to answer your question, I would divide it into two parts: what was before Volozhin and then what was the innovation of Volozhin? So if we would go all the way back, we would start talking about what Chazal… referred to as Yeshivas in Bavel and Pumbedita and Sura and other places like that. Or we could give a real all-encompassing overview of Yeshivas across the Jewish world, medieval Spain and in Yemen and in Morocco and in Europe and other places. Not only am I incapable of giving a full overview like that, but I think that we would want to keep it a little more focused.

So Volozhin is coming in a place called Ashkenazi Europe, and it’s coming off of a long tradition of Ashkenazi Europe. So there were two models that preceded Volozhin as Yeshivas in Ashkenazi Europe. We’re really framing it in one specific geographical area, Ashkenazi Europe, and number two over a time period of about a thousand years, maybe a drop less. So the first model we have during the time, medieval times, what we might refer to in Yeshivas as the time of the Rishonim.

David Baskevkin: That’s like Rambam, Rashi, the Ritva.

Yehuda Geberer: During that time period,

David Baskevkin: basically from the 11th century till let’s call it the 14th century, more or less.

Yehuda Geberer: 15th century, yeah.

David Baskevkin: 15th is kind of like that transitional, but yeah.

11th to 15th century, okay.

Yehuda Geberer: Right. But in Ashkenaz, so not the Ritba or the Rambam, but Rashi and the Ba’alei Tosafos, the Maharil, the Terumat HaDeshen, that world. And the Yeshiva then was a private institution owned by the Rabbi slash Rosh Yeshiva.

Literally private, it did not belong to the community and it did not belong to the public at large. The Rabbi personally hosted the students in his own home. He was their host, they lived in his house, his wife cooked for them, and they lived there for a couple of years. Usually they were local students, they could go home at night, and if they came from out of town, then they literally slept in his home.

And because of that these Yeshivas were very small, they were very limited. For instance, the Maharil describes about how many mezuzos he needed in his house because the chadrei habachurim, the students’ rooms, all needed a mezuza. And we have from students of the Maharil who describe literally the most intimate details about the Maharil‘s life because they witnessed him in his home. And that was model number one.

That obviously was not a great model because it came at the personal expense of the Rabbi and his wife.

David Baskevkin: I’m imagining if I had to give class literally in my house, I might enjoy it, it would last about 10 minutes with my wife coming down saying, “Who exactly am I cooking for? Not happening.” She would not be interested in this model.

Yehuda Geberer: So as there’s this migration east from the old Ashkenaz of Germany, France, to the Kingdom of Poland in the 14, 1500s, the 15th, 16th century, let’s say a generation or two before the Rema, we start to see the first Yeshivas of Poland. And very soon, by the 1500s, Poland emerges as the Torah center of the entire world, for sure of the Ashkenazi world, possibly of the entire world.

And there develops a new model for Yeshivas that was actually quite successful and lasted for centuries. And that was the Kehilla Yeshiva. And the Kehilla Yeshiva was exactly as it sounds. This is during the Golden Age of Kehilla autonomy in the old Polish kingdom, where the internal Jewish governance was quite strong and quite regulated and taxation, and Kehillos, especially the larger and richer ones, had access to public funds.

And as part of the prestige—now this is a very traditional society and the study of Torah is the greatest value and education is always the great Jewish value—so the communities want to have a Yeshiva as part of their institutions that are funded by the community. So they’ll have a shul funded by the community, they’ll have a beit din, they’ll have a cemetery, they’ll have in some instances a hospital or a bikur cholim or a guest house for the poor and, you know, all kinds of other social philanthropic organizations. So one of the institutions belonging and funded completely 100 percent by the community is a local Yeshiva. Now, a Rabbi of the community would be automatically the Rosh Yeshiva.

It was stipulated as a clause written into his contract and it would be written in how many students the community is obligated to fund for his Yeshiva. And he was not allowed to accept more than that. If he did, the community wouldn’t pay for it.

David Baskevkin: And I think it’s important to make a distinction because you know we hear the word kehilla a lot and people say, “Oh, I’m a part of a kehilla, I’m a part of a community.” The nature of communal affiliation in the time period you’re talking about is radically different than the communal affiliation particularly in the United States, where there’s freedom of religion, freedom of movement, you can do whatever.

Kehillas were state-sanctioned, right? They were a part where Jews had to live. There was state power. I think most, if not all, kehillas had taxation power. Yes, it’s not like your shul membership.

If I don’t pay my shul membership—

Yehuda Geberer: no, it was a state entity

David Baskevkin: —yeah, I might get some eyeballs at Mincha if I don’t pay my shul dues on time. But even throwing somebody out of a shul for not paying shul dues is pretty much unheard of in the United States. It’s not really all that common. You know, you miss a shul dinner, you didn’t take an ad, okay, it’s not the end of the world.

But back then there’s real state power.

Yehuda Geberer: Yeah, and it was a legislative body. I mean, it was completely government-backed. It had full power.

They had power that was backed by the non-Jewish government, not only to tax, but to mete out punishment for those who broke the laws of the community. You know, they had the power of cherem. This was all state-backed. Not only was it completely state-backed, but just to add to your point is that the non-Jewish government did not see the individual Jew as a citizen, as a subject, as an entity.

He didn’t exist as an entity. The Jewish community existed. The peasant class existed. The urban merchant Christian class existed.

Except for the nobility, people, human beings did not exist as individuals, as citizens. So the Jewish community, when they were taxed, Reuven and Shimon were never taxed. The Jewish community was taxed. How you get the money, I couldn’t care less.

You make your own taxation system. You go steal the money from people. I don’t care as long as we get our money. Later on, there was a draft.

Reuven and Shimon did not receive draft notices. The Jewish community was required to hand over a certain number of Jews for the military draft. That’s the entity and that’s the body of autonomous governance that the Jews have at this point.

David Baskevkin: And this is what gave birth to the Polish yeshiva model.

Yehuda Geberer: Exactly, the kehillah yeshiva. You know, small communities had small yeshivas. They would put in the rabbi’s contract five, ten students. The larger, richer communities and they wanted prestige, they would put in thirty, forty, fifty, and that would be considered a very big yeshiva.

And then of course you sometimes had people who were so popular and so charismatic that people came from far and they were not funded by the community. They either came from rich families and they funded themselves or sometimes the rabbi paid out of pocket to help students that he felt would benefit from it.

David Baskevkin: Do we have a sense in this period of what the experience, meaning what were they studying inside of these yeshivas at this period in time? Was there a schedule? Was it like everyone was getting lunch at the same time? Was it, you know, nowadays we have a system where there’s your typical yeshiva has what’s known as a morning seder, that is the time where you’re learning from let’s say nine to noon, and then you would have a shiur, a class from, I’m talking roughly, let’s call it noon to one, and then you’d have a lunch, a little bit of a break, and then you would have what was known as afternoon seder, and afternoon seder in many yeshivas now, as opposed to the morning where they’re learning more in-depth, in the afternoon they’re learning a lot more quickly, and that might go from three to six or something like that, and you sprinkle in Shacharit, Mincha, and Maariv, praying three times a day, and then there’s a final seder called night seder. People study at night and maybe they learn whatever they want or review.

Does that schedule begin in the Polish realm in the earlier models or is that something that really only emerges in the Volozhin world, which we haven’t even gotten to yet?

Yehuda Geberer: It’s at earliest in the Volozhin world. It’s probably even later because all the things you described is what we would call modern education, curriculum. Those are all concepts that the yeshiva borrowed from the non-Jewish world. Don’t tell any of your listeners that we borrow things in the yeshivas from the non-Jewish world.

But the modern yeshiva structure is certainly very modern. The idea of having these classes and different subjects, you know, that’s probably not even Volozhin, maybe a later part of Volozhin, probably even later than that, Telz and other places. In these yeshivas it was basically branding. You came to learn in this rabbi’s yeshiva.

You learned whatever you wanted. The rabbi had to execute his responsibilities as a communal rabbi first and foremost. So he was in the beit din, he was answering questions, he was delivering shiurim to the community. He would stop in.

There was no yeshiva building. It was the local community shul because it was community-funded, so they allocated space in the shul for them young men to study. And the community provided them with meals, so community members or the community gave them funds from the taxes, and that’s how they got their meals at locals. The locals were paid by the community.

They learned whatever they wanted. The rabbi came in probably a few times a week to either deliver a shiur on whatever was on his mind or whatever he was learning. He probably learned with the derech halimmud, the style of study of Poland at that time, which was called pilpul. Don’t ask me to explain what that is, because if you don’t ask me to explain I can pretend that I know.

But once you ask me to explain, I’ll have to acknowledge that it’s hard to.

David Baskevkin: It is hard to transmit. Pilpul, how would you even translate pilpul into English? It kind of sounds, it’s almost like an onomatopoeia, like pilpul sounds like doing somersaults a little bit.

Yehuda Geberer: I think Leibler once told me he would call it mental gymnastics.

But I don’t know if that’s accurate or if that’s just his cynical way of saying it.

