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My Father, My Mother, My Rebbi

By Riki Goldstein | November 17, 2015

Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl is best known for his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust, but his work after the war was no less heroic. From his yeshivah in Mount Kisco, Reb Michoel Ber served as a mentor and father figure to war orphans and Americans alike, raising them as if they were his own

In Adar/February of 1955, a small group of family members and yeshivah bochurim sat at a simple seudas bris in Mount Kisco, New York. The father of the boy stood up to speak. He was highly emotional, the joy and the sense of gratitude mixed with an intense longing, a sense of loss that could never fade. It was the bris of his fifth son born postwar. A powerful orator, the man wound down his intricate Torah thoughts with the following prayer for the new baby and his siblings: “Nekadeish es Shimcha ba’olam k’sheim shemakdishim oso bishmei marom” — may my five children sanctify Your Name in this world just as my five children whom the Nazis murdered are sanctifying It in the Heavens.”

The man was Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl — broken by anguished suffering yet whole enough to establish not only a new family but an entire community. The churban was always before his eyes, yet he possessed enough strength to rebuild. Reb Michoel Ber is primarily known for his hatzalah work during the throes of war, but his postwar labors for Klal Yisrael were no less heroic. The yeshivah that flourished under his leadership still stands, and the talmidim he nurtured still revere him for the boundless energies he poured into them.

Rabbi Yaakov Spitzer of Boro Park, a close talmid of Rav Weissmandl, explains that his rebbi, who died 58 years ago this week, was on a mission to resurrect. “Reb Michoel Ber didn’t want a ‘Holocaust memorial.’ He wanted a live perpetuation. Not of how the parents died, but of how they lived and learned. He wanted to restore the glory of the Torah of Nitra, of the yeshivos, of the rabbanim, of the erliche balabatim. Today the young orphans he cared for have great-grandchildren, beautiful families, and sometimes expansive businesses, and all are erlich, thanks to his guidance.”

Early Years

Rav Weissmandl was born in Debrecen, Hungary, raised in Tyrnau, Slovakia, and studied in the yeshivos of Sered, Galanta, and Nitra. He was a Talmudic genius with a special interest in ancient manuscripts of Gemara, an interest that sent him on two visits to England to study in the library of Oxford University. His brilliance was already evident in the one-and-a-half-hour pilpul derashah that he prepared for his bar mitzvah. His grandfather asked him not to deliver such an impressive address at such a young age, and he acceded, but years later, when he delivered it to spellbound talmidim in the yeshivah, he offhandedly remarked that it had been prepared when he was a bochur of 12. He was a genius in mathematics and economics as well as Torah.

Reb Michoel Ber married the daughter of the Nitra Rav, Rav Shmuel Dovid Ungar ztz”l, and they had five children. When World War II broke out, his incisive mind realized the horrific extent of German plans for the Jews. His creativity and understanding of human nature, though, told him there was a way to at least delay the menace: the Nazis could be bribed. With supreme daring and ingenuity, he and a small “Working Group” managed to hold off the deportation of Slovakian Jews for almost two years, from 1942 till 1944. This created a window of opportunity through which thousands of Slovakians escaped. During that time he worked to save individuals and whole communities with every fiber of his being, communicated with the Nazi beasts themselves, the Allied powers, the Zionist groups, and international Jewish agencies.

Tragically, a lack of funds and apathy from overseas, along with assimilated Jews’ distrust of the “ultra-Orthodox,” conspired to thwart his plans. Nevertheless, thousands of Jews escaped certain murder through his help and advice. Eventually caught by the Nazis and placed on a train to Auschwitz, Reb Michoel Ber cut the lock of the cattle car with a saw hidden in a loaf of bread and jumped to safety, spending the rest of the war hidden in a bunker in Pressburg. The Nazis murdered his wife and five children.

Torah Heals

The bochurim who survived World War II came home to Nitra, Pressburg, or Sederhelm to find their families no more and everything destroyed. Rav Weissmandl gathered them and formed a group. “I knew your father, I’ll take care of you,” he would say. “Come with me and we’ll rebuild.” A few of the boys for whom he took responsibility were as young as 12 and 13; despite his brilliant mind and intense immersion in Torah, Reb Michoel Ber was able to reach them on their level and take care of every physical need, once staying on a Hungarian farm an entire week in order to persuade two young orphans to join his group.

First the yeshivah reopened in Nitra, but the area had come under Soviet control, and religion had no place there, so Rav Michoel Ber arranged to move the yeshivah to America. Rabbi Binyomin Zev Loevy was among the traumatized survivors. “Even in Paris where we awaited the voyage to New York, we gathered around him and we learned,” he remembers. “Reb Michoel Ber established a beis medrash in the basement of the hotel. He understood that the Torah would heal us.”

