First Place

They came because their parents said they had to go to cheder, but they stayed because they loved the atmosphere, the ruach, the competitive spirit — and the rebbi.

Some parents were drawn to Balkind’s cheder rather than the lessons offered by the establishment shul because Rebbi Balkind’s bar mitzvah boys shone. “They said he taught ‘a spiffing singsong’ for the leining,” Aryeh says. “Everyone could tell who was a Balkind boy when they leined.”

“Remember the pashta?” Mr. Kohn adds. On long Shabbos afternoons in cheder, boys as young as five would chant the trop of Krias HaTorah together after the rebbi, following along on a big wall poster, “Pashta, munach, zarka…” then chant the trop symbols appearing in the Chumash that week up to sheini. After that, they’d lein the parshah out loud together until sheini, and take turns to lein at their Minchah minyan.

“We could lein by ourselves when we were about eight,” Mr. Kohn says. “I still lein and teach leining occasionally.”

There was great pride in being one of the “Balkind Boys.” Cheetham was a rough place, parents worked hard and the streets and schools could be tough, and even anti-Semitic. The parents, either first or second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, varied from completely frum to barely religious, but when they sent to Rebbi Balkind, some of them got a lot more than they bargained for. He forged a unique atmosphere, where the boys felt compelled to push themselves in their studies and excel. “I was bottom of the class at school, but in cheder I was successful,” Sidney Kohn says.

Not long ago, Mrs. Lopian met an older gentleman who proudly told her, “I was Number One of group A1 in the cheder.” Every child started at the bottom of the “D” group, which was for children who couldn’t read yet, while “C” groups were for Hebrew readers. Then you moved on to B groups, then A4, A3, A2, and finally, A1. There was a healthy competitive spirit that the former students still remember.

“I was Number One of Set A1 for five years before my bar mitzvah,” Mr. Liefman says. “At one point I was toppled by someone, but I fought back. I was determined.”

“I was Number Two of A1. I was your competition, but you always won,” Mr. Kohn retorts. “The Rebbi taught me alef-beis and up to Rashi, and he knew how to handle kids. I enjoyed cheder, it had such a ruach, such a healthy competitive spirit.” Every boy was farhered every day, and every eight weeks they were re-ranked according to their achievements.

The schedule was completely nonconventional. “Sunday morning it was from when you got there until the Rebbi finished,” Mr. Kohn says. “On weekday afternoons, school finished at four, then you went straight to cheder until seven or until you were farhered, and then you could go home. Friday was the only day off, and on Shabbos, cheder began at 1:30 and continued until Motzaei Shabbos in the winter, or 6 or 7 p.m in the summer.”

Cheder classes on Shabbos? This was an innovation very dear to Rebbi Balkind’s heart. In a city where football matches and “the pictures” [movies] would draw the kids on Saturday afternoon, he was determined to provide an alternative. His daughter remembers him taking a short nap for just ten to 15 minutes, then being ready for his talmidim at 1:30, with the older ones coming at 2:30. The program lasted until it was too late for the football match.

Great Expectations

The Balkind boys had a structured Shabbos afternoon: There was learning, and there was Shalosh Seudos, there was Minchah with the boys leining themselves from the sefer Torah lent by Mr. Preida Smith, and there were the rebbi’s stories.

“He would tell us stories about the Maharal and the Golem,” Mr. Kohn remembers, “and he’d finish by saying the next part would come next week.”

Mr. Liefman has a more serious reflection on those tales. “I attribute my emunas chachamim to the Rebbi’s stories. They were stories about very elevated individuals, like Rebbe Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev and some other chassidishe rebbes — the Rebbi was sympathetic to chassidus. It’s sixty-odd years ago, but those stories have never left me.”

“For fifty years, my mother didn’t sleep on Shabbos afternoon,” Mrs. Lopian says. “She was busy preparing Shalosh Seudos for the boys.” Mrs. Balkind made stacks of peanut butter sandwiches. There was often herring, and occasionally, when someone sponsored it for a yahrtzeit or special occasion, there were salmon sandwiches, and there were also treats like halvah or sliced oranges.

Rebbi Balkind wanted to attract the boys by giving them ice cream at Shalosh Seudos as a Shabbos treat, but the family didn’t own a freezer. “We tried different ways of keeping it cold, but nothing worked, and so my parents went to buy a freezer. Only for the boys,” Aryeh says.