David Baskevkin: Yeah, they would ask detailed questions, why did the Talmud ask from the second part of the Mishnah, they could have asked it from the first part of the Mishnah. They weren’t just like reading easily and covering a lot of ground.

It was a lot of gymnastics over there. So let’s jump ahead we have these two models, a Kehillah model, and then we have the earlier model, which is just opening up your house to the public and letting people come in. Let’s fast forward quite a bit, what is going on in the world and who are the figures that basically decide we need something different? How is it different? Why did they decide in 1802 to basically create a new model and was it consciously new? As you mentioned, we call Volozhin Yeshiva the mother of Yeshivas. When it was founded, were they consciously trying to start something new?

Yehuda Geberer: So let’s get to Volozhin.

The Volozhin story is the story of one man. There were other figures peripheral in the Volozhin story and beyond Volozhin in other parts of Europe. But let’s focus on Volozhin for now. It’s one man, it’s Reb Chaim Volozhiner.

He was the rabbi of the town, he’s the premier student of the Vilna Gaon, and he’s consciously starting something new. That’s the short answer to your question. And the reason we know that is because he told everyone that. He wrote a now famous letter called the Igeres HaYeshiva in 1803 and in the letter it seems that the Yeshiva is already functioning.

That’s why we don’t know exactly how long before he wrote the letter was it functioning. A few months, even up to a year. But he basically spells out in the letter why he opened the Yeshiva and what he intends to accomplish. And he says that the Kehillah model basically collapsed in the previous decades, the previous century.

And we know as historians for a variety of reasons. Reb Chaim Volozhiner seems to, from his letter there and other things he said, he seems to blame the Chassidim, which is pretty typical for a student of the Vilna Gaon, that there was less emphasis on the intense rigorous study of the Talmud because of the new sect of the Chassidic movement, that they’re running to the Rebbe and davening and dveikus and

David Baskevkin: more ecstatic spiritual experiences that can sometimes offer more to the masses than elite in-depth Torah scholarship. So he’s consciously starting something new.

But as a historian, could you just add a couple words, why did the Kehillah model collapse? We had centuries if not a thousand years of the Kehillah model. You could probably give an exact date of how long this model actually lasted for, but it was a significant amount of time with significant amount of power. What do historians attribute the collapse of the Jewish Kehillah model to?

Yehuda Geberer: It’s much more about broader societal things that are going on in Poland. After the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648, 1649, what we call in Jewish history Tach VeTat, Gzeiros Tach VeTat, this terrible massacre of the uprising, so the Polish kingdom goes into this economic downturn and the fortunes for the Polish kingdom and therefore for the Jews of the Polish kingdom start going down.

And bad financial situation and worsening antisemitism and worsening situation for the Jews in the Polish kingdom and because the Polish kingdom is collapsing, so therefore the internal governance of the Jews in the kingdom, the Kehillah, the autonomous Kehillah structure, infrastructure that we spoke about earlier, all that is not doing great. It’s not in great shape. There’s not a lot of funding to support these Yeshivas. And these macro trends are basically driving the end of the Kehillah Yeshiva.

Now, if we zero in on that, we’ll see exactly what the innovation of Reb Chaim Volozhiner was because the main drawback of the Kehillah model Yeshiva was the Yeshiva was essentially a financial liability for the community because it was allocated from their tax funds. It was a part of the budget. Now, that’s great in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries when the Jews of Poland are wealthy and they’re doing great. But in this late 17th and across the whole 18th century through the collapse of the Polish kingdom, the partitions of Poland, what was Poland, especially the area of Reb Chaim Volozhiner is now in Tsarist Russia.

It’s a completely different situation. The political map has changed. They no longer can afford this. And no matter how much you value Torah and we’re still talking about a traditional society, this is pre-secularization, there’s this resentment towards the Yeshiva students because they’re a financial liability to the town.

So Reb Chaim Volozhiner sees that there’s no longer these Yeshivas. People are studying in local shuls. There’s always study of Torah in an informal fashion. But he says we have to save the Torah, we have to have a formal transmission of the teacher to the students and we need to do it in a better way because something’s not working here.

So what he comes up with is no less than genius. And basically the greatest innovation of Reb Chaim Volozhiner’s modern Yeshiva is funding. Not in the way the Talmud is studied, not in the way that the curriculum is, but in funding. That’s the main, I mean it’s structural, let’s call it structural, let’s not make it just about money.

That it’s not a Yeshiva of the community, it’s a Yeshiva of Klal Yisrael, of the Jewish people, specifically the Jews of the Russian Empire. Let’s be honest, that’s where the Jewish people is. There’s more Jews in the Russian Empire in the 19th century than everywhere else in the world combined. So the Jews are in the Russian Empire.

So he writes in that letter, he says, I happen to be the rabbi of Volozhin, but this is not Volozhin’s Yeshiva. It’s an ivory tower, it’s completely separate from the community. There’s not one penny from the community budget. I didn’t consult with the communal leaders who hired me as rabbi on opening this Yeshiva.

Has nothing to do with them. This is a Yeshiva, a public Yeshiva that belongs to Russian Jewry, belongs to the public. And the students will not be local like they were traditionally in the local Yeshiva, even though the big famous local Yeshivas always had foreign students coming in from outside, but they were the minority. This is going to be a Yeshiva that’s anywhere from all across Russia and even beyond.

Students are invited because we want the best and the brightest from everywhere. And I need you to help me. And I need you to fund me. Who’s you? Russian Jewry.

You guys are going to fund me.

David Baskevkin: What was the game plan? You’re going to do an annual dinner, there’s no social media, a Raiz-it campaign or something like that, bonus round. They didn’t have any of that then. So what was the game plan?

Yehuda Geberer: He basically had these offices, these Gabbaim of the Yeshiva in Vilna, in Minsk, in other words, they weren’t even in Volozhin, which were two major cities in the Russian Empire.

And they were like the board. And he and these people, he and his staff in the Yeshiva, so there’s the Volozhin rabbinical staff, there’s the Gabbaim in Vilna and Minsk, and the three of them together, they hire a huge team of fundraisers that crossed the length and breadth of the Russian Empire. And they’re not just fundraisers, they are publicity, they’re advertising the Yeshiva’s existence and its prominence. And they are recruiters and giving the entrance exams.

They’re the ones getting the students, they’re the ones bringing in the funds, and they’re the ones branding Volozhin, they’re creating this brand. Volozhin is the Yeshiva of Russian Jewry. That’s how he gets the word out, that’s how he gets the students, that’s how he gets the funding. Now listen to this, the funding comes in from all over Russia, as do the students to the community.

Now the Yeshiva is a shul, there’s no building, right, it’s one of the local shuls. Later on they build their own building, but even when they build their own building, it’s just a building with a Beis Medrash. There’s no dining room or dormitory or anything like that. That’s very modern, that comes much later.

So they sleep by members of the community and they’re fed by members of community. How? The Yeshiva pays members of the community to host students and to feed the students. So now the Yeshiva becomes a financial asset to the community. Ah, and every community is going to want to have a Yeshiva

David Baskevkin: because they’re getting paid now,

Yehuda Geberer: because this is an economic boom for the town.

Half the town is being supported by the Yeshiva. So this is a huge income for the town. So he flipped the tables. Why was that so important for him? Because this goes beyond structural.

He writes in the letter he wants Kavod HaTorah to be restored. The honor, the aristocracy of Torah. Torah scholars and those who study Torah are the princes of the Jewish people, they are the elite of the Jewish people and they should be treated as such. And as the old Kehilla model was collapsing, there was this resentment, okay, we have to pay you, poor guy, I don’t want him to starve, so we’ll pay him.

But here, no, no, no, we want the Yeshiva student. If we get him, why? Because you’re getting paid. But ultimately the Yeshiva student is the source of all blessing, spiritual, material, everything. And I can’t extol the genius of Rav Chaim Volozhiner enough by creating this model.

This is the model that’s followed till today. There’s almost no, there’s very few, there are instances of local Yeshivas still, but almost all Yeshivas today worldwide are this structural model.

David Baskevkin: And it’s interesting because the economic boom that Yeshivas bring is also very much the case, meaning the Yeshivas that thrive are the ones that are creating and kind of lifting up the entire town, like I studied in Ner Yisrael. Baltimore was transformed by the presence of the Yeshiva.

Lakewood was transformed from the presence of the Yeshiva. The original model for that is Volozhin. Now, let’s talk a little bit about the demographics in terms of how many people at its peak. When we think of Volozhin, when I was studying in Ner Yisrael, there must have been a few hundred people in the Beis Medrash on any given morning.

You could step into Lakewood and you will see thousands who are studying and there are many places in Israel that you will see thousands. When was the peak of Volozhin? How many people did it end up serving? And do we have information about what the experience of students were in Volozhin?

Yehuda Geberer: Yes, Volozhin at its peak in its later period had probably around three hundred students, give or take, I may be off by a few numbers.

David Baskevkin: Which is not a huge number by today’s standards.

