2 Marcheshvan - Rabbi Elazar Simcha Wasserman - 1992
On this day in 1992, Rav Elazar Simcha Wasserman passed away, making this day his yartzeit. He was born in the Russian Empire in 1899, the eldest son of Rav Elchonon Wasserman, a close student of the Chofetz Chaim. His father sent him out of Europe before the war to build yeshivas, and then spent seventeen months in America raising money and went back to Poland anyway, because he would not leave his students. Rav Simcha was formed in Novardok, where the ethic was selflessness and learning Torah for its own sake and nothing else, and it marked everything he did afterward. He founded a yeshiva in Strasbourg, and in 1938 he came to America.
He never stayed anywhere long. He ran Torah programs in Manhattan, then became dean of Yeshiva Beth Yehudah in Detroit, where he worked alongside Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz to build the national programs of Torah Umesorah. In the 1950s he and his wife moved to Los Angeles and he opened Yeshiva Ohr Elchonon. Washington Heights, Detroit, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles. He would arrive, start something, get it standing, and move on. This was precisely what Novardok had done across Europe between the wars, and he was carrying the method to a continent that had never seen it. He took no salary for any of it. His wife taught school and that is what the two of them lived on.
In Los Angeles the work turned outward. He and his wife drew in Jews with no background at all, and he taught Gemara to people who had never opened one, calling it a light that turns a person back toward good. In 1979 they moved to Jerusalem, where he founded another Ohr Elchonon and taught beginners at Ohr Somayach. Both yeshivas carry his father’s name for a reason. Rav Elchonon was shot into a pit at the Seventh Fort in Kovno in 1941, and there is no grave and no stone, and his son said he wanted a yeshiva to stand as his father’s headstone. Nearly his entire family had been murdered in Europe. He and his wife had no children. He spent more than fifty years raising other people’s.