When he arrived in New York with the young students and realized the spiritual dangers they would face in a foreign metropolis, Rav Weissmandl took them out of town, to Westchester, in upstate New York.

Unfortunately, the local residents waged a fierce legal battle against the yeshivah’s presence, so much so that Rav Weissmandl was forced to defend the institution — which he called the Yeshiva Farm Settlement after its ethos of Torah study combined with employment training — and its right to remain on its property.

On one occasion, the lawyer acting for the neighbors claimed they opposed the settlement because they didn’t want an “uneducated and uncultured group” in their midst. Rav Weissmandl asked this attorney how many languages he knew.

“One — English,” he replied.

“Well, I know eleven,” countered Rav Weissmandel. “Seven perfectly, another four communicably.” (Reb Michoel Ber had learned Arabic to gain access to the Rambam’s Peirush Hamishnayos in its original and resolve discrepancies in the translation). “I am educating these students, and the last thing I would want them to be is uneducated.”

The lawyer was quieted and the yeshivah eventually won the right to develop its site in Mount Kisco.

The Yeshiva Farm Settlement

The responsibility Reb Michoel Ber felt toward his postwar talmidim was without beginning or end. “I joined the Nitra yeshivah in 1948,” Rabbi Spitzer says. “I was one of 70 bochurim. Sixty-five were yesomim, and he was their father and their mentor.”

Reb Feish Herzog of Kedem Wines was an extremely close talmid of Rav Michoel Ber. “The way I see it, he had two kinds of talmidim: the war yesomim and the Americans. He had a different approach to each one, a different way to every heart. Not every bochur who had survived the war could learn all day — hence the farm and the printing shop around the yeshivah. He told each boy how many hours he should learn, and formed his schedule. He was completely attuned to each one’s psyche, and he was the first to create an ‘out-of-the box’ yeshivah framework, way ahead of the times. In that way, he saved these boys and established them as erliche Yidden.

“For us, the younger, American boys, he was a strict rosh yeshivah. Learning seder in Mount Kisco began fartugs — at 5 a.m., although there were those who learned late at night too,” says Reb Feish Herzog. “Shacharis was at 7, but Reb Michoel Ber did not believe that one should arrive to davening from his bed, unprepared. He also wanted us to get used to early rising as a habit for life. He demanded a lot from us, watched over us with an eagle eye, but he also rejoiced in our successes.

“I remember reciting birchos haTorah in the beis medrash at 3 a.m. one morning when I had awakened early, and Reb Michoel Ber walked in, having arrived from the city on the last train. When he saw me he was so happy. He wanted to kiss me. He davened with tears every day, but he still noticed the nuances of his talmidim — how they stood, how they davened, where each boy was holding.”

Reb Michoel Ber was a visionary — his dream for Nitra in upstate New York went beyond a yeshivah. He wanted to establish it as a self-sufficient settlement, with the married students settled around the yeshivah who would help support it through business ventures.

“In my time the farm was active,” reminisces Rabbi Ezriel Tauber, a talmid of the Nitra yeshivah from 1955 to 1957. “There were chickens, and profits from the eggs and other ventures.”

This came to an end with Reb Michoel Ber’s passing.

My Father, My Mother, and My Rebbi

A noted talmid chacham in the Nitra yeshivah community in Mount Kisco, New York, Rav Binyomin Zev Loevy possesses perhaps the most complete memories of Harav Michoel Ber. When asked what his connection to the great man was, he doesn’t hesitate. “Before the war, Reb Michoel Ber was my rebbi,” he says. “After the war, he was my father, my mother, and my Rebbi.”

Most of the boys of Nitra were 16, 17, or 18 years old when World War II ended, Rabbi Loevy explains, and they had been spiritually broken and physically weakened. “He gave us cheishek to live and to rebuild. We had no will to live after what we endured. He told us that anyone who managed to survive the war and stay ‘normal’ was ‘not normal’ — rather exceptional and special. No one had parents, but Reb Michoel Ber had known our families. He knew our fathers’ names, and he told us clearly what we had to do: learn, marry, and raise Torah families. He explained that our tafkid was to ensure that the memory of our families would live on in this world.”

