Enduring encounters from Rav Dov Landau’s chizuk mission

Photos: Mattis Goldberg, Naftoli Goldgrab, AEGedolim, YH

IN Slabodka and beyond, everyone knows that for 93-year-old Rosh Yeshivah Rav Dov Landau, there’s no time for public appearances, meetings, or events. Even talmidim in search of advice, and visitors and askanim hoping for a brachah, know they’ll have to catch the Rosh Yeshivah between his many daily chavrusas. That’s why it was an unusual — and joyous — surprise that the Rosh Yeshivah agreed to travel to the US for a week of chizuk and to attend the massive Adirei HaTorah event at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia earlier this month. (It was actually his second chizuk trip — the first was in October of 2021, the first time he’d been out of Eretz Yisrael since arriving with his family from Poland as a seven-year-old child.)

Reb Dov, as he’s affectionately known, is one of the greatest, living talmidei chachamim, a grandson of Slabodka founder Rav Eizik Sher, scion of Strikov chassidus, talmid muvhak of the Chazon Ish. Reb Dov is far from a practicing chassid — he’s the quintessential Chazon Ish’nik — yet Slabodka has many chassidish talmidim, and several times a year he will invoke the Strikover and Vorka minhagim of his youth. In conversation, he’ll often quote a chassidish vort and incorporate historical details, alongside the mesorah he received from the Chazon Ish and his talmidim. In fact, many contemporary rebbes and mashpiim are his talmidim, including Rav Tzvi Meir Zilberberg and Pnei Menachem Rosh Yeshivah Rav Shaul Alter, and perhaps his closest friend was Rav Avraham Genechovski, a rosh yeshivah in Tchebin. (On Shabbos afternoon many years ago, the two friends would stand in the front of the Slabodka beis medrash and speak in a code all their own.)

Despite Reb Dov’s personal strictures, his days permeated with Torah learning and his constant longing for nothing more than to be in his room with his towering stacks of seforim as his companions, perhaps it is the eclectic mix of those closest to him — people like his Ponevezh mashgiach Rav Eliyahu Dessler; Ramat Hasharon’s Rav Yaakov Edelstein, the “older bochur” who took him under his wing in Ponevezh; and MK Moshe Gafni, who garnered Rav Dov’s halachic ribbis ruling over a government savings plan for child benefits — that has given him a unique language with the throngs he met in the Tristate area.

What did Reb Dov’s day look like in a week across the ocean, separated from his beloved beis medrash, his seforim and his still-grueling schedule?