Yehuda Geberer: No, Professor Shaul Stampfer has shown in his research that it wasn’t like Volozhin came on the scene so all the other forms of Torah study ended because now everyone the next week recognized that Volozhin’s the new way, that’s it, shut down everything else.

He shows He shows that kehilla yeshivas continued to exist. He shows that random study in battei midrash, local study halls, continues to exist throughout the nineteenth century. There’s a lot of Torah study being studied at this time. By the way, I would just throw it out there.

We love to speak about Ashkenazi, Litvish, as if they’re the only ones who existed in the world. Four years or five years after the opening of Volozhin, the Chatam Sofer opens the Pressburg Yeshiva, which becomes the model of Hungarian yeshivas, which spawned a movement and later tens, maybe even more of yeshivas in the Austro-Hungarian Empire modeled on Pressburg, where the Chatam Sofer was Rosh Yeshiva. In Germany, there were yeshivas that had nothing to do with Volozhin. In the Sephardic world, the Baghdad Yeshiva, in Yemen, in Morocco, in Greece, in Italy, Padua had a yeshiva.

I mean, it’s not like Volozhin is the only show in the Jewish world, and especially like Rav Chaim Volozhin had this, he had a lot of pride in his yeshiva, so he instituted these mishmaros, the shifts of Torah study, because if no one’s going to be studying Torah in Volozhin, then the world will be without Torah study. I’m not convinced. There would have been Torah study in other parts of the world also at that time.

David Baskevkin: But explain because that was a really fascinating phenomenon, and I assume that this actually played out, where part of the vision of Volozhin Yeshiva was that the yeshiva would constantly have Torah study throughout the night, not everyone, but to make sure that there were cohorts, mishmaros, of different people, so every minute and moment of the day was covered, that there was never a moment where the yeshiva, there was nobody learning in the yeshiva, and that was a very real theological concern that Rav Chaim talks about.

He says, it’s God forbid if there’s no Torah study for one moment on earth, existence would cease. You know, that’s the purpose of what’s holding up the world. And you, I never even thought of it because I knew of it. You’re just gently suggesting that given timelines and other people learning, probably there was always somebody learning regardless of what was happening in Volozhin, though it was a good fail-safe so we know for sure.

But tell me a little bit more about what the experience of students were. Now we have so many yeshivas to choose from. There are yeshivas for the top guys, for weaker students, for this and for that. Were there students who struggled in Volozhin? Did Volozhin have to deal with like behavioral issues and people who are waking up late and not showing up? There’s certain like tropes of personalities who are in yeshiva, there’s the guy who starts learning in his room, which is always a bad sign.

I haven’t seen him since Chanukkah. He’s learning in his room. That’s the person who they’re struggling with depression or whatever it is. Every yeshiva everywhere’s had that.

You have the person who hasn’t learned a thing and they wake up around this time of the year and they say I want to accomplish something so they pick up a Masechet Megillah, a short tractate. I’m going to make a Siyum on Megillah. That’ll be my way of feeling some sense of accomplishment. You have people who are in yeshiva who while they’re there they’re not really assimilating into the culture of the yeshiva.

Did these issues arise in Volozhin, or because Volozhin basically was able to get the pick of the litter throughout the world, it was only the elite of the elite?

Yehuda Geberer: It’s an excellent question, and they were the elite of the elite, and incredibly enough, they still had all those issues. So, apparently even the elite of the elite could have them. We have loads of memoirs of former Volozhin students. I can’t even describe the wealth of information we have about the smallest details about student life in Volozhin because we have this wealth of material left by students themselves.

David Baskevkin: Could you mention a memoir or two? Are there any in English for our listeners to try to get a window? I mean, there is a famous poem, I believe, by Bialik.

Yehuda Geberer: Yeah, sure, Hamatmid, which is based on someone in Volozhin, yeah.

David Baskevkin: Are there any memoirs in particular or any stories that kind of jump out at you of these experiences within the yeshiva?

Yehuda Geberer: Just mention a couple of memoirs, I don’t know if they are translated into English. There’s Micha Josef Berdyczewski wrote a memoir about his time in Volozhin.

There was… blanking… there was… oh, there’s so many.

David Baskevkin: Okay, we’ll come back to it.

Yehuda Geberer: But going back to your point about what their experiences were, they describe those tropes, those personality types: people who are struggling to wake up, people who are struggling to show up. There was a lot of freedom in Volozhin, so there wasn’t that many disciplinary issues if there’s no rules. But there was limited rules, meaning you were allowed to kind of learn whatever you wanted.

You didn’t have to study with a study partner. The official yeshiva thing was to complete the entire Shas, was to start in Daf Bet in Berachot and end in the last daf of Niddah, to go through the entire Shas. What does it mean official? That means that the shiurim, the classes, the lectures that were delivered by the Roshei Yeshiva, the heads of the yeshiva, were in this order, this cycle.

David Baskevkin: How long would it take them to complete such a cycle? I mean, now a lot of yeshivas have what they call a machzor, a cycle, where they go through the same five to eight tractates over an eight-year period, but every yeshiva you come in.

learning tractate X, Y, or Z. In Volozhin, do we have any sense of the pacing of how quickly or slowly it would take them to cover the entirety of the Talmud?

Yehuda Geberer: There was not an official time because it was loose like that. It wasn’t that you have to finish it by this time. They did it at their pace.

They went at a, what we would consider today, a very fast pace because they went through the entire Shas every bunch of years, every five, seven, eight years or so. But the shiurim, the Talmudic classes, were optional. I mean, most didn’t attend altogether and it was kind of like an added exciting thing and you could learn whatever you wanted. You could go at any pace you wanted.

So there wasn’t that much discipline. But we know from these memoirs and stuff about how, you know, sometimes their rooms were inspected by members of the yeshiva staff to see if there was any forbidden literature, haskalah literature or things like that, which there was plenty of that in Volozhin too. So you had people slacking off, people with behavioral issues, people making trouble in the beis medrash. There was a few student revolts against the administration’s policy, especially in its later years, that ended up, you know, bringing disruption in the main study hall itself.

David Baskevkin: Disruption is a very generous term to describe it. It was pretty close to outright like fights, like violence, like people were really pretty intense back then. But I actually want to get to that because, you know, we have been talking about Volozhin and Volozhin as a symbol for the contemporary yeshiva world. It is symbolic conceptually of how yeshivas almost look at themselves as a continuation of Volozhin.

And part of that conceptual connection is not just the founding of Volozhin, it is also the closing of Volozhin. Volozhin Yeshiva at some point closes its doors and in a most kind of like, I don’t want to call it superficial, but the way that the story was perpetuated within the yeshiva world was that Volozhin closed its doors in protest to ensure that the government regulations of introducing secular studies into the yeshiva, it was better to not have the yeshiva at all than allow mandatory secular education to infiltrate the walls of the yeshiva. Can you take me through a more historical lens of why exactly did Volozhin close?

Yehuda Geberer: This research was groundbreaking research by Professor Shaul Stampfer

David Baskevkin: along with my chavrusa and dear, dear friend Jake Sasson. But he actually found the document that they eventually published with Shaul Stampfer that had the closing of the yeshiva.

But tell me a little bit about like the end of the years because it really left a lasting impression on the yeshiva world, the very closing of Volozhin.

Yehuda Geberer: Yeah, the yeshiva was in trouble for a long time as far as the Russian government was concerned for a variety of reasons. They were officially illegal, you know, you needed a license. Czarist Russia, the regulation and the control that they had over the Jewish community was very intense.

It said ten Jews weren’t allowed to gather for an official meeting without a government license.

David Baskevkin: Is that true? Wow.

Yehuda Geberer: So the yeshiva was definitely illegal as an institution. Most of the other yeshivas we know of at the time, including the Mir, was considered part of the local shul legally, formally, you know, they weren’t legally recognized as an official yeshiva.

So Volozhin was too prominent and too famous to go under the wraps, so to speak. So the Czarist government had their eyes on it for a long time. And there was all kinds of regulation that were going back and forth between the yeshiva administration and the Czarist police and local government officials about is the yeshiva legal, is it not legal, what goes on in the yeshiva, and so on and so forth. Now this is a time of upheaval in the Russian empire.

For a period of time, the Russian Czarist government’s policy with the Jews in Russia was to try to modernize them. We know that in Jewish history as the period of haskalah mita’am, haskalah that’s ordained from the Czarist government. It doesn’t come as a grassroots movement from the Jewish people in Russia. And they try to force a modernization of the Jewish community.

And they focused on education and the rabbis, modernizing the institution of the rabbinate. And this had an impact on Volozhin over the 19th century. Keeps on coming up and Volozhin is trying to go through the raindrops here, they’re trying to evade the Draconian measures of the Czarist government and this is over decades. How does that get us to this place? Because in the 1880s, the Czarist government laid down an ultimatum to the yeshiva administration led by the Netziv of Volozhin, or Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, who’s the legendary head of the Volozhin Yeshiva for the simple reason that he was there for a long time.

The yeshiva existed for 90 years and he was the head of the yeshiva for half of it, for 45 years. So that he has to include, this is a yeshiva university, right? This is the university of the Jews, the Jews study Talmud at an elite level, so this is your elite institution, so you need to conform with the government regulation. regulations. What are the regulations? You need to include general studies in the curriculum and the teachers need to be licensed as teachers by the Tsar’s government.