The students felt their Rebbi’s love and limitless concern, and in Rabbi Spitzer’s words, “we adored him. I remember two bochurim involved in a fight. Our rebbi spoke to them. He said, ‘Listen, I knew your parents and your siblings and it is barely three years since they were killed. When they herded the Yidden into the gas chambers, there were roughly 20 minutes from when they sealed the door to when the gas took its intended effect. What do you think your parents were saying? They were saying vidui… and they were pleading with the Eibeshter for you. Those moments of kedushah will never be lost. They still echo. If you let yourself hear the echoes of the cries of your loved ones, you wouldn’t be having this argument, you would always come to your senses.’ They stopped it.

“Reb Michoel Ber connected with us on a deep emotional level, as well as spiritually. He understood the pain because he too had lost his family. And because he was there for them unconditionally, I do not know of a single talmid of Reb Michoel Ber who went astray, a very unusual thing after the ravages of war.”

What G-d asks of You

In Nitra, yiras Shamayim and erlichkeit were more prized than lomdus. Rav Weissmandl’s own davening was an emotional outpouring of devotion to the One above, and he spoke to the whole yeshivah about the importance of knowing peirush hamilim. He farhered all the bochurim every Shabbos. When he noticed that a boy did not understand the words of davening, he called him over to teach him privately about the meaning of the tefillos. After all, he was their father.

Reb Feish Herzog recalls his rebbi’s tefillos. “He always cried during davening. But on Tishah B’Av and on Yom Kippur, the floor around him was wet with his tears.” The heartrending kinnos and haftaros, interrupted by weeping, remain unforgettable to those who witnessed them.

Known himself as an ish emes, honesty was a supreme value to Reb Michoel Ber. He could not tolerate any hypocrisy. Rabbi Spitzer still has the kuntres in which Rav Weissmandl inscribed the constitution of the Yeshiva Farm Settlement. He reads what is probably Reb Michoel Ber’s most famous rule: “A member of the settlement who is caught speaking untruths three times must leave the community.”

“This scenario never actually happened,” Rabbi Spitzer explains, “since emes was one of the hallmarks of the Nitra bochurim.”

Rabbi Tauber also recalls Rav Weissmandl’s hashkafic impact on his talmidim. “While there were roshei yeshivah and other hanhalah members who gave the regular shiurim and led the learning in the style of the European yeshivos, Reb Michoel Ber gave the shiur on certain masechtas, and he also taught us machshavah from the Chovos Halevavos and Shemonah Perakim. For me and for many bochurim, the main attraction was his personality. The achrayus he felt for us, and for all of Klal Yisrael, was obvious. This was a man who could see beyond the churban, to rebuild what was lost.”

His personal integrity also included an emphasis on genuine hakaras hatov. Reb Feish Herzog had a grandmother who ran the grocery store in Tyrnau when Reb Michoel Ber was growing up. “He came to Williamsburg to visit her every month in her old age, since she had given him candies when he was a child.”

Always About You

“Who does the average person speak about most often?” Rav Binyomin Zev Loevy asks rhetorically. “Himself. Me and I. I want, I need, I did. My rebbi barely used ‘I.’ It was always about ‘you.’ He lived for Klal Yisrael. His own needs, accomplishments, and preferences were insignificant. This characterized Rav Michoel Ber Weissmandl. It was true of him before the war, when I knew him in Nitra. It was true during the turmoil of war and the desperate energies he threw into saving Yidden, and after the war, in his guidance and rebuilding of the broken survivors. He had a wife and children and a mother and a sister [who died in the war], but he never limited his concern to them. When he spoke about the means of rescue it was about every child, every mother, every sister. Every single Yiddishe froi.”

Rabbi Ezriel Tauber, too, remembers the Rav’s selflessness. “He sat not at the ‘mizrach wall,’ but in the middle of the beis hamedrash. He accepted no official position in the yeshivah, yet was its soul. He was very humble, yet we had tremendous respect for him.”

During a Shabbos spent on the West Side of New York, to make an appeal for the yeshivah, Rav Michoel Ber was asked to give a shiur on Pirkei Avos to the laymen. He reached the mishnah that exhorts, “Me’od me’od hevei shefal ruach — be exceedingly humble,” and became emotional as he explained that in this middah one must choose extreme humility — there is no middle path. “You must reach a madreigah where it makes no difference whether people offer you kavod (honor) or bizyonos (scorn).”

“Is this really possible?” the shul’s rabbi asked him.

Rav Weissmandl thought for a while, and then said. “Yes. It is true of me that it makes no difference to me. In fact, I handle scorn better. But in this case, because I have an achrayus to raise money for the yeshivah, kavod is advantageous. That is why it took me a while to answer you.”

