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A GENERATION LEAVES




Amidst the carnage of murder and violent death that we are experiencing here in Israel - the Moment Café explosion in Jerusalem on March 9 took place only a few hundred meters from my house as my wife and I were walking home from a Saturday night social visit – the normal but saddening toll of life and death, our unavoidable mortality cycle, continues to take place. In the past two months, two great men of the past generation passed from my life. I shall not see their equals since they were yet from the generation of Jewish Europe and carried within themselves the special flavor of that thousand-year-old society that no longer exists. And neither American Jewish society nor Israeli society has the current capacity to replicate the warmth, breadth of vision, solidarity of peoplehood and love of Torah and Jews and humanity that so characterized that unique world, now gone forever.

 

                        My great and beloved teacher and mentor, Rabbi Chaim Kreiswirth, passed away in January. At that time, I wrote an article about him and my profound sense of loss in an op-ed piece in the Jerusalem Post. I also wrote briefly about him in the last issue of the Wein Press in connection with my trip to Chicago to eulogize him there and the nostalgia that that event occasioned. I will not repeat myself here on these pages as to what I said about him in those pieces. But I nevertheless do wish to write a little more about him, his dynamic personality and his influence upon me and upon hundreds of other at-that-time young American Jews. I have long felt that part of the challenge of educational institutions, especially those that teach Torah, is to provide their students with heroes – with figures that are larger than life. For only heroes can inspire, and schools should provide inspiration and not merely knowledge. Knowledge can somehow be gained at other places and times – some of our greatest Jewish scholars were almost self-taught – and knowledge can be forgotten, discarded, amended or enlarged later in life after school. Inspiration, on the other hand is eternal, something that lives within one’s self all of the days of one’s life. As such, it is an enormously valuable commodity, one that is not subject to imitation or erosion. It is also something that unfortunately is not in great current supply.

 

                        It is so important to have someone in life that serves as a hero, as a role model, who inspires, who makes a young person say, “I want to be like him or her.” All of the necessary moral traits in life, no matter how well described and explained in books, are not equal in impact and influence to actually being with a person who possesses those moral traits and thus behaves accordingly. This is especially true as regarding a teacher-student relationship. A teacher should be a source of inspiration, a hero figure, and not only an imparter of information. I know that this is a tall order and seen superficially perhaps it is even unfair to ask it of our educators. But the Talmud itself makes that demand. It states, “If the teacher resembles an angel of God, then Torah can be gained from him, but if not, then Torah should not be studied under him.” This severe and limiting statement is meant to point out the ultimate goal that we should try to achieve in education and in schools of learning. Even if in practical terms, we fall short of this lofty goal, nevertheless we are bidden to aim for it and realize that we are always to strive for its achievement.

 

                        All of this serves as an introduction to the few words about Rabbi Kreiswirth that follow. To me, he was the embodiment of inspiration. His goodness, kindness, compassion, humor, concern and sensitivity for others, created a unique moral personage. His greatness in Torah knowledge was legendary. Possessed of a phenomenal gift of memory, combined with his penchant for long hours of study, he was a recognized Torah authority already in his early youth. He was the head of the yeshiva in Chicago before his thirtieth birthday. He amazed us, his students, with his vast knowledge of everything that related to Torah and the Jewish people. But it was his personality, even more than his phenomenal intelligence and memory, which truly captivated us. We wanted to be like him, even though we knew that we were most unlikely to ever achieve his intellectual knowledge and prowess. But at least we could imitate his personal qualities, control our temper and mouth, be kind and loyal one to another and catch the fire of his enthusiasm to rebuild the Jewish people and Torah life after the awful destructions of the Holocaust. He was the hero in our lives that we needed, the source of courage and boldness in a dark and dangerous world. And in that sense, he remained with us all of our lives, prodding, encouraging, helping us to do more and go farther, even when we were no longer in daily contact with him.

 

                        Rabbi Kreiswirth was born in Poland and studied in Lublin and later in Slabodka, Lithuania. As such, he combined within his being the fire of Polish chasidut and the intellect and analytical approach of Lithuanian yeshivot. He was also influenced by mussar – the movement of ethics and human sensitivity and intense service to God and man - as expressed in Slabodka. In fact he married the daughter of Rabbi Avraham Grodzensky, the masgiach and champion of mussar at Slabodka. Thus, he was already at a young age an amalgam of the positive and deeply felt religious streams flowing through Eastern European Jewish society. One of the unique characteristics of Eastern European Jewry was its breadth of range in the world of Jewish thought and spirit, and there was a sense of societal cohesion merely in being Jewish. Though there was no shortage of disputes and divisions within the Jewish world there in Eastern Europe, nevertheless the different groupings and ideas were strongly influential one on the other. There was far less isolationism and narrowness of contact with “others” there than is the current prevalence of such attitudes in our every day Jewish life. In any event, this type of environment helped fashion broad-ranging personalities who were open to all types of Jews and were not overly quick to condemn and vilify others, simply because they differed in outlook and ideas. The tendency of the young, especially those studying in yeshivot or other schools of higher education, is to be certain and doctrinaire, smugly intolerant, intellectually arrogant and narrowly focused. It was therefore extremely important to have such a personality as Rabbi Kreiswirth to teach and inspire the young men under his tutelage. He helped mitigate our tendency towards extremism and arrogance, for he himself was the example of humility and openness. For this alone, his students are eternally grateful to him.