So the Netziv says, okay, if that’s the only way to keep the yeshiva open, let’s do it. Under four conditions. Number one, these general studies will be limited in time. It won’t be that many hours of the day.

Number two, they’ll be in a building separate from the yeshiva. A nearby building, not in the beit medrash, not in the yeshiva building. Number three, they’re optional. No one in the yeshiva is forced to attend.

And number four, that the teachers are non-Jews. He didn’t want the teachers to be Jews because which Jews have a Tsar’s government license to teach? Only the maskilim, only secularized, modernized, integrated Jews. Fascinating. If they’re non-Jews, they’re innocent, they’re just teaching Russian, they’re teaching some math or whatever it was.

So with those four conditions, the Netziv allows general studies in Volozhin. And that goes on for several years. How many students actually got a general education out of it? I don’t know. Maybe none, maybe a few.

I have no idea. But that was general studies in the Volozhin yeshiva. Now, the Tsar’s government is keeping a really tight eye on this yeshiva for another reason. This is the 1890s in Tsarist Russia.

The revolutionary fervor is rising. I mean, in 1881 Tsar Alexander the Second had been assassinated by a revolutionary. So revolutionary movements are across Russia. The Tsarist government is this real dictatorial, autocratic, old-fashioned, no one has any rights.

They’re not modernized. They’re not like the rest of Europe. And the people of Russia, I’m talking about the general masses of Russia, they’re restless. And eventually this explodes in the 1905 revolution, which is suppressed, and then it explodes even further in the 1917, first the February revolution and then the Bolshevik revolution that same year, and the Tsar is overthrown.

So the Tsar is very suspicious of revolutionary activity. Where are revolutionary, where is that fervor the most? Among the youth in the universities, on the campuses.

David Baskevkin: It’s crazy how history repeats itself.

Yehuda Geberer: Yeah, exactly.

So in all Russian campuses, in St. Petersburg, Moscow, there’s Tsarist Russian spies from the secret police of the Tsar. And the Tsar considers Volozhin the Jewish university and he suspects that there might be revolutionary activity here, especially since the Jews had even more reason to hate the Tsar because he was terrible to the Jews. So there were spies.

And in one of the spy’s reports, it turns out that these spies say that listen, they’re very subservient to leadership. Their rabbinical leadership they hold in awe and great respect. And if they revere their rabbis, their rabbinical leadership, and they follow the rules, the rabbis are loyal to the government. In general, you see they’re submissive to leadership, to authority, so they’ll be submissive to the Tsar authority as well and there’s nothing to worry about revolutionaries here.

But that might change. And it does change because the Netziv is getting old and sick, the yeshiva is heavily in debt, it’s going through some hard financial times, and he is looking to the future for a successor. And he brings in his son Rav Chaim Berlin to succeed him. Rav Chaim Berlin was a great Torah scholar, very charismatic.

He had been the rabbi of the wealthiest Jewish community in Russia in Moscow. He knew wealthy ba’alei batim. He would be able to fundraise. He knew how to talk to people.

He knew some Russian. And he would be great at pulling the yeshiva out of its financial woes and succeeding the Netziv. Now, a large group of students in the yeshiva was very insulted and very hurt by this act because the Netziv had an assistant in the yeshiva, his grandson by marriage, who was married to his granddaughter, Rav Chaim Soloveitchik. Rav Chaim Brisker was the sgan rosh yeshiva, the assistant rosh yeshiva.

And he was revolutionizing the world with a new style of Torah study that captivated the Lithuanian Torah world and continues to be studied as a methodology of Talmudic study until this very day. And his students look to him and his new way of analytical thinking as if he was God. He was it. His shiurim were the first time in Volozhin history that people took shiur serious.

They loved it. They were obsessed with him. And you are bringing in your son,

David Baskevkin: more modern,

Yehuda Geberer: more modern community rabbi who knows ba’alei batim to be the rosh yeshiva when we have this superstar who’s already the assistant? He should just be upgraded from assistant, promoted to senior rosh yeshiva. But the Netziv wasn’t looking for a good maggid shiur, someone who knows how to deliver the Talmud class in an optimal fashion.

He was looking for a fundraiser for someone, you know,

David Baskevkin: an administrator, a face.

Yehuda Geberer: So this exploded into a revolt and the yeshiva was divided between supporters of the Netziv and Rav Chaim Berlin and supporters of Rav Chaim Brisker. And the Russian spies duly report to the Tsar that they no longer respect rabbinical authority. They no longer respect their own rabbis and revolutionary activity is brewing in the yeshiva and it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump before they revolt against the Tsar.

This is just the beginning.

David Baskevkin: The history of the yeshivas is still playing out now. You know, sometimes we conceptualize our greatest danger… always internal politics.

Yehuda Geberer: Oh, of course.

David Baskevkin: And one of the things that happened during this time, and you might know the details of the story, there was an etrog pelting incident where the way that students would kind of show their distaste, they were pelting staff, I think they pelted Reb Chaim himself maybe, unless I have the story wrong.

Yehuda Geberer: I think they stole his arba’ah minim and then threw it, yeah, something like that.

David Baskevkin: There were etrogim flying around.

This was not just, it was real, there was hijinks, there was a very real rebellious mischievousness that you would not necessarily imagine. Maybe we saw it a little bit, there’s a Yeshiva in Ponevezh where there was quite a bit of internal discord and that mirrored in some ways the discord that we had in Volozhin, which is about succession, about who’s going to take over and what’s the direction.

Yehuda Geberer: Well, we said Volozhin is the mother of all Yeshivot. The mother of all Yeshivot, so we role model on Volozhin.

David Baskevkin: It bequeathed not only a model of success, but unfortunately also a model of failure, which is the internal politics, and eventually this leads, what year would you place it exactly where the Volozhin Yeshiva closes its doors?

Yehuda Geberer: I don’t know if I would, hate to disagree with the host. No, please. I wouldn’t term it failure. I would say the challenges that Volozhin faced would be faced by future Yeshivot as well.

David Baskevkin: Fair enough. God forbid, the Volozhin Yeshiva did not fail, but it did ultimately close its doors, and a lot of that was this.

Yehuda Geberer: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So 1892, specifically January 1893 already is when the final closure, but we’re talking about in the months leading up to it is 1892. What happens is that they need a pretext to close the Yeshiva. They can’t say we’re suspicious of revolutionary activity against the Tsar, it’s not a great way to close a Yeshiva. So they need a pretext.

And they found it in this lapse in the general studies. They found that the Netziv’s four conditions made it that the whole general studies curriculum in Volozhin was a joke. So they say, oh, okay, fine, we’re changing the rules of the general studies. Listen to this.

They make these measures. They knew this would close the Yeshiva because there’s no way. What happened? They said, number one, the Yeshiva’s only allowed to be open nine hours a day. The remaining fifteen hours of the day, the Yeshiva’s locked.

No Volozhin, nine hours a day. Number two, of those nine hours, no more than three hours dedicated to Talmudic study, the other six to general study. Number three, the rabbis teaching the three hours of Talmudic studies have to have teaching certificates from the Russian Ministry of Education. The Netziv looks at this and says

David Baskevkin: this is not happening.

Yehuda Geberer: This is not adding an hour of general studies in the Yeshiva. This is not a Yeshiva. Nine hours a day it’s open, the rest of the day it’s closed. Even then, it’s only three hours of learning, and even then it’s by maskilim who have a certificate.

Like this is a joke. So he ignored it. And since he ignored it, he kept the Yeshiva open and ignored the regulations, the Tsarist police came and forcibly closed it. The Tsarist police came, they kicked them out physically, they removed them from the Yeshiva, locked the doors, kicked the Netziv and Reb Chaim out of the Vilna district, and dispersed the students.

And that was the end of Volozhin.

David Baskevkin: So this 90-year period kind of gives birth to a movement, and there are many other Yeshivot that end up springing up in Europe that we still are familiar with their names now, whether it’s the Mir Yeshiva, Telshe, Slobodka, these are all bubbling up. Now we don’t have enough time to tell the individual story of all of these Yeshivot, so what I want to do is basically take the time period that we are in, it is 1892, this is when my great-grandparents are just arriving in this first major wave of immigration to the United States of America. 

When you arrive in America in the late 1800s, early 1900s, are there any Yeshivot? What is considered the first Yeshiva in America, and how does the birth of the American Yeshiva movement really step into its own?

Yehuda Geberer: So we have Yeshivot back in Europe that spin off of Volozhin, like you mentioned. I will again add this caveat, those are Lithuanian Yeshivot. There are Yeshivot in Hungary, there are Yeshivot in Germany, there are Yeshivot in the Hasidic world, Poland and Russia, in other places, and there are Yeshivot in the Sephardic world. And we tend to focus on the Lithuanian Yeshivot, and there’s an obvious reason: the prominence in its own time and especially its influence through history justifies it.