Teachers and rebbeim commanded proper respect in those times, and Rebbi Balkind didn’t hide his expectations from the boys. On Sunday morning at cheder, he would ask each boy if he had been in shul on Shabbos. If the answer was noncommittal or suspect, this would be followed by, “How many sifrei Torah did they take out?” The next question was, “Were you in cheder on Shabbos afternoon?” If it was a bar mitzvah boy, he had the boy roll his sleeve up and checked if he had laid tefillin that morning.

“The question, ‘Were you in cheder on Shabbos afternoon, yes or no?’ was because my father was well aware of the temptations for chillul Shabbos,” Mrs. Lopian says. “One time a boy said, ‘I had to visit my grandmother, I couldn’t come.’ Daddy responded, ‘Does your grandmother live in Old Trafford [the Manchester United football grounds]?’ The Manchester Evening News had come through the door, and back then, the press photographer used to take a picture of the crowd at the match and circle someone, and you would win ten pounds if it was you. This boy’s mazel — he was circled!”

Aryeh Balkind remembers once asking his father how he had managed to make a mandatory program on Shabbos afternoon when this was unheard of in other places. Rebbi Balkind explained that he’d started by letting a boy get out of any deserved punishment during the week, if he could answer “yes”’ to the question, “And were you here on Shabbos afternoon?”

Twice in the 19-year period that Mrs. Lopian was growing up, the family went on vacation to local seaside towns. Otherwise, Rebbi Balkind did not take vacations. He taught on Pesach, sharing gigantic sacks of nuts with the boys, and he taught on Tishah B’Av afternoon. During the summer school holidays, instead of taking a break, he’d offer two cheder sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, to accommodate the boys’ vacation schedules.

Take Back Your Money

Where did the passion for chinuch come from? Reb Yonah Balkind was born in Gateshead, Northern England, in 1909. His father passed away in 1914, leaving his mother, Esther (née Guttentag), to raise two children alone. Reb Yonah told his children that he remembered standing up on a chair to say Kaddish. An immigrant from Stanislaw, Esther was determined that her son go to yeshivah. Gateshead had no yeshivah at that time (the famed Gateshead Yeshiva opened in 1929), so Mrs. Balkind sent Yonah to Manchester, where Rosh Yeshivah Rav Moshe Yitzchok Segal took the teenager under his wing.

He was 17 in 1926, when an established trader named Mr. Preida Smith approached the Rosh Yeshivah with a request. His grandchildren needed some Jewish teaching: Could the Rosh Yeshivah recommend someone to learn with them during the daily two-hour school lunchbreak?

The Rosh Yeshivah suggested Yonah Balkind, and that day, a rebbi was born.

“This is the man,” Aryeh Balkind says, holding up a picture of Mr. Smith sitting solemnly for a portrait with his wife. Did he foresee what he was setting in motion — a movement that would impact thousands of Jewish boys born in England’s industrial epicenter?

Since the yeshivah did not have dormitories or dining facilities and ran on the “essen teg” system, Yonah moved into the Smith home. He learned in yeshivah, took his meals at the Smiths’ table, and taught the grandchildren at lunchtime in the back bedroom of their house.

As more children came to join the lunchtime learning, it was clear that Yonah Balkind knew how to manage them. They learned quickly, and they loved coming. He organized the boys into groups, based not on age but on their learning level. He created a sense of belonging, games of table tennis and shove-ha’penny, and swimming outings — it was a cheder that felt like a club.

Jeff Ingber, an international table tennis player who played for Britain, was a Balkind Boy. “He used to say he learned to play at cheder,” Mr. Liefman jokes.

The cheder moved over the years. When Reb Yonah married Anna (Yehudis) Schotten (from Mattersdorf, part of Austria’s “Sheva Kehillos”) in 1942, the cheder moved into the Balkind home, using two rooms downstairs and one upstairs.When the family moved from Granton Street to Bignal Street the cheder premises came along. (For one lengthy period it was held in the Crumpsall shul classrooms, with Shalosh Seudos in the Ohel Torah shul, then in the Holy Law shul. But it was never a communal institution; it was always a private one, bearing Rebbi Balkind’s hallmark.)

Not all the boys stayed observant — some were not that observant to start with. Many of them worked their way up from their parents’ working-class status, winning scholarships to prestigious schools such as Manchester Grammar, which always had a significant number of Jewish boys. Yet Rebbi Balkind’s Torah classes still had a tremendous influence on individuals. For decades, a significant number of honorary officers, baalei kriah and communal activists of Manchester’s synagogues were Balkind Boys. They knew how to daven, they knew how to lein — and they cared enough to be involved. They cared — because they had a rebbi who cared about them.

