Rabbi Shimon Yosef Meller rescues a rare photo of the Brisker Rav from a forgotten archive

Photos: Chananya Knobel, Mishpacha archives

The Judaica enthusiast in the small Eastern European town greeted his guest from Jerusalem and the pair got down to business straight away.

On one side of the table, the host — a local with an interest in the Jewish history of the Belarus-Lithuania region — spread out a mix of photos and documents for sale. As an amateur, he couldn’t identify many of them, but he’d told his guest over the phone that the artifacts were a century old.

That assurance had been enough to persuade Rabbi Shimon Yosef Meller to get on a plane. The biographer of the Brisk dynasty, who’d spent unparalleled time in the company of the Brisker Rav’s sons and close talmidim, was in the market for something big: an unseen treasure involving Rav Chaim Soloveitchik or his son, Rav Yitzchok Zev.

The process of sorting through the file began. A miscellany of the Jewish history of the region spilled out on the table, including documents, letters and photographs. The remnants of this fabled heartland of Torah life proved interesting, but ordinary.

After a few minutes, though, Rabbi Meller struck gold.

“He handed me this photo, and I couldn’t believe what I was holding. There, stamped with the seal of the Warsaw district authorities, was the marriage certificate of the Brisker Rav. And looking out from the document was a breathtakingly-clear picture of the Rav, the earliest known in existence.”

As an experienced bargainer, the visitor swallowed his sense of wonder and continued flipping through the collection as if the photo was unremarkable.

In the end, he selected a number of items at a low price and walked away — feeling like he’d picked up the crown jewels at a yard sale.

Back in his Rechov Sorotzkin apartment in Jerusalem — a photographic shrine to generations of the Soloveitchik dynasty — Rabbi Meller takes stock of his find, about whose origin he’s deliberately coy.

It centers on a period from which relatively little is known about the future legend. We know that he was married in Warsaw in Shevat 1910, and that the event was a major event in the rabbinic world, as befits the son of one of the generation’s gedolim.

We know that Rav Yitzchok Zev’s wife, Alta Hendel née Auerbach was a granddaughter of Rav Meir Auerbach, one of the leading rabbanim of Yerushalayim, known by his halachic work Imrei Binah. We know also that “Reb Velvel,” as the Brisker Rav was known, continued developing his Torah greatness in his father’s shadow, even after marriage.

But besides the mesorah of stories guarded by the Brisker Rav’s sons about their father’s early years, there’d been no photographic record of that period.

Until now, the earliest image was a grainy picture of the Rav from more than a decade later in 1921, when as his father’s rabbinical successor he attended a meeting of the town leadership, which was attempting to regroup after the devastation of World War I.

The grandchildren of the Brisker Rav were also moved to see the other half of the marriage certificate, which contains a picture of their grandmother, who lost her life along with many members of the family in the Holocaust.

“These images are the equivalent of the footage of the Chofetz Chaim that emerged a few years ago, which caused a sensation across the Torah world,” Rabbi Meller says. “I got the same shiver when I saw them.”

Whether that comparison is borne out remains to be seen, but the very fact that it can be drawn at all testifies to the unique stature — indeed, mystique — that Brisk enjoys in the contemporary Torah world.