Other Side of the River Rav Sorotzkin’s writings indicate that his early life was anything but the clich?d “already from an early age he was destined for greatness” tale. He grew up on the seam line between chassidim and misnagdim, and he brought his characteristic positive outlook to bear on their “battles of the spirit.”

“This kinas sofrim led to increased wisdom,” he wrote. “But by the time I was growing up [in the region bordering the inner part of Russia and Ukraine], no remnant could be found of that milchemes mitzvah in our town. The perushim and the chassidim each davened in the nusach of their fathers, but most of the yeshivos were closed, and traveling to the Rebbe remained the lot of only a lucky few. Children still learned in chadarim and those with talent began learning Gemara, but there wasn’t even a yeshivah ketanah in the entire region. The rabbanim were either from the old generation or imported from other locations that were bastions of Torah…

“In the region where I grew up, the boys went from cheder straight ‘into life.’ They learned a skill or became peddlers, and the lucky ones who had energy and talent went to find ‘good jobs’ inside Russia. They would dress up as gentiles and learn their trades, and then return [to the Pale of Settlement] with money in their pockets, but without tefillin or tzitzis. The talented, wealthier ones turned their backs on Torah and mitzvos and joined the Haskalah movement.

“Who would have dreamed that I would get out of that environment and into the big yeshivos to learn Torah? That I would become a rav in large, important kehillos, and be involved in fighting religious wars on behalf of the public? That I would merit to author works of halachah and aggadah and to disseminate them in Klal Yisrael? It is only through Hashem’s mercy, that He ‘took me from the other side of the river’ to a place of Torah and implanted within my heart a love of Torah and the diligence to learn it. He has bestowed so much chesed upon me and protected me from the winds of the Haskalah, from the mania of wealth, and from other dangers that lay in wait for me in the land of my birth.”

It was not for naught that Rav Zalman Sorotzkin began his memoirs with the fact that his native town straddled the line between chassidim and litvishe Jews, because he devoted his life to all of them, regardless of their community affiliation. As such, during his 30 years of rabbanus in Europe, he received offers from various chassidic towns as well.

But Rav Sorotzkin’s dream was to establish and lead a yeshivah, although those plans were sidelined time and again. After the passing in 1910 of his father-in-law, Rav Eliezer Gordon, during a London fundraising trip to refurbish the burned-down yeshivah in Telshe, Rav Zalman’s brother-in-law, Rav Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch, was appointed as successor. During that time, it was common in many cities that the rosh yeshivah also served as the rav and av beis din of the city, but now with both positions available for two eminent candidates, Rav Bloch was to become the rosh yeshivah and Rav Sorotzkin would become the city’s rav. Yet so as not to break protocol, Rav Zalman’s own wife, Rebbetzin Miriam, went from door to door among the decision-makers with a petition asking that they give the position of rav to…Rav Bloch. And then, in order to make sure there would be no efforts to divide the positions, the Sorotzkin family picked up and moved to the town of Voranova just outside Vilna, where Reb Zalman became the rav of the town and became very close with Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzensky. (When he made the sacrifice in Telshe, many in the yeshivah predicted that Hashem would yet return Reb Zalman to Telshe in other ways. Indeed, his sons, Rav Baruch and Rav Eliezer returned to lead the yeshivah years later because of their wives, granddaughters of Rav Bloch.)

He was in Voranova for two years — he opened a small yeshivah ketanah for post-cheder children there — when he received a ksav rabbanus from the town of Zhetel, where he saw a possibility of realizing his big dream. The city was located between Slonim and Novardok, was the birthplace of the Chofetz Chaim, and was full of Torah scholars. There was no better place to establish a yeshivah. The residents of Voranova reminded the Rav that he would receive a generous “bonus” of 500 rubles if he completed a three-year term, but the idea of being able to establish a real yeshivah tempted him too much, and he accepted the position in Zhetel.

By the time he arrived, though, he was shocked to discover that someone had beaten him to it and had already opened a yeshivah. Rav Zalman served as rav in Zhetel for nearly 18 years, but he never did establish a yeshivah of his own because he feared machlokes. Although that hope was never realized, in its place a new seed took root. Rav Sorotzkin would use his combined powers of forgiveness, vatranus, courage, and wisdom to ensure the survival of the entire yeshivah world.

Draft Dodgers One of Rav Zalman’s first displays of this courage and wisdom occurred when, in celebration of 300 years of the Romanov dynasty, the rav of Zhetel was asked to deliver a blessing in the main shul.

Of course, the Jews didn’t have a single good word to say about the evil czar who had forced Jews to reside within the Pale of Settlement, and who had encouraged countless pogroms.

