Underground yeshivos that kept the song alive in times of terror and fear

Photos: Mishpacha archives

What does it take to run an underground yeshivah? Students, seforim, a secret meeting place, you might suggest. But how to find a hideout in Communist Russia, when informers lurk around every corner? How to procure seforim in the ghetto, when the Germans have confiscated them all? And how to find students in 1970s Samarkand, when you don’t even know who is Jewish?

Through some of the most terrifying periods of the last century, rabbanim and talmidei chachamim — with the barest resources at their disposal — managed to keep the song of Torah alive. While they sometimes received help from unlikely friends in high places, it was more often than not their characters, imbued with determination, ingenuity, and simple pluck, that enabled Torah study to continue — and even thrive — in the darkest chapters of our recent history.

Soviet Union, 1918

Forced to the Cellars

“The Schneersons don’t run away!”

— Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the Rebbe Rayatz of Lubavitch

The Bolsheviks despised religion — the “opium of the masses,” as they called it — and insisted it be stamped out at all costs. But they also despised the czars, and persecuting Jews mirrored the behavior of the czars — which they wanted to avoid at all costs. Their solution: Jewish Communists, who could not be accused of anti-Semitism, would stamp out Judaism for them.

The ”Yevsektsia,” as these Jewish Communists were called, surpassed the Soviet government’s best hopes. They attempted to crush all vestiges of traditional Judaism, even those the Communist government had declared legal. And of all forms of Jewish traditional practice, the Yevsektsia had a particular antipathy for Torah study.

While most yeshivos, seeing the utter impossibility of further Torah growth in the USSR, fled across the border to Poland, one network of yeshivos became famous for its heroic refusal to leave: Lubavitch, under the leadership of Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe (also known as the Rebbe Rayatz).

The Rebbe is said to have once told a czarist police officer, “The Schneersons don’t run away!”. Upholding that maxim, the Rebbe organized a massive network of underground yeshivos throughout the USSR — around 600 schools, according to one biographer.

The Rebbe knew that in the trying times to come, he and his followers would need the utmost dedication for their mission to succeed. In a secret ceremony in 1922, he gathered a select group of students, urging them to continue the battle for Torah: “I took eight youngsters who were strong in both body and spirit, and we gathered together in Moscow. There we made a solemn oath: come what may, to persist in our mission, to the very last drop of our blood.”

But in the secret police state that was the Soviet Union, blood was shed to the last drop quickly and frequently. How did the Rebbe and his followers succeed in organizing so many underground yeshivos in such circumstances? “Child guards were placed right outside the doors where learning was taking place, just like in the days of the Spanish Inquisition,” Chabad historian Rabbi Shalom DovBer Levine  wrote of the time. “If anyone unfamiliar chanced by, the signal was given: Hide the seforim and stop learning immediately.”

In Novgorod, Rav Chaim Shaul Bruk, a renowned Chabad mashpia in Russia,  led an undergound yeshivah in a shul attic. Even though it was stiflingly hot, he taught classes there for hours at a stretch, imbued with the Rebbe’s resolve. And to keep away unwanted visitors, Rav Bruk devised a special code: the bochurim would knock in a prearranged sequence when it was safe to enter and exit the hideaway.

But the attic soon came under suspicion, and Rav Bruk hastily moved the yeshivah to the shul chazzan’s home. It would have been the perfect hideout — except that the chazzan’s son, as it turned out, was a Communist. But Rav Bruk knew that there were two kinds of Communists: the ideological ones, who wouldn’t take bribes, and the opportunistic ones, who would. What type was the chazzan’s son? Fortunately, for the right price, the chazzan’s son was willing to look the other way so that the yeshivah could continue its activities.

But despite the precautions that Chabad leaders took, they faced enormous risks. Yeshivah bochurim were frequently dragged to jail and beaten. In one instance, the Yevsektsia beat a boy suspected of learning in yeshivah, then stood him against a wall in the prison courtyard. A firing squad took aim, the officer gave the command, and rifle shots rang out — but the boy emerged unscathed. The officer had instructed his soldiers to fire just above the boy’s head as an intimidation tactic. The bochur was released, and went back to yeshivah — where he suffered a nervous breakdown due to the trauma he experienced.