20 Elul: the Ponevezher Rav — Rebuilding What Hitler Destroyed
On 20 Elul 5729 (1969), Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, the legendary Ponevezher Rav, passed away.
Born in Lithuania in 1886, Rav Kahaneman studied in Telshe under Rav Eliezer Gordon and Rav Shimon Shkop, and later in Radin under the Chofetz Chaim.
In 1919, he became the Rav of Ponevezh, Lithuania, where he built a remarkable Torah empire that included several yeshivos, a school, and an orphanage. He also served as a member of the Lithuanian parliament, representing Jewish interests.
But the world he built would soon be destroyed.
“U’v’Har Tzion Tihyeh Pleitah”
Some years before the Holocaust, deeply uneasy about the future of European Jewry, Rav Kahaneman asked the Chofetz Chaim what would become of them.
The Chofetz Chaim pointed him to the words of the Navi Ovadiah:
“U’v’Har Tzion tihyeh pleitah, v’hayah kodesh.”
“But on Mount Zion there shall be a remnant, and it shall be holy.”
Those words would shape the rest of his life.
Starting Again With Seven Students
Rav Kahaneman was visiting Eretz Yisrael when World War II erupted and did not return to Lithuania.
His wife and nine of his ten children were murdered in the Holocaust, together with countless members of his community and his students.
Nearly everything he had spent decades building was gone.
But Rav Kahaneman began again.
While European Jewry was still being consumed by the Holocaust, he set out to rebuild Ponevezh in Bnei Brak.
The new yeshiva began with just seven students, among them the brothers Rav Yaakov and Rav Gershon Edelstein.
By 1948, it had grown to approximately 140 students. It would eventually become one of the great Torah institutions of the postwar world.
And Rav Kahaneman did not rebuild Torah alone.
He established homes for orphaned children and helped care for survivors, including children from the famed Yaldei Teheran — mostly Polish Jewish children who had fled eastward through the Soviet Union before reaching Iran and, ultimately, Eretz Yisrael in 1943.
When his son Avraham reportedly told him that they simply could not afford both the yeshiva and the orphanage, Rav Kahaneman insisted that the chesed could not be abandoned.
He recalled the guidance of the Chofetz Chaim that the house of kindness should come first — because Torah without chesed cannot endure.
“Titus, Where Are You?”
Perhaps the most enduring story about the Ponevezher Rav took place far from Bnei Brak.
During one of his fundraising journeys, Rav Kahaneman visited Rome and made his way to the Arch of Titus.
The monument had been erected by the Romans to celebrate their victory over the Jews and the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash. Its famous relief depicts Roman soldiers carrying away the menorah and other sacred vessels from Jerusalem.
Standing before the monument of the empire that had once believed it had defeated the Jewish people, Rav Kahaneman reportedly called out:
Titus! Where are you?
Your empire is gone.
And I am here — building yeshivos.
More than 1,800 years after Rome destroyed Jerusalem, a survivor of another attempt to destroy the Jewish people stood beneath Rome’s victory monument, raising money to build Torah in Eretz Yisrael.
The Roman Empire was history.
Ponevezh was full of students.
Rav Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman passed away on 20 Elul 5729.
The yeshiva he rebuilt still stands on a hill in Bnei Brak — one of the great Torah institutions of the Jewish world.
The empire that celebrated our destruction disappeared.
The Torah he rebuilt lives on.
Adapted from On This Day in Jewish History by Rabbi Pinchas Landis.
