“If one sets out to produce only generals, who knows if there will be any soldiers?”

Rav Shraga Feivel once told a talmid that his goal was to produce soldiers, not generals. “If I produce a thousand soldiers,” Rav Shraga Feivel remarked, “I know that out of that group will come a certain number of generals. But if one sets out to produce only generals, who knows if there will be any soldiers?”

The students and protégés of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz who followed him into Torah Umesorah weren’t professional school builders. They were articulate and educated, innovative and dedicated — traits that Reb Feivel knew were necessary for the tedious task of winning over American Jewry to the day school idea. It would be the extended personal contacts and spadework on the local fronts that would build the schools, and these workers had the talent and the much-needed patience. It was an awesome responsibility whose personal reward was not material but spiritual, but “it was a duty that came naturally and was expected of any talmid of Reb Feivel.”

—Rabbi Ephraim Wolf

IN1886, just as New York City’s first yeshivah, Etz Chaim, was opening, Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz was born in the small Austro-Hungarian town of Világ (today Svetlice, Slovakia). While he was raised in a chassidic environment, he was exposed to both traditional and modern Jewish teachings.

His education under such renowned Torah scholars as Rav Moshe Greenwald in Chust, Rav Shmuel Rosenberg in Unsdorf, and Rav Simcha Bunim Schreiber (the Shevet Sofer) in Pressburg set the stage for his lifelong commitment to chinuch. However, his early influences ranged wider than those of the average Hungarian yeshivah student. He eagerly devoured the teachings of mussar, Kabbalah, Jewish history, and the works of Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch, the last of which would have a profound impact on his educational philosophy.

Having come to the United States in 1913 at the peak of the great immigration, he settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he taught at the local Talmud Torah. By 1920 he was able to bring his family over from Europe, and they relocated to New York City. Two years later, he was offered a role at Yeshivah Torah Vodaath, a full-day elementary school that had been established in Williamsburg in 1917.

Mr. Mendlowitz (as he insisted on being called) was hired by the school’s co-founders, Reb Binyamin Wilhelm and Reb Bentzion Weberman, over the objections of members of the board of directors who preferred a more modern-looking and progressive figurehead.

That position would change soon enough. In his expansive 1976 monograph of Torah Umesorah, Rabbi Dr. Daniel Kramer writes:

Reb Feivel soon proved to be the ideal choice — an excellent pedagogue and a good administrator. He was a man who brought to life the subject matter taught and translated it into a meaningful and memorable experience. His warmth and sincerity endeared him to his students and their parents.