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bout a decade ago, an ad appeared in the Jerusalem Post. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, home of the Albert Einstein Archives, had an opening for the position of director of the archives. The ad listed ten necessary qualifications, including German as a mother tongue and knowledge of library and computer systems. After the hiring committee sorted through the hundreds of resumés they received, they narrowed the list to about half a dozen names. One of the candidates on the short list was Dr. Roni Grosz, a Vienna-born Kopitschnitzer chassid.

“When you write your CV you don’t write that you’re chareidi,” says Dr. Grosz, recalling that day back in 2004 when he was invited to meet the hiring committee. “When it was my turn to be interviewed, they thought I had walked into the wrong room.”

However, Dr. Grosz possessed nine out of the ten requirements; he lacked only knowledge of the exact sciences (i.e., physics). By the end of the interview, he had dispelled the committee members’ preconceived judgments about chareidi Jews. And he got the job.

E = Genius

Dr. Grosz says he didn’t know much about Albert Einstein before he was hired to manage the archives, the most important repository of Einstein documents, books, letters, photos, and personal items in the world. But like most people on the planet, he had heard of the man who is considered one of the world’s most important scientists — and whose name, according to Oxford Dictionaries, has become synonymous with the word “genius.”

Things were different, though, when Einstein was a child. Born in 1879 to Jewish parents living in Ulm, Germany, the young Einstein was slow to learn how to talk. The family’s maid dubbed him “der depperte” (the dopey one) because even when Einstein did begin to speak, after the age of two, he would first say the words softly to himself. Only after he was satisfied with the way the words sounded would he say the sentence out loud.

While Einstein displayed a curiosity about the world and an aptitude for math early on — a gift of a compass when he was five ignited a lifelong interest in the mysteries of the magnetic field, and by the age of 15 he had mastered differential and integral calculus — he also had a rebellious streak that got him expelled from school and caused one teacher to predict that the child would never amount to much.

After his family moved to northern Italy, the teenage Einstein renounced his German citizenship and moved to Switzerland, where he eventually enrolled in the famed Zurich Polytechnic Institute. He graduated in 1900 with a degree in math and physics, but he couldn’t find a job teaching in a university. He therefore went to work at the Swiss patent office.

Then, in 1905, Einstein’s “miracle year,” the young patent clerk published four papers in the journal Annalen der Physik that revolutionized modern physics.

“Any scientist could have made his claim to fame with just one of these papers,” comments Dr. Grosz. “It would have been the crowning achievement for any scientist associated with a university to publish such a paper at the end of his career. But Einstein did this at 26 and in the evenings, while his small children were crying. And he produced four of them in one year. It was like a fairy story. No university would hire him, and he showed them how wrong they were.”

While the first two papers showed that light could be conceived as particles as well as waves, and proved the existence of atoms and molecules, it was the last two that turned Einstein into a “superstar.” In the third paper he outlined his special theory of relativity, where he states there is no such thing as absolute time and space. The fourth paper declared that from the standpoint of physics, energy and mass are interchangeable, a principle that Einstein later summed up in the equation E=mc² and which was used in nuclear fission research. Ten years after his “miracle year,” in 1915, he published his general theory of relativity, where he showed that gravity is not a force, as 17th-century physicist Sir Isaac Newton had thought, but a curvature of the space-time continuum. However, not everyone was thrilled by the Jewish upstart’s discoveries.

“Newtonian physics provided a perfect explanation and everyone was happy,” says Dr. Grosz. “It wasn’t as if people were saying, ‘We have to find answers for what we can’t explain.’ Then Einstein came along and said, ‘but there is a small distortion that Newtonian physics can’t explain.’ So they told him, ‘Are you sure that for this small distortion you want to tear down the whole building?’ To which Einstein replied, ‘What can I do? If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.’

“Einstein had an explanation for the slight deviation he had discovered, but that meant he had to uproot all the principles of classical physics. There was a lot of resistance, but in 1919 Einstein was proven right.”