Everyone sat tensely to hear what the Rav would say, fully aware that the authorities were monitoring his every word. Rav Zalman confidently walked up to the podium and said: “Yitzchak Avinu blessed Yaakov with the blessings of the World to Come, and that’s why things here are really wonderful even if they don’t seem to be on the surface. In Germany there is terrible assimilation that is destroying Yiddishkeit, and here, the Czar from the house of Romanov imposes constant decrees on us that actually serve to bring us together. They might not care about our lives in this world, but they never stop worrying about our World to Come!”

After the German invasion in 1914 at the beginning of World War I, Rav Sorotzkin moved his family to Minsk, where he galvanized the thousands of religious Jews, including hundreds of avreichim and rabbanim, who had also converged on the city after being displaced.

“The war left their talents unutilized and I saw that if someone would just begin to organize it, a tremendous movement could be established here,” Rav Sorotzkin wrote in his memoirs. “No one yet knew about Agudas Yisrael because the war disrupted its establishment, so I gathered everyone and explained the need to organize religious Jewry under one framework.”

Thousands soon joined him, and the movement had electoral power as well. In municipal elections held at the time, the religious list won three seats, in addition to one seat for the independent chareidi party. Later, when the revolution toppled the czar, the provisional government gave the Jews some independent rights and instructed them to establish a “Jewish parliament,” in which 17 seats were allocated to Minsk and its environs.

The Maskilim jumped at the opportunity and began working to capture all the seats. Rav Sorotzkin recoiled at the idea that the Maskilim, many of whom were members of the Bolshevik party, would be elected. He took with him a veritable army of young men to whom he gave a crash course in oratory so that they could deliver emergency speeches in shuls, shteibels, and other Jewish gatherings, and at the end of the campaign, Rab Zalman’s list garnered 11 of the 17 seats.

At the time, the issue of annulling the draft for yeshivah students became a focal point in Rav Zalman’s life. He officially served as the head of the rescue committee for the thousands of refugees who’d fled to Minsk, Byelorussia. During that time, he also became a close friend of Rav Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz from Kosova — the Chazon Ish.

“When we came from Zhetel to Minsk,” he wrote, “my wife, Miriam, rented an apartment with three rooms. What a miracle! The gaon of our generation, the Chazon Ish, still unknown, rented one of the rooms from us for two and a half years. Day and night he closeted himself in his room and toiled endlessly in Torah. We never saw him except on Mondays and Thursdays, when he would emerge and daven in the neighboring shul.”

Rav Avraham Yeshaya, like many other avreichim and displaced rabbanim, was sought out for the draft by the Russian army, which was severely lacking in manpower and was greedy for every able-bodied inductee. And because those with clergy exemptions were no longer living in the cities where they officially served and therefore no longer busy with their clergy-based jobs, there was no longer official grounds for their exemption.

Rav Zalman was horrified by the possibility that hundreds of Torah scholars would be torn away and sent to the trenches as cannon fodder. And so, he appeared with a delegation of rabbanim before senior regime officials with a claim that Christian religious figures received an exemption in every situation because they were spiritual leaders, while the Jewish leaders (at least 200 rabbanim were on his list) whose  communities needed them were being mercilessly harassed.

In response, the officials replied that the government did indeed exempt Jewish rabbis, but this exemption only applied to official rabbinical appointees. All efforts to secure exemptions for the refugee rabbanim proved futile. Dozens of erudite scholars and community rabbanim found themselves in the trenches on the battlefields because their exemptions were rejected.

After extensive efforts, some local rabbanim were released so that they could go back to serve their communities, but hundreds more refugees remained under the threat of the draft. Rav Zalman then approached the local army commander, General Sastevitz. It was not easy to get to him — even the senior Jewish representatives were afraid to stand before him as he was notoriously anti-Semitic. After a few hours of charmed conversation, though, the general somehow came over to Rav Zalman’s side and was helpful in finding legal loopholes for releasing the rabbanim and many Torah scholars. He even managed to secure an exemption for his boarder, Rav Avraham Yeshaya of Kosova.

The exemptions seemed too good to be true, and one day, it all blew up. The war board heard rumors about the renegade general and about Jews getting themselves exemptions in all sorts of ways, and an official annulment of all such arrangements was issued.

Rav Sorotzkin wasted no time in organizing a group of rabbinic leaders to protest the decision to the Russian justice minister, and as leader of the delegation, he told the minister as follows: “I read in the newspapers about certain governors who’ve been traveling around, how ‘the governor of Grodno traveled here, the governor of Kovno met with that minister.’ Now, as you and everyone know, these districts have long been occupied and the governors aren’t even there anymore. Yet you’ve kept the positions and are trying to convey that everything is normal in order to maintain high morale and the belief that you’ll yet recapture these districts.

“Now, think about what will happen if you don’t consider the exiled rabbanim as though they are still serving in their original communities. This means you’re saying that you’ve already lost to the Germans. So if you want the Jews to get the impression that you lost — then draft the rabbanim.”