On His Shoulders

Reb Michoel Ber’s responsibility to his students went far beyond the beis medrash. Their spiritual standing and their physical needs were all on his shoulders. He made it clear to them that it was up to them to perpetuate their parents’ legacy by marrying and building Torah homes and communities. Finding a shidduch was not easy after the war, since the young girls had been decimated by the Nazis yemach shemam, but Reb Michoel Ber made tireless efforts to marry off his talmidim and find them parnassah, sending most into the working world. His endless tefillos and hishtadlus were rewarded with success: when he passed away in 1957, all but three of the older yesomim were married, and those three became engaged within the next three months.

While he helped find shidduchim for his talmidim and helped them settle, he himself lived in poverty; likewise, physical conditions in the yeshivah were simple. Reb Feish Herzog remembers plenty of bread for breakfast, but no butter, only oil and salt.

He made tireless rounds to fundraise for the yeshivah, but took nothing for himself. Mr. Samuels, a philanthropist who supported the Nitra yeshivah and was close to Reb Michoel Ber, would repeat the following with wonderment: “I was once speaking to Rabbi Weissmandl and I asked him about the halachah in the Rambam [Talmud Torah 11-7] that one cannot take money for teaching Torah to talmidim. He remained silent, and I thought I had ‘caught him.’ Years later, I found out that he never took a salary from the yeshivah.”

Rav Michoel Ber had one surviving sibling, his younger brother, Reb Moishe Duvid Weissmandl, who lived first in Toronto and then in Monsey, and it was he who supported his brother’s family, also helping him to fundraise for the yeshivah.

Man on a Mission

Rav Michoel Ber treasured his close relationship to many gedolim. It was partly due to his intervention and persuasion that the Satmar Rebbe remained in America and did not leave to head the Eidah Hachareidis in Yerushalayim. He felt that American Jewry needed this chassidic giant among them.

The Satmar Rebbe, Rav Yonason Steif, the Klausenburger Rebbe (who was Rav Michoel Ber’s brother-in-law, having also married the Nitra Rav’s daughter), all came to visit the Nitra yeshivah in Mount Kisco at Reb Michoel Ber’s invitation. It was during a two-week visit of the previous Amshinover Rebbe ztz”l that a telling incident was engraved on Rabbi Spitzer’s memory:

“Maariv was at a quarter to ten. After Maariv, the Rebbe and Rav Weissmandl sat outside and spoke until morning. We were all desperate to know what they were speaking about. One bochur eventually went to listen in — and they were discussing Reb Michoel Ber’s worries for the talmidim. We were all exempt from the army, except for one bochur, a yasom, who had been drafted and stationed in Germany. Rav Michoel Ber spoke his heart out to the Amshinover Rebbe, how worried he was about this particular boy. He said, ‘Not a single night goes by that I don’t sit up crying and begging the Ribbono shel Olam that he should not slip, that he should come back and raise a family to be shomer Torah u’mitzvos…’ That was the extent — not a single night.”

Reb Feish takes up the story. “After two years this boy returned. When he came in to Reb Michoel Ber and he still looked like a Yiddishe boy, our rebbi became very emotional. He said to the boy, ‘When someone jumps from the 50th floor, he dies. But when an acrobat jumps, he survives it. When I see you back here like this, I can see that you are an acrobat — a strong person.’ This boy settled, he has a beautiful family today.”

For the last few months of Rav Weissmandl’s life, he was very frail. The heart condition that he developed during the searing strain of the war weakened him progressively, so that even as a young man, he was in and out of the hospital. Yet nothing could stop his mission. Two weeks before he was niftar, the yeshivah’s annual fundraising Melaveh Malkah was scheduled to take place. Rabbi Tauber remembers that there was no chance that Rav Weissmandl, who bore the whole burden of the yeshivah’s existence, could attend. He had written letters to all the talmidim and supporters to ensure they would come.

Suddenly, the crowd gasped as a sick Rav Michoel Ber entered the banquet hall, and stood at the podium to deliver his final address, a message that none present ever forgot. “Previous speakers have spoken about me and praised me before my arrival,” he told them. “I decided to come and speak for myself — why should others praise me? I am one of HaKadosh Baruch Hu’s messengers, whom he dispatches on missions around the world. If I am a shaliach of HaKadosh Baruch Hu, what is my mission? First I thought that my job was to save the Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. We didn’t succeed — so it is clear to me that is not what He wanted from me. If despite utmost effort you don’t succeed, it’s not your job. That was not my shelichus. Now the yeshivah is my shelichus and my responsibility.”

If any one description could encapsulate this humble but unique man — thinker, scholar, activist, rebbi, and father — surely his own depiction should be chosen: man on a mission from HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 585)

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