 

                        I have a picture of him taken in 1954 when he participated in the ordination ceremony of the rabbinical student class that preceded mine. In it, he is yet a strikingly handsome young man, his neatly trimmed beard still black and he is wearing a stylish, double-breasted suit. He is in that picture the person as I first met him and perhaps still prefer to remember him. Later, he left Chicago to become the rabbi of Antwerp. There he donned more formal rabbinic garb, long black coat and large black hat, and his beard eventually became long and white. But he always remained the same dynamic and inspirational person, loyal to his students and compassionate to all those in need. Many an orphan girl had her wedding paid for through his efforts and he always was a champion of the needy and downtrodden. In this, he also served as an example to his students and to others, though few of us were able to equal his charitable deeds and communal achievements. When he was alive he provided inspiration from near, from up close, from phone calls and visits and letters. Now, he will continue to provide us with inspiration, albeit from afar.

 

                        My dear friend and mentor, Rabbi Aaron Paperman, passed away last month. Rabbi Paperman was one of those unforgettable, original, heartwarming characters that light up the life of those fortunate enough to know them. An American by birth, he traveled to Lithuania in the 1930’s, there to study for a number of years in the famed Telshe Yeshiva. Returning to America just before the Second World War, he later enlisted as a chaplain in the United States Army and was the chief Jewish chaplain in General Mark Clark’s American forces fighting in the Italian theater of war. After the war, he served as rabbi and educator in Plainfield, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania. But his loyalty to Telshe Yeshiva was such that he agreed to forsake the apparently easier and more lucrative life of the rabbinate to become the chief fundraiser for the then yet struggling Telshe Yeshiva that had relocated to Cleveland, Ohio. And he was an outstanding fundraiser. People loved him, admired his personality, laughed at his stories – he was one of the greatest raconteurs and storytellers that I have ever known – and willingly gave him money for the purpose of strengthening Torah in America. Rabbi Paperman was always laid back in his approach to people and to his job. There never was any pressure, any hard sell. It was only friendship, warmth, good humor and nobility of character and sincerity of purpose that emanated from him. He was the living example of the wise aphorism that honey catches more flies than does vinegar.

 

                        He told me that once Rabbi Mordecai Katz, the great and hard-driving Rosh Yeshiva of Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland, passed Rabbi Paperman’s office and saw him relaxing, reading the New York Times and smoking his then ever present cigarette. (Later in life, he gave up smoking when he realized the damage it was causing to his lungs and heart.) Rabbi Katz, who did not know what the word “relax” meant, complained to Rabbi Paperman: “Reb Aharon, you raise $750,000 a year, over half of our budget, and this while you relax so much! If you would work full time you would raise so much more money and we would then easily cover our budget!” Rabbi Paperman raised his eyebrows in his unique and characteristic fashion and said to Rabbi Katz: “Reb Mottel, if I worked twenty-four hours a day, the Lord would nevertheless see to it that I did not raise one more penny than what was fated for me to raise!” And I think that was the secret to his success as a fundraiser. He realized that ultimately his success or lack of success was no longer really solely in his hands. And therefore he was calm, patient, confident, never tense or excited, even when the yeshiva was in very difficult financial straits. He did his best and accepted God’s results with great equanimity.

 

                        Later in his life, he left Telshe Yeshiva and became the chief fundraising person for the Chinuch Atzmai, Torah Schools for Israel, the independent Charedi school system in Israel. All of his old customers continued to give him money for the now different cause that he represented. People gave money to Rabbi Paperman as Rabbi Paperman. They had confidence in his judgment, integrity and noble purpose. To all of us who contributed regularly to the causes he represented, Rabbi Paperman was not a fundraiser – he was an investment counselor for charitable giving, a friend, a confidant, an adviser and mentor. This was especially true in his relationship with the young rabbis that he encountered and always befriended. He gave them sage counsel based on his years of public Jewish life. He shared stories that could be used in sermons and articles, reminisced about Eastern European Jewish life, provided encouragement and inspiration. He never was pessimistic about the Jewish future and his unfailing good humor always cheered everyone with whom he came into contact. He was a heroic figure to me and to many others and perhaps his great charm lay in the fact that he never saw himself as being such.

 

                        I recall that he once told me that he was going to take a short vacation, since he had had a very successful season raising money for Telshe Yeshiva and he felt that the yeshiva could do without his services for a few weeks. The yeshiva’s new study hall building was recently completed and somehow paid for and he was justifiably proud but equally drained by the achievement. A few days later, a disastrous and tragic fire destroyed the old wooden dormitory building of the yeshiva, with loss of life also occurring. I called Rabbi Paperman to console him and offer him any meager help that I could. He said, “There are apparently no vacations allowed in our line of work. We will have to build a new and fireproof dormitory and I will have to help raise the enormous funds necessary for such a project. I will be eternally saddened that I did not devote myself to raising those funds and help the yeshiva construct such a dormitory before this terrible tragedy occurred. We always become too smart too late!” He devoted all of his energies to that project and the new dormitory arose out of the ashes of the old one. In a great measure, the success and longevity of Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland is due to his efforts and spirit.

 

                        More than two decades ago, he and his wife moved to Israel. He continued to teach and inspire there as well. He was part of the vanguard of those that established Kiryat Yearim/Telshe Stone in Israel, a town straddling the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. He eventually became the beloved grandfather in town, the elder statesman in his family and he remained active in Torah study until almost the last months of his life. He was such a unique person that he is undoubtedly irreplaceable. He spanned so many worlds and times and did so many different things in his lifetime on behalf of the Jewish people. To all those who knew him and loved him, his passing leaves a hole in our hearts.

 

                        King Solomon said, “A generation leaves and a generation arrives and the world stands forever.” The generation of my teachers, mentors, heroes, is rapidly leaving us. The generation that is arriving will live in a different world and under different circumstances than the one that is leaving. I hope that the new generation will eventually know and treasure the great personages of that departing generation. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, it is unlikely that they will ever actually see their equals.