Quiet hung in the room; everyone, even the government representatives applauded in appreciation of the young rav’s explanation.

“Well, he’s right,” the minister said, and the decree was finally annulled.

Bread and Cigarettes While in Minsk, Rav Sorotzkin founded a refugee committee for the thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled there from their war-torn towns. As head of this committee, he provided the refugees with food, medicine, and educational facilities. Once the war was over, though, he returned to Zhetel, where he worked tirelessly in trying to protect the Jews from the fallout of war between the Poles and Bolsheviks after the Germans retreated. Eventually the Poles drove out the Russians, but their control was limited to terror raids to enforce fear among the public.

“We would hide all our liquor from these soldiers and absolutely refused to sell them alcohol, but we did supply them with an abundance of food and a ration of cigarettes,” Rav Sorotzkin wrote.

Many years later in Eretz Yisrael, Rav Sorotzkin was featured in the pre-Pesach issue of the IDF journal Bamachaneh, and within the wide-ranging interview the reporter asked him to share his memories about an especially memorable Seder night.

“Just before Pesach we heard that that Polish soldiers planned to pass through the town on the first Seder night. The Jews wanted to bolt their doors and cancel their Sedorim, but I thought it better to bribe the soldiers with cigarettes in order to sidetrack them from their planned plunder. We put together a huge supply of cigarettes in my home and told the local militia that free cigarettes would be distributed on Seder night:

“Sure enough, a huge line formed in front of my house. Each soldier received his ration and I myself supervised the distribution, which lasted until after midnight.”

The planned pogrom was averted, although the next morning a Jewish butcher was tragically murdered. Yet because of the generated goodwill, the Polish commander came personally to Rav Zalman to apologize.

During that time, in addition to the threat of Polish soldiers, there was also rampant hunger, and Rav Sorotzkin discovered that hundreds of Jews in the region had perished from intestinal typhus due to starvation. Meanwhile, to help lessen the influence of Communist Russia, the Americans had sent large quantities of surplus food to Poland.

“I hurried to Slonim, where Hashem helped me find favor in the eyes of the officials and I returned to Zhetel with a large supply of wheat, sugar, oil, rice, and cocoa,” Rav Zalman wrote in his memoirs. With the supply, Rav Zalman opened a soup kitchen where children would get a daily nutritious meal. But no sooner had his own been cared for, than the local gentiles begged him to open a soup kitchen for them too.

“Why don’t you go to your priest?” he asked.

“We don’t trust him,” they replied.

“In the interest of darchei shalom I set up a soup kitchen for them as well,” Rav Zalman wrote. “But I kept it strictly separated from the Jews.”

He also established a co-op where food was sold at minimal cost. Additionally, four kilograms (nine pounds) of bread were distributed to every person in town each week.

In addition to myriad other communal duties, Rav Sorotzkin headed a committee set up by the American Joint Distribution Committee to establish orphanages for children whose parents perished in the war. In his memoirs, he wrote how it wasn’t a simple task — certain elements on the committee were interested in giving the children a nonreligious education, and he used all his persuasive powers to make sure the orphans were receiving the chinuch their parents would have wanted.

He also managed to overturn a ban on shechitah in Poland, and battled a plan that threatened to disqualify most of the rabbanim of Poland. “Among the many Polish decrees,” he wrote, “was a demand that all rabbis pass a test to prove their mastery of the Polish language. The Chofetz Chaim managed to get the government to revoke the original decree, and in the end it was agreed that rabbis need only be able to conduct a light conversation in Polish. But hundreds of rabbanim knew no Polish at all.”

The first thing he did was get himself onto one of the committees that did the testing, so he could make sure the rabbanim knew all the questions and answers in advance. When it came to the Brisker Rav, though, the situation was more precarious. The Rav knew little Polish, and his opponents took advantage of this to try and thwart his legitimacy as rav of Brisk. That would mean, for one thing, that he would no longer have the authority to register births, deaths, and marriages.

“First I met with his opponents, and they promised to hold off the attacks,” Rav Zalman wrote. “Then I went to Warsaw to meet with government officials, and explained how inappropriate it was to disqualify a man whose father and grandfather had held the position of rav of Brisk for decades and who had produced many seforim and publications.” They were apparently impressed by the arguments, because they waived the need for him to undergo any tests.

Starting from Scratch  In 1930, Rav Sorotzkin was appointed rav of Lutsk, where he remained until the outbreak of World War II. During that time he became a main address for all the major problems plaguing Polish and Ukrainian Jewry, and many gedolim — including the Chofetz Chaim and Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinkski — consulted with him on issues facing the broader community. According to family members, Rav Sorotzkin had a collection of about 2,500 letters from gedolei Yisrael on all issues important to the klal, but the entire collection was lost during the Holocaust.