Building on the Past

While Einstein’s career involved uprooting the work of previous physicists, Dr. Grosz’s life has followed a different path, one of building upon what came before him. He was born in Vienna, 18 years after the end of the World War II. His father had been a hidden child during the war and he immigrated to the United States in 1950, while his mother and her family left Vienna in 1938 and moved to Eretz Yisrael. Yet by the early 1960s, both his father and mother were back in Vienna, where they met and married.

“I didn’t grow up religious,” says Dr. Grosz. “We were very conscious we were Jews, and my parents wanted their children to marry Jewish, but they didn’t give us the tools to stay Jewish. My father turned 13 just after the Anschluss, so what chance did he have to learn about Judaism?”

One of the things the family did do was the Pesach Seder. While Dr. Grosz recalls looking forward to the Seder as a child, he also has strong memories of his father struggling with the Hebrew text of the Haggadah.

“From the time I was five or six, I began to worry about this. As the years passed, it dawned on me that my father was probably less Jewishly literate than his father — although I don’t know how much my grandfather really knew — and I tried to think forward to the future, when one day I would sit at the head of the table with my children. Maybe I’d manage to get through the Haggadah, but what would I be able to give over to my children? And this was true for all of Judaism.”

When he turned 20, Dr. Grosz decided to become Jewishly literate. But he very quickly realized that learning Hebrew and reading books about Judaism wasn’t enough. He also had to do. He therefore began to go to shul, where he was gradually introduced to Vienna’s chassidic community, and to take on other mitzvos, while he continued to learn. Later, after he had moved to Eretz Yisrael, he became a chassid of the Kopitschnitzer Rebbe, who also had family ties with Vienna. But at this point in his life, Dr. Grosz was also focused on going to university and getting the education he needed to pursue a career that would support the Jewish family he one day hoped to have.

Library in Distress

Dr. Grosz studied at the University of Vienna, where he majored in philosophy and communications sciences. Although he says that as a child he had no clear idea of what he wanted to be when he grew up, one profession he was sure wasn’t in his future was that of librarian.

“I didn’t like reading when I was young,” he says. “I don’t think I read a book until I was ten or 12 — until I found out what I liked to read. So I never thought I would be a librarian. I don’t think anyone thinks they will be one.”

What changed the trajectory of his career was the opportunity to help salvage what had once been the impressive library owned by Vienna’s prewar Jewish community.

“That’s a story by itself,” he comments. “The Nazis packed up most of the books in boxes and shipped them probably to Prague. The Nazis planned to build in Prague a museum of an extinct race, meaning the Jews, and Vienna’s Jewish library was supposed to be part of it. This is guesswork, but after the war some boxes were found at a train station in Czechoslovakia, so the theory does make sense.”

While part of the library’s collection was lost or dispersed, what survived was put into storage. By the time Dr. Grosz arrived on the scene in the 1990s, the remains of the collection were in shambles. “The collection had been housed in horrible conditions, in damp cellars. The books were piled on the floor. Rats had made their homes by eating through these books. So everything that was close to the floor was beyond repair.”

As the chief and only librarian of the Jewish Library of Vienna, Dr. Grosz was in charge of cleaning and then cataloging the books that were salvageable. He would later complete a degree in Library Science, but in the beginning he worked by intuition. Eventually, he and his team worked with a librarian from the Austrian National Library to set up an electronic catalog.

“It was a homemade, DOS-based program,” he recalls. “The librarian from the National Library came with his program, and I had my program that could teach Hebrew to any program and it actually worked. To this day, you can look at the catalog on the Internet and see the Hebrew titles in Hebrew. Twenty-five years ago, this was really cool.”

Archives in a Digital Age

The Jewish Library was eventually handed over to Vienna’s Jewish Museum. In the year 2000, Dr. Grosz and his family moved to Eretz Yisrael. His first job in his new home was working for a company that developed software for library management programs. Thus, by the time Dr. Grosz answered the ad in the Jerusalem Post, he had acquired just about all the skills he needed to excel in the job. “I’m working now with a program I developed over ten years ago,” he says, smiling.