The cheder fees were laughable, even in those days, just a half a crown a week, and the Balkinds lived as simply as possible. In the war years, between 1940 and 1945, when most boys’ fathers were called up to the army and the mothers were managing alone, Rebbi Balkind continued to teach steadily, although many could not pay.

He never embarrassed a student who couldn’t pay. “My father had a work accident with the woodcutting machine in his factory, and he couldn’t work,” Mr. Kohn says. “My mother would send me with some coins for cheder money, and I’d give them to the Rebbi. He’d say ‘What’s this? Your father paid already,’ and send it back. I didn’t know anything. And there was one time he sent a parcel, with food and Kellogg’s cereal.”

One time, a boy came in with two guineas, a lot of money in those days, which he gave to Rebbi Balkind as a Chanukah gift. The rebbi’s response was, “Give it back to your father. I’m not taking it, and I’m not going to treat you better than anyone else.”

He just was never in it for the money, and his wife and family shared that idealism. Mrs. Balkind did some sewing work to help out financially, and they got by on the minimal cheder fees. When a yeshivah high school opened in the city in 1948, today known as Manchester Mesivta (or colloquially, Jewish Grammar), Rebbi Balkind joined the staff and taught there for ten years — on an honorary basis.

Learning Curves

ArtScroll was as yet unheard of, and so Rebbi Balkind wrote his own translation of the Chumash into English and made copies and summary sheets so the boys could learn the parshah with Rashi, translating every word.

“We had a Gestetner [duplicating machine] in the cellar,” Mrs. Lopian says. “It was painstaking work. My father researched the exact English for every word in the Torah, typed the English, then wrote the Hebrew in by hand. He had to write with a special stylus in order for the Gestetner to copy, and turn the handle on the rotary to duplicate the papers. Each turn of the handle cranked out one copy.”

The boys would race in on Sundays to get their weekly Chumash Rashi sheets and make a start. Mr. Liefman remembers the wonderment of his aunt, who was picking him up to go to the park, looking through the crack in the door and seeing him standing on a bench, shouting out translations. Another little boy was standing on a bench opposite, and Rebbi Balkind was firing Chumash words at them. Whoever dropped first would be out; then the victor would be challenged together with another boy, ranked higher than him. This system led to a fiercely competitive ranking system. A game called “Keep the Kettle Boiling” was also used, with a line of boys snaking around the room. When your turn came, the rebbi pointed at a word, which you translated, then ran back to the back of the line.

The cheder was mainly boys, but sometimes girls sat at the back of the room to learn reading, davening, and Chumash, too. Mrs. Lopian says that when she and her sister decided they had grown out of cheder and didn’t want to attend anymore, her father agreed, but they still had to learn the entire parshah every Sunday morning, using the translation sheets.

In later years, when Sunday mornings saw rooms full of children at cheder, Rebbi Balkind utilized technology and recorded lessons using a tape recorder. “He was in one room at a time, and in the other, the boys listened to his tape,” Mrs. Lopian says. “Recordings were new then, and it sounded so real that some of the kids would raise their hands to answer Daddy’s taped questions.”

“I’ve still got some tapes of the Rebbi,” Mr. Kohn says. “And remember the letters he had lit up on the board for us to teach ourselves?”

In 1950, when TV came into homes, Rebbi Balkind nicknamed it “treife vision.” But he realized that times were moving on, and the moving, flickering images would attract children. “Don’t watch that, watch this,” he said, and created an alef-beis board that lit up with electric circuits.

Yonah Balkind took great pleasure when a boy went on to learn in yeshivah. Otherwise, after bar mitzvah, he’d send those students who could manage on to the Gemara classes offered in the evenings and Sunday mornings in the Manchester Yeshivah. Although he was demanding as a teacher, he never criticized the choices his boys made later on.

“When he’d meet a boy years later, whatever standard of Yiddishkeit the boy kept, my father made him feel good and offered encouragement,” Aryeh says.

The boys came from many walks of life, and would forge their own paths, becoming judges, politicians, lawyers, sportsmen and shopkeepers, but each carried the impact of having learned real, genuine and pure Torah along the way. One student wrote, “Whether we are still frum or not, every Balkind Boy can pick up a machzor on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur and follow the service. We are quite capable of davening for the congregation any time.”