In Lutsk, Rav Sorotzkin again made  education a top priority. Most of the cheder enrollment came from poor homes, while the town’s wealthier families sent their children to the more secular-leaning “enlightened” school. To reverse the trend, the Rav brought in top-tiered melamdim from Lithuania and enrolled his own son.

When World War II broke out, Rav Sorotzkin and his family were blacklisted and fled to Vilna, where his friend Rav Chaim Ozer begged him to attend to the needs of the many yeshivos that had been uprooted and temporarily settled in Vilna. And so was founded Vilna’s Vaad Hayeshivos.

But Rav Sorotzkin wasn’t there for long. When the Russians gained control of Vilna, he and his rebbetzin fled again and began the arduous and miracle-laced journey to Eretz Yisrael.

Once in the Holy Land, Rav Sorotzkin didn’t waste any time jumping into communal work, and immediately became a member of the council of Polish refugees. One of the committee’s functions was to distribute monies sent from the provisional Polish government in London, but eventually they cracked down on recipients and only paid funds to those with a proper Polish passport and not the provisional passports distributed during the war.

By that time both Rav Shach and the Chazon Ish had made their way to Eretz Yisrael, but Rav Shach didn’t have a proper passport and so went to the Chazon Ish for advice on what to do. “Stand in line behind the Rav of Lutsk,” he told Rav Shach of his own former savior. “If there’s trouble, he’ll figure out how to help you.”

Rav Shach heeded the Chazon Ish’s advice and indeed stood behind Rav Sorotzkin. When the secretary asked Rav Zalman about his family situation, his eyes clouded over in pain. His bechor was in jail, his daughter had remained in Lutsk and her fate was unknown (later it became known that she, her husband, and their children had all been killed by the Nazis — although all five sons survived), two other sons were in Japan, and his two youngest were with him in Eretz Yisrael. The secretary felt so bad about causing this important rabbi such pain that she apologized for the question and, in her confusion, let Rav Shach’s stipend through as well.

When Rav Sorotzkin arrived in Eretz Yisrael, he saw the desperate state of the yeshivos — they were unorganized and lacking vital funds; meanwhile, the great yeshivos of Europe had been destroyed, and the Torah world had to be built from scratch. Rav Zalman decided that his first priority would be to create a Vaad Hayeshivos based on his European model. The Vaad’s primary task was to provide a financial base for the yeshivos, but how much could be collected from a small, poor country, no matter how many towns were visited? So Rav Zalman embarked on a year-long fundraising mission to England, where he was greatly assisted by London av beis din Rav Yechezkel Abramsky.

Personal Sacrifice When Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, who served as head of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah, passed away in 1953, Rav Sorotzkin replaced him, and he remained in that position until his own passing 13 years later. The year Rav Zalman took over, something else happened that was to change the face of chareidi chinuch in Eretz Yisrael. Until then there were two government educational streams: state-sponsored secular schools, and national-religious schools. The Chinuch Atzmai system of independent Torah schools became a third stream, and turned into Rav Sorotzkin’s life work — to the extent that for all the millions of dollars he organized for the schools, he refused to spare even a few grush for himself. (Once a delegation from a particular Talmud Torah went to discuss a financial issue with Rav Zalman, and discovered that he and his wife were freezing in their house as their petrol heater was empty and they had no money for more fuel. Of course, the delegation ran to the nearest gas station for a refill.)

His years of fundraising were exhausting, and a collection of those light-blue aerograms in the family archives shed light on the price his family paid. But if Rav Zalman once dreamed of being a rosh yeshivah, now, he was in charge of chinuch all over.

One happy picture depicting his son Rav Yisrael as a chassan — seated near his father-in-law, Rav Reuven Katz, with his own father conspicuously missing — says it all. Alongside the photo is a cutout from a New York Jewish newspaper which reads, “Brooklyn Dials Israel.” Rav and Rebbetzin Sorotzkin can be seen as Rav Zalman hold a phone as he speaks to his son, the chassan, in Petach Tikvah and wishes him mazel tov on his wedding, which both parents missed as they were abroad on fundraising efforts.

Earlier, Rav Sorotzkin sent the following aerogram: “To my dear son,” Rav Zalman wrote on 7 Tishrei 1948, “Although I have already sent a telegram to you and Chasidah and the mechutanim shlita, with mazel tov for your engagement, I want to bentsh you again with the brachah of parents to their very dear children… With a tefillah to Hashem… that you live happy lives of peace, love, friendship, and a life where you will have yiras Shamayim and fear of sin, love of Torah… and make great strides in your learning and be a credit to our family…

“As for the timing of the wedding, it is very, very hard for us, but after thinking it over, Mother and I decided that you should not wait for us and should celebrate the wedding in Kislev, as discussed, and as sheluchei mitzvah, our absence at the wedding will be considered by Hashem as an olah and korban to atone for our sins…”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 618)