The honor Reb Volf Greenglass fled from followed him to the end

Photos: Jeff Zorabedian, Family archives

IN 1941, a rumpled group of nine young men between the ages of 20 and 27 arrived in Montreal, after a circuitous escape from war-torn Europe. Chassidim of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson (the “Frierdiker Rebbe”), they were intent on fulfilling the Rebbe’s directive to establish a yeshivah in Montreal, a city that boasted very little Jewish infrastructure at the time.

Not everyone was enchanted by their mission. Samuel Bronfman, the founder of the Seagram liquor brand, exclaimed, “We left Russia to escape from G-d, and now you want to bring Him here? I’ll give you $5,000 to relocate to Toronto.”

But the Rebbe told them to stay in Montreal, and so they did. “They established a yeshivah that became the Harvard of Chabad yeshivahs,” says Rabbi Nissen Mangel, who survived the Shoah and was a talmid at the yeshivah before becoming a distinguished author and lecturer. His alma mater, Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim/Rabbinical College of Canada, has been thriving ever since.

Rabbi Mangel maintains that the success of the yeshivah was due in large part to its mashpia, Rabbi Volf Greenglass, one of the original group of nine and his rebbi for the  ten years he learned in the yeshivah. While many people outside the Chabad orbit may not be familiar with his name, Reb Volf — whose life was largely spent within the walls of the yeshivah — was a powerful force, leaving a lifelong impact on his talmidim and community. And even those who thought they knew him well didn’t always appreciate the depths of his learning, piety, deep humanity, and profound knowledge of Kabbalah.

“He was an authentic, old-school chassid,” Rabbi Mangel says. “He was from what we would call the chassidim rishonim.” Humble, devoted to his rebbe, and ever eschewing kavod, Rabbi Greenglass never wanted to be addressed as “Rabbi.” “Ich heis Volf,” he would say.

Reb Volf passed away 13 years ago, on 22 Teves, 2011, but his son-in-law Rabbi David Cohen of Montreal refuses to allow his life story and teachings to fade into oblivion. After 13 years, Rabbi Cohen finally finished documenting his father-in-law’s legacy in a sefer entitled The Mashpia, published this past Purim in both English and Hebrew by Wellspring Press. The book is full of information, anecdotes, and divrei Torah, but the hardest part, avows Rabbi Cohen, was trying to convey the nuances of chassidic philosophy in English.

Rabbi Cohen himself was a talmid of Reb Volf from the age of six, when his parents immigrated to Montreal from Casablanca and enrolled him in the yeshivah. Today, Rabbi Cohen and his wife Sarah have joined Mishpacha in the Crown Heights home of 90-year-old Rabbi Nissen Mangel and his wife to reminisce. In the Mangels’ comfortable, warm home, the memories come to life, painting a portrait of the man who shaped their lives and the lives of many contemporary leaders.