by Rabbi Berel Wein
During the Second World War, American Jewry, at least the Jews in Chicago where I lived, knew that the situation in Europe was bad, but I don’t think any of us knew how bad it was. The Jewish community back then had no real political power and not much wealth. There was a general malaise. American Orthodox Jews felt there was little they could do.
On top of that, the religious structure of the American Jewish community was very weak. The younger generation of Jews in America was basically non-observant. The majority of American Jews had inherited their family traditions, but were not Jewishly educated or observant.
In 1950, Look, a popular magazine in those days, dedicated an issue to the topic of 300 years of Jews in America, 1650-1950. In the article, the author stated that the Conservative movement would become mainstream Judaism—the Orthodox would disappear completely and the Reform would assimilate.
There were dozens of boys on my block on the West Side of Chicago, all of them Jewish. We all went to public school. I was the only one of the group who was shomer Shabbos. Once I got older, I decided to go to law school even though I had always wanted to be a rabbi; there were no positions in the Orthodox rabbinate.
Soon after World War II, refugees started to drift in. Some of the refugees, especially the rabbinic refugees, were people of immense strength and vision who said, “We’re going to build [Torah Judaism] all over again. We’re not satisfied with [American Jews saying], ‘This is America and this is how we’re going to do it.’” It was unacceptable to them. These were the teachers I had in Beis HaMidrash LaTorah, the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago. They were all European rabbis and great talmidei chachamim, tremendous people, all of whom had had very difficult lives.
It was an all-Yiddish-speaking yeshivah. It was not so much that these rabbanim communicated to us the knowledge of Torah as much as the geshmak of Torah—how pleasant, how wonderful Torah is. The message they conveyed to us was how fortunate we were to be able to be in a place where we could study Torah. How fortunate we were that we could perform mitzvos. They never spoke about what happened to them. They always spoke about what was going to be, and what we were supposed to be, and that it was our task to rebuild the Jewish people. Over time, dozens and dozens of Jewish leaders came from the yeshivah and, in fact, even entire communities in Israel. (The aliyah rate from Chicago was enormous.)
But what really inspired us was the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The birth of Israel was so unlikely, so unnatural. The years preceding it were so devastating: the British blockade, the Holocaust, the thousands of refugees, the internal strife. But G-d has His ways—which is basically the story of the Jewish people.
I remember the day the State of Israel was declared; it was on a Friday afternoon. I walked to shul with my father, of blessed memory, who was not an especially outwardly emotional person; he had the stoicism of the Lithuanian Jews. But as we walked to shul, I saw that he was weeping. It made an enormous impression upon me.