At a memorial service for Reb Yonah Balkind, Judge Charles Bloom shared how his story as a third-generation immigrant was mirrored by thousands of others. “My grandparents came from Kovno. They had some understanding of their religion, but when they came, they struggled to make a living, which became the focus of their lives. My parents were typical of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. They went to shul three times a year, and ate kosher meat and matzah on Pesach.” But when he joined Rebbi Balkind’s cheder at age seven, the family’s life was transformed. “My life had been school, football, and pocket money. It became shul, cheder, and cheder gelt. Instead of Maine Road [Manchester City Stadium], I went to Bignor Street on Shabbat. Instead of the third goal, we had the Third Meal, and instead of the terrace, we had bentshing. This permeated the life of our whole family. All three Bloom brothers went on to yeshivah education. My mother began to keep Shabbat and attended shul regularly. My brother worked in Jewish education, as do my daughter and son, and my grandchildren attend Orthodox Jewish schools in London. Due to the inspiration of Rebbi Balkind, four generations have been influenced.”

“One year,” Ariyeh says, “Daddy had 80 of his boys building succahs, and he went around to help them all — although he told me that one of the boys was building the succah in his front room.” The kids, who would not have had succahs otherwise, were so proud that the rebbi came to see their succahs, and he was so proud of them that he distributed straw for sechach to all his boys, free of charge. He also got free wood for them from a supplier who had a fire and was left with unusable wood. Rebbi Balkind himself chopped off the burned parts and gave the wood to the boys.

“Daddy went to have a look at one boy’s succah with a candle because it was late at night,” Mrs. Lopian recalls, “and the straw sechach caught fire.”

But Rebbi Balkind’s own succah was big enough for them all. He built one large enough to host a public Simchas Beis Hashoeivah. In the cold and often rainy landscape of an urban, working-class community, with only a tiny chareidi core back then and thousands of Jewish families, it was the second Simchas Beis Hashoeivah in Manchester. (Memory suggests that Dayan Weiss, the Minchas Yitzchak — with whom Yonah Balkind was very close — had the first one.)

Trust Fund

The trust the boys felt was such that when Mr. Kohn’s father was on his deathbed, he ran to Rebbi Balkind. “It was just before Yom Kippur when the doctors said there was no chance, that my dad had maybe four hours left. I told my brother I was going to the Rebbi. I ran over and said that my Dad — the Rebbi used to call him Shmeel — was very ill. He said, ‘I don’t know what will be, but I will strat saying Tehillim right now.’ The next day, my Dad woke up. He lived another thirteen years.”

Between Pesach and Shavuos, Rebbi Balkind held a minyan for Maariv in his home. One night, a man who was saying Kaddish missed his usual minyan and was directed to the big Victorian semi-detached house on Bignor Street. After he’d come for a couple of weeks, Rebbi Balkind noticed he seemed worried, and asked what was wrong.

The man explained that before his father passed away, they had bought a garment factory together. Now it had become clear that the seller had cheated them, exchanging the sewing machines for broken ones. The factory was not operational, and he had scheduled a court case suing the seller, but the only person who knew about the deception and could testify was the non-Jewish manager, who had since emigrated to Ireland.

“My father asked him ‘Have you said Kiddush Levanah?’ The man had never heard of it, but that night they went out and said the tefillah together,” Aryeh recalls. “Three days later, the manager called him up from Ireland, hysterical. His father had come to her in a dream three nights in a row, urging her to ‘do a Jewish boy a favor, go back to England and give evidence for my son.’ She was frantic because she was trying to get a plane ticket but couldn’t get one in time. Then, the court case was postponed by two weeks because the previous case dragged on, and she was able to get a flight. When she arrived, he sent two cars to the airport to greet her, one as a decoy in case her old boss tried to grab her on the way. But when the man called to tell my father she’d arrived, my father advised him to call off the court case. ‘If two Yidden fight in court, it causes a chillul Hashem. Once you have the witness here, you can settle out of court.’ And of course, the seller was keen to settle, once he knew he was cornered.”

This same man became attached to Rebbi Balkind and soon came to him with another problem: His bank manager had fallen very ill. While the rebbi said he could not pray for a non-Jew in the brachah “Refaeinu” — a prayer for Am Yisrael — he could mention him by name in another part of the tefillah if he had his mother’s name. The man inquired, and Rebbi Balkind prayed for He’arel Frank G. ben Catherine. When the invalid had miraculously gotten out of bed and was told a Jewish rabbi had prayed, he wanted to convert to Judaism. He had gotten up at the very minute the rebbi had davened Shemoneh Esreh.