But I still think that it would be historical justice to mention that there were other Yeshivot in other parts of the Jewish world as well. But if we get to the United States, and in the 1890s, it’s the great immigration like you mentioned, both of our ancestors arrived during this time, and the immigrants for the most part are struggling just to make it.

They’re not focusing on education, for the most part they send their children to public school. But there’s some courageous individuals who say, no, we gotta have Yeshivot. And the first one… that started is originally called Etz Chaim.

Eventually, it merges and changes its name following the passing of the great Kovno Rav, Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor, in 1896. And a year later, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a group of Jews who originated from Kovno in Lithuania name the yeshiva, Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan. That’s RIETS, that’s YU today, and that is the first American yeshiva. And they’re a beginner yeshiva for young kids first, and then they have for older students, they struggle along.

There’s a couple of others that start afterwards, there’s RJJ and slow halting steps.

David Baskevkin: Yeah, my grandfather was born in 1915, and he, along with Rabbi Bender’s father, I think Rav Binyamin Kamenetsky was there at that time, they all went to Torah Vodaas. Torah Vodaas is over 100 years old now.

Yehuda Geberer: It’s an early yeshiva too.

David Baskevkin: And they eventually actually split off and started a new yeshiva movement that still exists today called Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim.

Yehuda Geberer: Exactly. And these yeshivas mostly in the New York area start to emerge in the 1920s and thirties. They form the nucleus of the American yeshiva society that we know today.

So again, RIETS, RJJ, Torah Vodaas, Chofetz Chaim, Chaim Berlin, a few others I’m probably missing. When the Frierdiker Rebbe arrives in 1940, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he starts Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, he opens the first Tomchei Temimim in America. There is these attempts to establish a yeshiva presence and then Rav Ruderman already early 1930s he starts Ner Yisroel. Not only is it a prominent yeshiva, but it’s in Baltimore, it’s outside of New York.

This is like a big move, starting yeshivas outside of New York City.

David Baskevkin: But the yeshiva world still does not come into its own as its own entity. Meaning now there’s an adjective, a socio-cultural adjective that’s part of a much larger universe. These yeshivas were all outstanding and they had their early years, they were all relatively small, they weren’t like hustling and bustling.

Many of the graduates did not continue on to Torah study, and even if they did, they were probably out of town rabbis like my grandfather who served in Portland. What are the contributing factors that kind of lead to the prominence on American shore of the yeshiva movement? Of that there’s a yeshiva world in America that’s not just a couple of institutions, but are now communities. We have thousands of graduates who have all spent time in some model that has echoes of the original Volozhin model. What are the catalysts that allowed the yeshiva world on American soil to really flourish?

Yehuda Geberer: It’s a great question.

I would divide the answer into two halves. The first half would be internal and the second half would be external. The internal answers, it’s kind of external too, the Holocaust is the first part of the answer. The Holocaust does a few things to American Jewry.

Number one, it is this sense of destruction that is so incomprehensible. The entire world of Europe and bear in mind that this is a recent immigrant generation, almost everyone within the last half a century had just come from there. These were their families, their communities, their homes, and they had left that world behind, made that choice for a better future, and then that whole world is gone. That leads to the next step which is that we, American Jewry, and bear in mind that in 1945 when the Holocaust ends, what later becomes Israel, there’s half a million Jews there.

American Jewry is the place. There’s four and a half million Jews in America and no more in Europe, not enough yet in Palestine. So in 1945 when the dust settles of World War II and the Holocaust, where’s the future of Jewry? In the United States of America. And this sense of responsibility to rebuild what was lost starts to settle into the consciousness of American Jewry.

That’s the second thing that happens. The third thing that happens because of the Holocaust is on a technical level it brings the remnants of the Torah aristocracy to American shores. Some went to Israel, but many came to the United States. And they provide the leadership, the vision, the motivation, the drive, and the students.

The original students were European young Holocaust survivors who wanted to attend yeshiva. So many of the original students weren’t even necessarily American. So Rav Aharon Kotler, people like the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Frierdiker Rebbe and then his son-in-law the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the Satmar Rav, and then the ones who came earlier, Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz and Rav Ruderman and Rav Dovid Leibowitz and then when he succeeded by his son. And then all these visionaries, these builders who saw this world that was lost and they saw a need to rebuild it, and they have people who are willing to fund them.

The Irving Bunims of the world, the Moses Samuel Feuerstein, Joseph Shapiro, Stephen Klein, you have these people Orthodox or even traditional members of the American Jewish community who say we need to rebuild. That’s on the internal side. And that’s usually where the conversation stops when most people discuss. Unfortunately, you chose me.

I have another whole side that I discuss, the external forces, because what these visionaries did and what the Holocaust did was lay the groundwork. And we’ll say that their greatest success was seen at the younger level, Torah Umesorah, the day school movement. The immigrant generation, I’d have to guess ninety, ninety-five percent sent their kids to public school. Now in the 1950s in the Orthodox community, they’re sending their kids to day schools, to Torah day schools, private day schools.

That’s Torah education. And that goes through eighth grade. And now some of the frummest of the frum, the most religious, especially New York City but even outside, in the 1950s are even sending their kids to yeshiva high schools. And that’s where it ended.

There were rare exceptions that there were rare students who went to post-yeshiva high school in the 1950s and sixties. A couple of hundred in the whole country in Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan, YU, in Lakewood, in Telshe, a little bit of Chaim Berlin, Torah Vodaas, a sprinkling, a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of hundred, I doubt even that. So you’re successful in the Orthodox community in elementary education, they’re going to day schools instead of public school now. They’re also pretty successful in high school Torah education.

Would the yeshiva world, the yeshiva society, the yeshiva community exist as we know it now with the way you described before if the Torah yeshiva education would have ended that, or would we need the masses, not the few elite like it was back in Europe, to continue yeshiva education in the post-high school, not to go to college, not to start a career right away, but to continue studying Torah post-high school after eighteen years old? I’m not even talking about kollel, I’m talking about post-high school. So what happens? My claim is that we have to look beyond the internal. We have to look at the external. And there are four things that I found that are external, broader trends in American society that contributed to the growth from the 1960s and on to post-high school yeshiva education for the masses.

I’m not talking about high school or elementary school, and I’m not talking about the few elite that were always studying Torah post-high school. We’re talking about the masses.

David Baskevkin: Post-high school for the masses. What we think of now, you know, we send the kid to a gap year in yeshiva, so we do it in Israel, but that’s very unusual, it’s adopted in the masses, you could go to a Modern Orthodox high school, you’re spending a year sometimes two years sometimes three years in post-high school learning.

What are the external forces that kind of create this very new idea of post-high school yeshiva education for the masses?

Yehuda Geberer: Right. I think there’s four. I’m probably wrong, there’s probably another ten reasons that I haven’t thought of, because there’s never the reason, it’s always a confluence of factors. Of course.

So I found four, and would love to hear from your listeners if they can think of other ones. Number one, the changing trends in American society, in the social culture of American society. In the pre-War era, in the age of immigration, the dominant, I guess, culture, values of American life were to become Americanized, to integrate into the American way, to send to public school, to become American and live the American dream. And the immigrants, first of all, they all wanted that.

They embraced that. It wasn’t shoved down their throats. But even if they would have resisted it, they would have had to do it anyway because the social pressures were so intense and so strong, there was no other way to survive the immigration experience. Almost no way, again, there’s always these exceptions.

That’s what was pre-War. In the 1950s and especially the sixties, there’s this new idea of multiculturalism, that the beauty of America, of American society, is not that everyone integrates and everyone becomes American and there’s this thing called America that everyone goes through this melting pot. The term was invented for this. It was invented in New York by some literary figure for this concept in the age of immigration.

The post-war, the 1950s and sixties says no, American society, I’m talking about general society, embraces diversity, embraces multiculturalism, embraces the idea that you can be different and it doesn’t make you less American. And this has an impact on the rise of the Evangelical Christian movement, that different kinds of religion have a place, that you don’t have to send to public school, you have a private religious school? Wow, go for it! And it doesn’t make you less American. You just have to fund it yourself because separation of church and state. You want to wear a fur hat and white stockings in Williamsburg in the middle of August? In the 1920s, unheard of! You’re not American! In the 1950s and even more so in the sixties, wow, you’re different, you’re keeping your heritage, your culture, it does not make you less American.

And they allow this space. In the 1960s is when there’s this historic testimony of Rabbi Moshe Sherer, legendary leader of Agudath Israel of America, to the United States Congress about private school education in America. And you know who he’s representing in that testimony? Not just yeshivas, the Catholic parochial schools have him as their emissary as well. There’s this openness and that only gets even…

And even more so in the 1960s with the hippie and counterculture movement and the civil rights movement, and there’s this new definition of what is American identity and Orthodox Jewry falls right into this space and flourishes. They flourish on it. We can have our distinct dress, we can have our distinct education, and it doesn’t make us less American. And we’re fine with that.

That’s number one that allows this. Number two, a change in legislation. First, Roosevelt’s New Deal, which it takes some time to trickle down into society by the 1940s, but much more so, the Great Society of LBJ in the 1960s. In the Great Society of LBJ that he pushes through Congress is this welfare package that we still live with until today.

