On a French hilltop, Rav Chaim Chaikin guaranteed Torah would rise again 

Photos: Archives of the Yeshiva of Aix-les-Bains -Yeshivas Chachmei Tsorfat

Three unlikely Holocaust survivors — a French rav, a Polish scholar bereft of his entire family, and a talmid of the Chofetz Chaim — climbed a hilltop in the French resort town of Aix-les-Bains and declared that Torah would rise again. Eighty years later, talmidim remember Rav Chaim Yitzchok Chaikin, the humble giant who carried the flame across continents. This is the story of a yeshivah called “Aix,” and the man whose light still illuminates it

1945.

The German troops who’d occupied France for five years have finally gone, leaving behind a small and wounded Jewish community — those who managed to survive the roundups and deportations to the East. Now, in the resort village of Aix-les-Bains, a vacation destination for nobility and the wealthy in the east of France, a French rav joins up with a Polish scholar and sole survivor of his family, together with a talmid of the Chofetz Chaim who’d just spent five years in a German POW camp, in order to rebuild Torah in this devastated region.

They rent a 900-year-old mansion on a hilltop — the locals say the villa was Queen Victoria’s summer vacation home, and they also say it’s haunted by ghosts. But ghostly sounds don’t bother them — they will fill it with the sound of Torah.

A trickle of refugees from Eastern Europe arrives at the yeshivah. Soon, French teenagers join, and afterward, a constant stream of North African bochurim from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco fill the shiur rooms. The mesivta, beis medrash, and kollel become the linchpins of Torah in France, as a Bais Yaakov seminary and community grows around them.

2025.

Thousands of talmidim gather in Paris to honor their yeshivah, a lighthouse of Torah in little Aix-les-Bains (pronounced “eks le bah”). It has cultivated over 6,000 talmidim to date, among them hundreds of rabbanim and dayanim leading communities across Eretz Yisrael, France, Morocco, and the United States.

This isn’t a fundraising appeal for this institution, known among French Jews simply as “Aix,” just the joy and emotion of reconnecting, inspired by the rousing words of Slabodka Rosh Yeshivah Rav Moshe Hillel Hirsch and the uplifting song of Motti Steinmetz. And above all, they’re all gathered to honor the memory of the tzaddik who built the yeshivah and who immeasurably impacted the religious lives of French Jewry, the legendary figure they carry in their hearts: Rav Chaim Yitzchok Chaikin. This is his — and their — story.

The very existence of a yeshivah in France in the first part of the 20th century was not a given at all. France was cultured and modern, far from the Eastern European centers of learning, but that didn’t hinder the vision of a great man named Rav Nosson (Ernest) Weill (1865-1947), chief rabbi of Colmar and the Upper Rhine, who wanted French Jewry to have a Torah base that would secure their future. The Jews of the Alsace region, where he was based, were the most traditional of their countrymen, but even for them, a yeshivah was somewhat of a forgotten concept.

Rav Weill opened the institution in 1933 in Neudorf, just outside Strasbourg on the French-German border. Rav Simcha Wasserman, oldest son of Rav Elchonon Wasserman Hy”d and a giant whose greatness was hidden by his outward simplicity, was sent by his father to head the yeshivah. But when Rav Elchonon instructed Rav Simcha to move on to America in 1938, another son, the gaon Rav Naftali Wasserman Hy”d, suggested that a certain talmid of Radin by the name of Rav Chaim Chaikin — who had been one of the Chofetz Chaim’s closest disciples and had stayed on in the yeshivah after the gadol’s passing — was suitable to take over as rosh yeshivah in France.