But what exactly is in the Albert Einstein Archives?

The archives, which contain some 80,000 documents, are comprised of three kinds of material. One is what Einstein wrote: drafts of lectures, his books, and articles for publication in journals. Einstein also wrote letters, usually several letters a day, and so the archives contain the incoming letters he received from people he corresponded with from all over the world. Then there is everything else — photographs, his personal library, stenciled or photocopied copies of letters that he wrote, etc.

“The most important document is the 46-page handwritten original of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which had its centenary in 2015,” says Dr. Grosz. “But there are many other interesting documents. Some shed light on aspects of Einstein’s life, either on his private life or things he said about topics such as politics and pacifism and racism —you name it, he had a lot to say about many different subjects.”

While part of Dr. Grosz’s job is to hunt for the originals of letters that Einstein wrote, he says that as the years pass — and the original recipients of the letters pass away — it gets harder and harder to find them.

“I’m sure there were times when the letters were thrown away because the heir didn’t understand the importance and the value of the letter. There also were times when an heir would say they were sorry, but they lost it when they moved.”

Those heirs were probably kicking themselves last June, when 27 of Einstein’s letters were sold at auction for a whopping $420,000. At those prices, the Albert Einstein Archives will rarely try to purchase an original letter; instead, they’ll try to secure a copy.

Academic researchers, biographers, and the like remain the main patrons of the archives, but Dr. Grosz says he can see a significant change in the last decade in the way archives, in general, are perceived and used.

“When I was a student, it was very hard to access an archive’s collection. You had to come with an appointment and with a letter of recommendation from a university professor. Then the archive would show you a maximum of three pages. Of course, it was forbidden to photograph the pages. You had to come again the next day and they would show you three more pages. So there was an aura that the archive must be very important because it was so restrictive.

“That situation has totally reversed during the last decade. Now we have a generation that can’t remember life before the Internet. They’re used to getting everything for free and at a click — and if it isn’t free and available at a click, it’s not important.”

The Albert Einstein Archives therefore digitalized its entire collection. Although not everything is available on the website, a person can request a document and receive a copy via e-mail.

“If we were to withhold information, we’d be pushed to the sidelines,” says Dr. Grosz. “And that’s the opposite of what we want. We want Einstein to be at the center of people’s interest.”

A Face in the Crowd

Einstein, who won the 1921 Nobel Prize for physics, immigrated to the United States after the Nazis came to power in 1933. He became affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he remained until his death in 1955.

Even though there is no lack of famous people in the secular world, six decades after his death, the interest in Einstein continues unabated. Dr. Grosz attributes Einstein’s popularity to several things. He was the underdog who was later proven right. His unruly hair proclaimed that he was an individualist. Einstein was also an outspoken advocate of pacifism, and just as loudly condemned nationalism and racism.

“The fact that very few people really understood what he had accomplished didn’t detract from his fame,” says Dr. Grosz. “In the popular imagination Einstein is always a good guy, he’s cool. Even though Einstein was totally naïve when it came to politics, and he spent 30 years trying to find the unified field theory and he didn’t succeed, you don’t hear criticism. He remains a famous person and even today everyone knows E=mc².”

But popular as Einstein is in the secular world, not everyone can use his face or name to advertise a product. “If you want to call your product ‘Einstein’ you have to ask permission,” says Dr. Grosz. “There is a committee at the Hebrew University that considers these kinds of requests.”

Thus, there is Einstein milk in South Korea and educational Baby Einstein toys and videos. But one area the university can’t control is the Internet, where quotes mistakenly attributed to Einstein abound.

“Whatever people want to promote, people say that Einstein said it,” says Dr. Grosz, who then gives an example of a famous quote attributed to Einstein that the physicist never said: If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, mankind would only have four years of life left.

“We’ve never found any indication that Einstein ever spoke about bees. It’s an urban legend. About every four years the quote resurfaces and then we’re bombarded with e-mails. The Bee Farmers Association wants to use this quote to support their work and we have to say sorry.”