And I know many, not getting political, people have various opinions on it and about the budget and the deficit and all that, but regardless, it created a new reality that Torah educators, Torah students, people who would have to go normally in working-class families and supplement the family income by the age of 18, there’s all these benefits that exist.

David Baskevkin: WIC, food stamps,

Yehuda Geberer: all those things and so much more that allow a little more—it’s not so restricted—a little more space to breathe to allow people to explore new venues of Torah education and Torah study. Number three, the Vietnam War draft. This might be the most important of all the factors because until the Vietnam War draft, parents would be encouraging their children—and we’re talking about the frumest parents, the most religious, the most Orthodox parents in American society—the ones who are sending their children to yeshiva day school and the ones who are sending their children to yeshiva high school, those parents are encouraging their children to join the workforce at 18 or more likely to go to college at the age of 18.

And they usually didn’t encounter much resistance. The average kid wanted to go to college and go start a career. Then came the draft. Again, I don’t want to get into the politics of the Vietnam War, but for the most part, there were those who wanted to go fight, either for adventure or for patriotism, but for the most part, Vietnam War was a war that people did not want to fight.

David Baskevkin: Correct. It didn’t have the same patriotic motivation like World War II, the Greatest Generation. By the time the Vietnam War came around, that enthusiasm, which is general—it’s not specific to the Jewish community—had definitely abated. Why is the Vietnam War factoring into the flourishing of the yeshiva movement?

Yehuda Geberer: So as soon as the draft comes about, there’s something called the divinity school deferment, which is still American law till today.

That allows Catholics who are studying for the priesthood or ministers or whatever, you know, in any society, and yeshivas were registered as rabbinical colleges. I pretty much every yeshiva, I think, till today is registered as a rabbinical college. So every yeshiva student is officially studying for the rabbinate, whether they are or not is a different question. It’s also irrelevant to our discussion.

And they are all rabbinical students, so they’re eligible for a draft deferment. Voila! Every parent and every student—not every, some do want to go to the army—but almost every yeshiva student and almost every parent is all of a sudden telling their kid: you better stay in yeshiva after high school because you step out of the yeshiva, you’re going to get drafted and sent out to Vietnam. And that’s not happening. You’re staying in yeshiva.

And the yeshivas explode at this time. It is so direct. The other factors we’re discussing are much more gradual and much more subtle. This is sharp, this is direct, this is a boom, and new yeshivas open, the existing yeshivas explode with enrollment because everyone needs to stay post-high school.

And parents are even thinking earlier: maybe I’ll send my kid to yeshiva high school so that they could stay post-high school because I don’t want them to get drafted. I can’t send them to post-yeshiva high school if they never went to yeshiva high school, right? And the draft lasts I think six, seven, eight years, whatever it is. I don’t remember the exact number. And that starts a trend because what do they discover—and this is where the internal and external factors meet—they discover that the mesirus nefesh, the great sacrifice and dedication of these great visionaries and holy leaders, they created amazing places and these yeshivas were wonderful and they were awesome and this is where you could study Torah at an elite level.

Even when the draft ends, it’s already a trend. This is a good place. What’s the big deal if they push off college or career by a year or two or three or four, whatever it is? That already becomes the norm. So number four I save for the last, even though the Vietnam War is my favorite one, so I should have saved it for last, because number four I’m still not sure if it’s an internal or external factor, it’s a cross between the two.

And that is the combination of the demographic growth and economic prosperity of the Orthodox community of the United States. Pre-War, whatever Orthodox community there was was impoverished. It was the Great Depression, it was new immigrants who were struggling. The wealthy Jews were at best traditional and more often than not assimilated.

So sometimes traditional Jews, they said, nebach, let’s throw the yeshiva a few dollars. It reminds us of the heim. It reminds us of the old home back in Europe. But that’s not the way to build a movement.

That’s not the way to build infrastructure. You need people from within. And how do you have that? When the community demographic Hey, it is precedent because the 1870s had economic growth like that but I don’t want to get into American economic history. But it’s this massive economic growth in the 1950s and to a certain extent the 1960s as well.

This brings not only many Orthodox people into the community because of demographic natural growth, but it also brings economic prosperity. And the only way to build the infrastructure of a mass movement is to have it funded. So is it an internal factor because the Orthodox community grows and is successful, or is it an external factor because it’s dependent on the economic trends of the American wider economy? You know, we could call it a combination of both, but those four factors, I think, contributed greatly to the rise of the yeshiva movement, which these four factors would be completely irrelevant had there been no foundations. So obviously, we need the Rav Aharon Kotlers and the Rav Belkin and Rav Soloveitchik and Rav Dovid Leibowitz and Rav Henoch Leibowitz and the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Satmar Rav and Rav Shraga Feivel and all those visionaries and all that.

But the way the two come together is these confluence of factors that worked in tandem to create this massive and flourishing and beautiful yeshiva community and society that we know today in the United States.

David Baskevkin: This is absolutely fascinating. And if you look at the landscape now in the United States of America, there are many very strong yeshivas. Nothing compares to the strength and just the sheer force and magnitude of Beth Medrash Govoha, what’s known as Lakewood Yeshiva.

Every yeshiva, in fact, in the United States has a contingency plan. How do we make sure that all of our guys once they graduate high school don’t just go to Lakewood? How do we get them back, whether Baltimore, Chicago? Every single yeshiva community has that question. That to me is a very recent phenomenon. I don’t know when to date it, but to me the gravitational pull of Lakewood is truly, I don’t want to say unprecedented because there were other very big yeshivas, but it’s probably the closest to like the Volozhin gravitational pull of just like all rivers kind of flow back to Lakewood.

What do you attribute the overwhelming success, the gravitational pull of Lakewood in the contemporary American yeshiva world?

Yehuda Geberer: I thought about it a lot because you bounced the idea off of me, yeah.

David Baskevkin: Sure, I asked you this yesterday.

Yehuda Geberer: Yeah. And I didn’t have an answer yesterday.

I came up with three things. The first was a very justified position as the best. From the days of Rav Aharon Kotler, he was able to brand, it wasn’t like in the marketing way, meaning it was actually the best. It wasn’t that he marketed it as the best.

It actually was that this is the best yeshiva. There are many great yeshivas, but from, I would say, already the mid-fifties, it was clear that due to Rav Aharon Kotler’s leadership and the style of structure that he put around the yeshiva, that in the elitism of Litvish yeshivas and Lithuanian yeshivas always were about elitism.

David Baskevkin: The best, sure.

Yehuda Geberer: He had been successful at steaming ahead of Telshe, Chaim Berlin, Torah Vodaas, Rabbeinu Yitzchak Elchanan…

it was the best.

David Baskevkin: And a lot of that was built on just the sheer presence and the character of Rav Aharon Kotler, his genius, his scholarship. He was older than many of the other Roshei Yeshiva, significantly older than nearly everyone you mentioned. And he was already established in Europe.

Sure. His prominence, his first leadership role, you know, Rav Ruderman, Rav Hutner, a lot of their first leadership roles were more, they were students in Europe, but their first leadership roles were in the states. Rav Aharon was a Rosh Yeshiva in Europe.

Yehuda Geberer: He was a leading Rosh Yeshiva and Kletsk Yeshiva after Mir and Slabodka might have been the best in the Lithuanian yeshiva world.

So he was a top yeshiva and Rosh Yeshiva pre-war. And he was a fireball. He was energy and charisma. And he attracted the best students.

Not only that, but Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz sent his best students from Torah Vodaas. This is a great sacrifice of American yeshiva history. Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz took his best students and sent them to Lakewood when it started. And they said, “You’re going to destroy Torah Vodaas.” He said, “Is my goal to build my yeshiva or is my goal to build Torah in the United States? And what’s the difference if it’s my yeshiva or someone else? Rav Aharon Kotler needs the best students, so I’m sending him my best students.”

David Baskevkin: I’m so happy that you surfaced this because this is something that is very, I don’t know that it’s exclusive, but it is certainly unique in the yeshiva world, something that I witnessed of yeshivas sending students out to start other yeshivas.

Not other branches of the yeshiva. Other yeshivas. Other yeshivas. And they will not just send the riffraff.

I remember in Little League we one time played a game, I was the guy who you put all the way in the back of the outfield because I couldn’t focus, I was thinking about life and the world, looking at the clouds and the grass, and I remember there was one game where my baseball coaches who also… happened to be my best friend’s parents, Azriel Diamond and Yossi Sonnenblick, but I will not hold back on criticizing him as a Little League coach. I remember there was a game where the other team was short a player. So instead of forfeiting, who did they send them? They’re not sending them our pitcher, they’re not sending them one of the best.

They sent them Bashevkin. They sent me to play for the other team. You send your weakest guys. And there’s something very amazing, I mean, that’s normal, but the Yeshiva system was the opposite.