Gift of Conscience

Besides teaching his beloved boys, Rebbi Balkind became known for spreading the Torah of the Alshich. As a young man, he had given a shiur in the Cheetham shuls, which were full on Friday nights back then, with police on horseback called on Yamim Noraim to control the crowds. When he told Rosh Yeshivah Rav Moshe Yitzchok Segal that he felt that there was little interest in the divrei Torah and midrashim he was sharing, the Rosh Yeshivah’s response was “lern mit zei Alshich.”

The commentary of the Alshich thus became a specialty of Rebbi Balkind — he was an expert in it and taught it in several weekly shiurim to laymen, teenagers, and yeshivah bochurim all his life, at the Central Shul and at Lubavitch. Years later, when the rebbi became ill, a talmid living in Eretz Yisrael would go to daven at the kever of the Alshich. “His kidneys were shutting down toward the end,” Reb Aryeh says, “but after someone went to the Alshich’s kever, they restarted.”

Years ago, in honor of the 60th anniversary of Balkind’s cheder, his students arranged a large dinner. We look at the brochure, with tables full of smiling men from all walks of life, and the piles of letters and tributes that poured in. Mr. Liefman points people out to us, a well-known lawyer, a sportsman, the presidents of various shuls. Rebbi Balkind, who fled from honor and recognition, told his daughter that he’d agreed to the dinner plans only because he savored the opportunity to address hundreds of his old pupils and give them gentle mussar.

When Mr. Liefman’s sons were growing up, although they attended a Jewish elementary school, he still sent them to go to learn from Rebbi Balkind, who passed away 25 years ago, in November 1996. “We wished he would have lived forever,” he says.

“I think he gave all the boys the gift of a Jewish conscience,” Mrs. Lopian reflects. “One fellow wrote, ‘With Rebbi Balkind’s sense of humor, I know he will understand what I mean when I say that I can’t do anything wrong without thinking of him.’ ”

Among the Balkind Boys who led distinguished political careers, Lord Joel Barnett, a Labour member of Parliament, Chief Secretary to the Treasury in the late 1970s, paid warm tribute. “There must be many old boys like me, who would not wish to pretend to anyone, least of all Rebbi Balkind, that we carry out everything he ever taught us, but, speaking for myself, he can be sure that memories of him and his teachings will make certain that I could never stray too far from his precepts.”  —

The Final Visit

Well-known speaker and author Rabbi YY Rubinstein grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, where the Jewish education was very basic. He had learned with the local rabbanim there, but since by age 19 he’d set his sights on attending Gateshead Yeshiva, he needed to close the gap and get up to the required standard. To do this, he moved to Manchester, where Rebbi Balkind took him under his wing.

“Rebbi Balkind took a shine to me and agreed to learn with me, starting at 6 p.m., after I’d finished work. For one whole year, he learned with me from 6 p.m. until 1 a.m. every night — and this when he was already quite elderly.

“He was poor, but he would not take a penny from me. He had a commitment to chinuch and didn’t have it in him to turn anyone away. He was always teaching Torah — in fact, even if he stood next to a non-Jew on the bus, he’d tell him a Torah idea, because ‘they should know the Bible, too.’ I remember his succah — by then he had talmidim who had gone on to Gateshead, but they all came back to him when they were home, and Rebbi Balkind would speak divrei Torah from his passion — the Alshich’s commentary, the Bnei Yisaschar which he also loved, and some Gemara.

“Some of the boys he taught in cheder turned their lives around because of him. Once, I brought a university student along to hear Rebbi Balkind’s shiur. The Rebbi said something about non-Jews, the Canaanim, which outraged this irreligious student. But despite that, it took a while, but he actually became frum, because although it had been hard to hear, he sensed the incredible passion Rebbi Balkind had, and it was words that come from the heart entering his heart.

“I was alone with Rebbi Balkind when he was niftar. I got a call from a student of his who was a member of the House of Lords, asking me for directions to the hospital, and a little voice inside me told me I should go, too. When I arrived, the nurses asked if I was family. Relying on Rashi’s comment about Torah teachers, I answered ‘yes.’ His beloved son Aryeh, who was always at his side, had to leave just then on a necessary errand, and suddenly, the situation deteriorated sharply. We just had time to say the Shema, then he was gone.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 992)