It’s Complicated

Einstein may have been one of the founders of the Hebrew University and bequeathed his papers to the university, but according to Dr. Grosz, Einstein’s views about Zionism are complicated. “He understood Zionism differently than probably most of us do. He was very anti-nationalism. He believed that nationalism brought a lot of bad things to the world. At the same time, he was very pro-Jewish and he was very supportive of the Jewish settlement enterprise — but not at the expense of the Arabs. So it’s complicated and his views can’t be put into a predefined box.”

Easier to answer, says Dr. Grosz, is the rumor that Einstein became a baal teshuvah at the end of his life. “The rumor is wrong. Einstein was close to becoming a baal teshuvah when he was 12. He stopped eating pork when he was preparing for his bar mitzvah. But then his parents brought in a homeschooling teacher who gave him some science books. Einstein said that if the science books were true, then the Bible was wrong, and he gave it all up.”

What then did Einstein believe in, if anything?

“I think it’s not complicated. Einstein, like many top-notch physicists, believed in a superhuman creator, a guiding hand that created the universe. But that’s where it ends. Einstein didn’t believe that Hashem was interested in what happened after this creation. And for sure he didn’t believe that Hashem was interested in each and every person and every detail of what a person did or didn’t do. He couldn’t believe that the same G-d that could create the world would be interested in such supposedly petty things.

“But he was very good with some aspects of bein adam l’chaveiro. During the 1930s he was very busy with writing recommendations for Jewish scientists and others who were stuck in Europe. He helped many of them to immigrate. He also was very supportive of charities. He always got invitations to dinners. If it was a cause he supported, he would write that the organization could use his name when promoting their dinner. Then he’d add, ‘But I can’t come. I’m busy with my research.’ But, he always made time to help save other Jews. For dinners, no. For public appearances, no. But for writing dozens of letters and follow-up letters to help another Jew, for that he had time.”

The Final Equation

According to Dr. Grosz, he feels very accepted by his colleagues at the Hebrew University. He also points out that he’s not the only chareidi person on the Edmond J. Safra campus at Givat Ram. “There are more of us than you would think. There are about ten minyanim for Minchah here.”

And how do his chareidi neighbors react, when they find out about his job?

“The reaction is very positive. People tell me, ‘Now secular people won’t think the chareidim are uneducated. You’re making a kiddush Hashem.’ ”

Visualizing the Universe with Einstein

Albert Einstein was known for visualizing his scientific questions. For instance, when he was 16 he tried to picture in his mind what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. If you reached the speed of light would the light beam look stationary or not? (Yes.)

For his special theory of relativity, Einstein visualized lightning striking at both ends of a moving train. Would someone standing alongside the train tracks view the event differently than someone on the moving train? (Yes, the person standing beside the train tracks might see the two lightning strikes happening simultaneously, but the person on the train — assuming he had a simultaneous view of both the train’s front and back — would see the lightning hit the front of the train a moment before he saw the strike at the train’s back. Thus, because two people viewing the same event can have a different experience concerning the timing of the event, there is no such thing as absolute time. It’s relative.)

For his general theory of relativity, Einstein came up with a visualization exercise that you can try at home to see the effect of gravity on what he called space-time. (To visualize space-time, think of a fabric that weaves space and time together.)

Place a bowling ball on the surface of a trampoline or some other fabric pulled taut. The fabric will warp (or sag) from the weight of the ball pushing down on it. Then roll a billiard ball onto the fabric (a baseball will also do). The smaller ball will spiral inward toward the bowling ball not because the bowling ball is exerting some sort of force that attracts it, but because of the way the bowling bowl has curved the trampoline’s fabric and created a curved path.

In our solar system, the sun is like the bowling ball. It warps the “fabric” woven out of space-time, which creates curved paths, or orbits, for the planets. The reason why planets don’t crash into the sun is because of the high speeds at which they travel.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 598)