You’re starting a new, let me send you our best guy to get this off the ground because exactly as you said from Rav Shraga Feivel who was my grandfather’s first Rebbi and the first person to teach Tzedakah on American shores. Yes, he wasn’t trying to build his institution, he was trying to build American Jewry. So factor number one we have is the personality of Rav Aharon Kotler.

Yehuda Geberer: More than that, that it became the best Yeshiva.

David Baskevkin: Correct. It was the best Yeshiva, a lot of that was attributed because of the sheer power and towering presence of Rav Aharon Kotler.

Yehuda Geberer: So under his son Rav Shneur it continues to be the best Yeshiva, even without the towering presence of Rav Aharon, not to say anything detracting from Rav Shneur, he just didn’t have that same charisma that his father did. But Rav Shneur was a powerhouse in his own right.

So it’s the best. Now, the best is always going to attract more. No matter how high you set the bar, there’s going to be so many people clamoring to get in, it’s just going to continue growing because it’s the best. Lehavdil, even though Harvard and places like that have like less than a one percent acceptance rate, they’re still these massive universities.

David Baskevkin: The acceptance rate is actually what gives it some of its prominence. Exactly.

Yehuda Geberer: So the best is likely to be the biggest. That’s factor number one.

Factor number two, the fact that Lakewood is unique from almost its inception that it is not exclusively a Yeshiva for single students, it is primarily a Yeshiva for married students. Interesting. What we call a Kolel. And being that there’s no time limit on the Kolel and being that pretty much, I wouldn’t say they invented the concept, there were other Kolels, YU and other places, but they popularized the concept through education, through marketing, through ideology, they built up the Kolel concept.

David Baskevkin: The Kolel system.

Yehuda Geberer: Therefore, the overwhelming majority of their student body is Kolel members, whereas single students are limited to three, four, five, six, seven years, generally speaking, generally there’s some sort of time for the majority of the population.

David Baskevkin: Where you move on and you start building a life, but this was from its inception, that’s such a facet that I never thought of, and that really distinguishes it from Europe also, no? Yes. Was there a Yeshiva that primarily catered to people post-marriage in Europe?

Yehuda Geberer: It almost didn’t exist learning post-marriage unless you were becoming a rabbi.

There was a couple, there was the Kovna Kolel and the Volozhin had a little Kolel, Brodsky Kolel, the Mir had a tiny Kolel. The whole idea of Kolel is a postwar construct. That’d be another podcast. Okay.

We can’t explain that in a couple… Okay, sure, sure. The idea that Kolel, both in the United States and Israel, has become a mass idea in postwar, which has never existed in Jewish history, that would have to be another podcast.

David Baskevkin: I know where I was standing the first time I heard the word Kolel.

My sister who married somebody who was going to study in Kolel and still is learning in Kolel, truly wonderful person, just married off their third child Keinaina hara, but I remember it was the summer of 1997 and I was walking to camp and my mother was telling me that my sister had just gotten engaged and I was so excited because my other sister was already engaged and she was engaged to somebody who was going to be a lawyer. And I thought that was very exciting, oh, he’s going to be a lawyer, I was reading all these John Grisham books. My other sister, what is her husband going to do? And my mother, because she was still kind of wrapping her mind around it, I still remember her face, she was like explaining it to herself more. I remember her telling me, he’s learning in a Kolel, a Kolel is where you learn Torah professionally.

I just remember just kind of her body language of my mother, she should live and be well, we love her, the way she was explaining it to me, I could even tell back then, I’m like, Ma, you’re still kind of wrapping your own mind, explaining it to yourself, which was very, very because it was not so common back then. Even in the late 90s for people to kind of en masse, like a regular, you know, family to say, I’m going to get married and we’re going to spend years and years where our entire life is revolved and dedicated around Torah study was still kind of emerging at a mass level. But that is a very interesting and distinguishing factor where Lakewood from the very beginning catered to people who were already married.

Yehuda Geberer: Yes.

In addition to the single students, and for the majority of its history, the majority of its student body has been married, and that automatically your student population is doubled because most Yeshivas either they have a very small Kolel or none at all. Generally it’s only a few years, but many people keep it even five, ten, fifteen, even longer. longer. That enabled it to grow exponentially as well.

And the third factor I was able to think of was the trend that the nucleus of it was probably in the 70s, but it only gained traction in the late 80s, early 90s, is going to study Torah in Israel. What started to become this new custom in the American yeshiva life, starting in the late 80s, early 90s, and really reached its glory years in the late 90s, is this idea that you study in yeshiva high school, you then study post-high school in yeshiva in the United States for whatever, one, two, three years, and then you go study Torah in yeshiva in Israel, also for a year or two. Where do you study there? Mir, Brisk, there’s like a thousand other places by now, but then there was a few other places. And then you go back to America because you’re American.

You’re not coming to move to Israel. You’re going back to the United States. Now the question is, a senior single yeshiva student who spent two, three years studying post-high school in America and another year or two studying in an elite yeshiva like Mir or Brisk in Israel, now you’re going back, you’re going to start dating, you’re going to get married. Where are you going to go? Back to hang out with young post-high school kids? You’re a senior scholar.

You gravitate to the best. You gravitate to the elite place. You gravitate to a place that has many married students that you could continue there after you get married, so you’re already starting off there. And therefore, Lakewood attracted them because it was a natural place.

It was the best, it was a place you could continue after you’re married, and a place where an older senior single Talmudic young scholar can feel comfortable coming back from Israel. So the post-Israel, married kollel, and elite combined to make Lakewood the largest and, like you said, de rigueur, like you have to go to Lakewood. There’s no other place.

David Baskevkin: The gravitational pull on Lakewood in the American yeshiva world is incredibly, incredibly strong.

And it’s interesting the way that you say it because there’s something that feels very old and very unchanging about the yeshiva system and how we do it. And there is something that is unchanging, which is our connection to Torah and centering Torah in our lives and communally. But there is also just the way that we execute it, the strategy, how it plays out in individuals’ lives, the current system that we have now is kind of still young. Would it be unfair or untrue to say that this system is really about like 30 years old or so?

Yehuda Geberer: Yeah, we pretend we’re unchanging and traditional and conservative like that.

It’s ridiculous. We’re constantly evolving. There’s constant innovation. Everything structural, our way of learning and study, the structure of our yeshivas, the curriculum, there’s literally nothing that’s traditional about it.

Every single everything has changed. And we’re proud of that. We love our changes. And to pretend there’s no change, that’s preposterous.

David Baskevkin: No, I love because it’s change in service of perpetuating the eternal. That’s what I love about the yeshiva world.

Yehuda Geberer: I could not have phrased it better. And the reason I couldn’t have phrased it better is because I’m incapable of phrasing things like you.

That was beautiful. That was poetic.

David Baskevkin: I very much appreciate that. This has been an absolute delight and I always wrap up my interviews with more rapid fire questions.

My first question, we haven’t mentioned too many, what books would you recommend for someone who wants to learn more about the yeshiva world and particularly the American yeshiva world, which we don’t really have as much scholarship on, but I’m curious what books would you recommend to open up the window to this incredible universe?

Yehuda Geberer: Shaul Stampfer’s book, The Lithuanian Yeshivas of the 19th Century is number one. Dr. Ben-Zion Klibansky’s book, The Golden Age of Yeshivas is number two. There is a book about American yeshivas. Helmreich?

David Baskevkin: Helmreich.

The World of the Yeshiva.

Yehuda Geberer: It’s pretty good. I think that you’re bringing up a good point that we need a new book on the American yeshiva, a history book on American yeshivas.

David Baskevkin: We don’t really have a history of the American yeshiva.

Artscroll put out something that I think is actually one of the best. I love it because the picture of my grandfather is in it. But they have a book called, maybe it’s called like America. It has like a picture of America on it.

And it goes through kind of the early founders, but it’s not a cohesive academic work that kind of tells the story of rebuilding of Torah in America. I hope maybe you or one of your writing partners would take a stab at that. My next question is really practical for you. If somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever and go back to school and get a PhD in any topic of your choice, what do you think the subject and title of that dissertation would be? And I know you are kind of in the process of one, so you could give that as an answer, unless you already, like most PhD students, have already regretted the area that you’re

Yehuda Geberer: Immigration, the Jewish immigration from Russia and Galicia, Eastern Europe to the United States at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

You mentioned it in passing earlier, but that is my first love. I may not talk about it on my tours. I talk a lot about the Holocaust and about rabbis and tzaddikim and Chassidus and yeshivos. I barely talk about immigration, but that is actually my body of research.

David Baskevkin: I’m so happy you mentioned your tours and there are a lot of people who give tours. Really you’re an incredible tour guide and listeners who are interested in finding somebody who knows their way around Europe, not just the logistics currently but knows the history, how it got here, somebody who could really open up that world. I mean you’re number one in that area. My last and final question, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules.

What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Yehuda Geberer: I’m inconsistent, unfortunately.

David Baskevkin: That’s why we’re friends.

Yehuda Geberer: Generally around midnight, give or take a half hour, and I get up between 6:30 and 7:00.

David Baskevkin: Okay, I appreciate that.

Good solid. You’re not waking up in the middle of the night. Rabbi Yehuda Geber, I am so grateful you’ve been so generous with your time. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Yehuda Geberer: This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.

David Baskevkin: This was a long conversation but one that was absolutely fascinating and I hope for some of our listeners to introduce just the basic understanding of what is the philosophy of the American yeshiva world. Where did it come from? What is it trying to accomplish? This is not for the yeshiva world, this is for listeners who don’t know much about the yeshiva world.

People who might look at them as, use the term which I think is pejorative, black hatters, diminishing them to their most observable item of clothing. That I don’t think is a sophisticated approach. But this is also for the yeshiva world. I think a lot of people growing up now don’t appreciate or understand how this world emerged and what it is about and right now it’s moving quickly, it’s evolving quickly, so the way to really understand what the vision should be is to get to the roots.

And one thing that I wanted to actually share before we conclude and I want to leave you with a Torah thought, but before we get to that, one thing I wanted to share, which is something that I picked up in a wonderful biography of Rav Meir Lublin, who was the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin, which is one of the great yeshivos that we lost, unfortunately, in the Holocaust. It was obviously, as its name suggests, operated in Lublin, in Poland from 1930 to 1939. It had, I think it was a full service yeshiva, so what really made it unique is that it had a dormitory. It was really gorgeous.

Many people have visited the institution as it still stands today. It’s not a functional yeshiva as far as I know, though I do believe it is now a functioning synagogue. And one thing that I found in this biography of Rav Meir Lublin, who should also be noted was the founder of the Daf Yomi movement, the international movement that began, I believe in 1923, of people studying a page of Talmud a day. And that began from his address at one of the great rabbinic assemblies where he said we should start doing this so Jews all over the world who were so dispersed in times of war, everyone can really be learning together and a Jew who starts learning in Europe and then gets off a boat in America can continue and walk into a synagogue and they’re still learning with him.

So in this biography they have the daily schedule of the yeshiva and I want to go through it. I’m trying to remember what my schedule was when I studied in yeshiva. It shouldn’t be hard to find, but this is the original schedule from Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin. I’m going to go through it from morning till sundown because the last part of the schedule is my favorite.

So at 6 AM was rise and shine. That’s when you rise and shine and anybody who’s been in yeshiva knows that one of the jobs that we didn’t discuss is called a vecker. A vecker is Yiddish for a waker. And when I studied in Ner Yisrael they had this where somebody would go down the hallway and he would say, this is honestly, for me personally, I loved my time in yeshiva, just a little trauma from the vecker who would literally go down the hallway banging like a washing cup and would say kum l’avodas haborei, kum l’avodas haborei, doing it in his voice.

I mean he had that kind of typical nasal yeshivish voice. Kum l’avodas haborei means arise for the service of God. In Ner Yisrael, I’ll be honest, I never ever woke up at 6 AM, though I think I had a roommate, Chaim Schuss, who did. I would always wake up and hear him washing negel vasser, the washing in the morning, so they would wake up at six and davening was at 7:30.

That’s more reasonable. I’m not sure why they had people wake up an hour and a half before davening. And the first class was a class on the Rif, which is not the Talmud itself is really the first of the codifiers of the Talmud who would really just condense all of the back and forth of the Talmud and then kind of give you a bottom-line conclusion and they would read through the Rif in order and that was at 8:45 I believe that was for a half hour then they would have some sort of like 45-minute morning break and then at 10 a.m. they would go and they would learn together in different shiurim or maybe bechavruta it’s not entirely clear to me at 11:45 a.m. they had these were the options they would have different classes they would have a shiur on Mikvaot on Sunday Monday and Tuesday and then they would have a different shiur on Zevachim which is a tractate of Talmud. Mikvaot is Mishnais.

Mikvaot is Mishnais, we don’t have a Talmud on Mikvaot but the Mishnais of how to establish a Mikvah very intricate serious area of Torah study and then they would learn Zevachim Gemara Rashi Tosafos on Wednesdays and Thursdays then they would have lunch at 1:30 on Mondays and Thursdays they would also learn during this kind of break time it would be abbreviated they would learn Shaarei Teshuvah from Rabbeinu Yonah kind of an early work of ethics about repentance 2:45 there would be a break and then they would have a set time an hour a day from 3 to 4 where they would learn they would review things that they learned in previous years this is what it says on the schedule in Hebrew shinnun belimmudim shelamdu beshanim she’averu in previous years how brilliant can you imagine in a college class let’s review what you did in high school I mean they don’t really do that they assume you remember everything even in Yeshiva they should bring that back that is absolutely brilliant I love that then at 4:00 p.m. they had Mincha and they would say Tehillim at 4:30 in Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin believe it or not what did they learn they had a Daf Yomi shiur that is very rare I don’t know of any Yeshiva that as part of its schedule has a Daf Yomi shiur at 5:30 they would daven Maariv and then at 6:00 p.m. like they would all divide up the entirety of Shas of all of the Talmud and they would learn that for 3 hours until 9:00 p.m. where they would have dinner then from 9:00 to 9:30 they would review the Rif that they were doing in order from the morning and then at 10 p.m. and this is really what I love most about the schedule what did they do at 10 p.m. ketivas chiddushei torah ma sheshama meharav shlita o ma shechananu hashem lechadesh be’atzmo they would encourage the students to write down what they learned that day write down the Torah that they either heard from Rav Meir Lublin who was still alive at the time that’s why Maharam shlita that’s referring to Rav Meir Lublin or ma shechananu hashem lechadesh be’atzmo you should write down something that was gifted to you that you thought of during the day to write it down and I think that ability to encourage students to write your own Torah build your own connection to Torah through writing is something that is so beautiful I want to leave you with a Torah that I love to repeat I first heard this Torah from my mentor and teacher Moshe Bane and this is a Torah that he heard from his teacher Rav Yaakov Weinberg who was the second Rosh Yeshiva of Ner Yisrael and there’s a Torah that he once shared that I always think about and I think is a fitting conclusion to this episode about the history of the Yeshiva world the Talmud in Bava Batra on page 21a actually tells the early history of setting up kind of groups of study it used to be the Talmud says that we never would send our kids out to learn Torah that is the responsibility of the parents most parents or back then in the times of the Talmud most parents hopefully had the ability to teach their own kids Torah and you’d learn with your parents and get a strong foundation in Jewish education as things went on less and less parents felt competent and comfortable teaching their children until Yehoshua ben Gamla instituted a system where even those who had parents who weren’t scholars and weren’t comfortable teaching them they had the ability to go learn in groups and to make sure that they also got a basic Jewish education and the language of the Talmud is zakhor oto ish latov we should remember this person for good Yehoshua ben Gamla shemo his name is Yehoshua ben Gamla why why should we remember him she’ilmale hu were it not for him nishtakkach torah miyisrael the Torah would have been forgotten because he’s the one who set up this system that for children who don’t have parents who are capable of teaching them they can go out and hire somebody and sit in groups and they’ll study this early iteration of Yeshiva education so Rav Yaakov Weinberg the Rosh Yeshiva of Ner Yisrael asks a very basic and profound question why do we say about Yehoshua ben Gamla that were it not for him nishtakkach torah miyisrael Torah would have been forgotten from the Jewish people what on earth are you talking about Torah would not have been forgotten Torah would have been preserved just with kids who had parents who know how to teach them Torah. tough luck, we feel bad, we empathize, but that’s not the equivalent of forgetting Torah from the Jewish people. So why do we attribute this transformative compliment that literally Yehoshua ben Gamla should be remembered for were it not for him Torah would have been forgotten from the Jewish people? What on earth are you talking about? He just helped the kids who didn’t have competent parents, but he didn’t save Torah, there were plenty of parents who had the ability of teaching their children. And Rav Yaakov Weinberg gives I think one of the most profound answers that we need to think about today in 2026.

Says Rav Yaakov Weinberg: preserving Torah only for the kids who have parents who are capable of teaching them is not called preserving Torah. What we learn from this passage of Talmud is that preserving Torah only for some, the kids who can afford it, the kids who are smart, the kids who are brilliant, the kids who have good parents, good stock, grew up in the right neighborhood, if we only assure that those kids, that is not called preserving Torah. And that is why we attribute this to Yehoshua ben Gamla because Yehoshua ben Gamla’s the one who got up and said no Jewish child can be left behind from a Jewish education. And if we only provide a Jewish education for some, that is not called preserving Torah, that is called forgetting Torah.

He ensured that Torah is for everyone, which is why we say about Yehoshua ben Gamla ilmalei hu, were it not for him, nishtakcha Torah mi-Yisrael, Torah would have been forgotten. And in this moment you have to ask yourself: who are the people, who are the programs who are ensuring that regardless of your background, regardless of what got you to this point in your life, everyone, everyone deserves a Jewish education and that preserving a Jewish education for some communities, for some people, for some stratospheres of whether it’s wealth or intelligence or social ability or geographic location, that is not called preserving Torah. The way that we preserve Torah is ensuring that every Jew, every Jewish child, every Jewish adult, everyone deserves access to a full and robust Jewish education. So thank you so much for listening.

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