Rav Pesach Eliyahu Falk ztz”l was one of the world’s most accessible and venerated poskim. With his upcoming shloshim, family members share Rav Falk’s recipe for achievement

Once upon a time there was an impoverished Jewish couple who dreamed of Torah greatness for their children. They sent their son to cheder, but at eight years old he still couldn’t read. The worried parents encouraged their child, but by the time he was 15, the rosh yeshivah said that he couldn’t see a future for him. Saddened, the father resigned himself to the son joining him in his small seforim store. But the son, desperate to stay in the halls of the yeshivah, pleaded for one more chance — and within months his greatness was revealed.

This story sounds like it’s lifted from a collection of tzaddikim tales in a distant time and place, but in fact, it’s far closer to home.

Set against the drabness, grey skies, and northern English accents of postwar Manchester, it’s actually the early life story of world-famous posek Rav Pesach Eliyahu Falk ztz”l.

The rav, who went on to become a legend in his adopted home of Gateshead, giving shiurim to thousands of yeshivah bochurim and seminary students for half a century, answering sh’eilos from all over the world, and writing groundbreaking seforim, nearly wound up behind a cash register.

In those fateful moments when a young bochur committed himself to try again, the Torah world didn’t just gain a leading light, it gained someone who had struggled because Torah was worth it.

Rav Falk’s personal odyssey is perhaps what was at the root of his dedication to Torah truth wherever it led. It drove him to investigate bug infestation with as much perseverance as he labored over a complicated eiruv question.

But the struggle for Torah also gave Reb Eliyahu, as he was fondly referred to, a rare humility. He had infinite patience to hear out a worried caller, whatever the hour. Pesach-style, his open front door was an invitation to all those hungry for halachah to step inside.

Just weeks after Rav Falk’s sudden passing, as the shloshim approaches, his eldest son, Rabbi Naftoli Meir Falk, his grandson Yitzchok, as well as chavrusas and colleagues, share his life story. These conversations are a personal journey for me as well, more than 15 years after I last sat in Gateshead Yeshiva’s large shiur room, looking up at Rav Falk’s imposing figure as he gestured to the Mishnah Berurah. And as one of his talmidim talks of Rav Falk’s own initial struggles, I recall his labored climb up the stairs to give his shiur day after day. In retrospect, his life was living proof that under every struggling bochur lies the potential for greatness.

Rags to Riches

“My father didn’t sleep on a normal bed until he was 15,” says Rav Falk’s eldest son, Reb Naftoli Meir, founder of the international Avos U’Banim and Mordechai Hatzaddik programs. “Until then his bed consisted of orange crates. Even back then that level of poverty was unusual.”

If the home that Pesach Eliyahu Falk was born into in 1943 had few material comforts, both parents were happy simply to be alive. His father, Mr. Avrohom Zvi Falk, originated from Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), and in 1939, he was interned in Buchenwald. With a yiras shamayim that was his trademark, Avrohom Zvi worked to strengthen others in the camp by organizing shiurim. As the Holocaust began, he was miraculously set free, arriving in England in 1940.

Like many Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler, he suffered the indignity of internment on the Isle of Man by British authorities on the lookout for Nazi spies. By the summer of 1940, he was released and met his future wife, Hamburg-born Sarah Kleyva.

Manchester, North West England, must have seemed very foreign for this yekkishe couple, but they set about building themselves up. Mr. Falk opened up a small seforim shop — what eventually became the Jewish Book Center, still going strong decades later — and eked out a modest income for his growing family of six children.

If the Falks struggled to make ends meet, they provided their children with something else: their own deep-seated yashrus and love of Torah. By any standards, the chinuch must have been extraordinary. Rav Falk’s older sister Miriam a”h, born a year before him, became the wife of Lakewood Mashgiach Rav Matisyahu Salomon. Another sister married Dayan Aharon Dovid Dunner of London.

But little Pesach Eliyahu’s own future didn’t look so bright when he started school. At first he was sent to the Jewish Day School, a Manchester landmark whose intake was extremely diverse. But Mr. Falk wanted Torah excellence for his eldest son, and switched him to a cheder run by Reb Shmuel Rosenbaum.

It soon became obvious to the Falks that their son was not doing well. When his classmates were already reading fluently, he just couldn’t master it. “At age 13, a teacher told my grandfather that his son would never give him any nachas,” says Rabbi Naftoli Meir Falk. “At 14, he went to the Manchester yeshivah for a year, and then transferred to the Sunderland yeshivah under Rav Shammai Zahn. And that’s when he was told that he should join his father’s business because he wasn’t succeeding.”

That fateful conversation must have acted like a wake-up call. Despite the years of struggle, Pesach Eliyahu had absorbed his parents’ love of Torah, and when it looked like yeshivah would become history for him, he begged for another chance.

“And so, the Rosh Yeshivah arranged for a chavrusa to help him learn,” says his son. “Within three months he told my grandfather ‘this bochur will be a gadol b’Yisrael.’ ”

Pesach Eliyahu had turned his life around by sheer willpower, triggering a level of hasmadah that became his trademark. Rav Shmuel Goldberg of Yeshivas Shaarei Torah in Manchester — and a friend from yeshivah days — remembers Rav Falk falling asleep at night over piles of seforim.

According to his grandson, Yitzchok Falk, “my grandfather never left home without something to learn. When they brought back his tallis bag from the Gateshead Kollel after he was niftar, it contained a teshuvah that he was working on.”

The years of learning in Sunderland Yeshiva paid off, and Pesach Eliyahu headed off to Eretz Yisrael in 1962 to learn in Brisk under Rav Berel Soloveitchik. International air travel was still in its infancy, and so the young man took a train across Europe to Turkey, from where he embarked by ship to Israel.

En route, the bochur from England who would one day make a name for himself in practical halachah made his first foray in halachic leadership. With the boat at sea over Shabbos, the passengers were faced with restrictions on carrying unless they made an eiruv chatzeiros. Stepping forward, Pesach Eliyahu performed a kinyan with the ship’s captain.

“My grandfather told us that in yeshivah he never invested himself in halachah,” says Yitzchok Falk “but whatever sugya he learned, he attempted to do so properly, to understand how it applied on a practical level.”

A year and half later, in 1964, the Falks welcomed their son — now a growing talmid chacham — back to Manchester. Soon after, a shidduch was suggested with Esther, daughter of Gateshead’s legendary baker Shraga Steinhaus.

But there was one problem: Despite being brought up in England, the chassan couldn’t speak English. “My father was brought up speaking German at home and Yiddish in yeshivah,” explains Reb Naftoli Meir. “After all that time not practicing the language, he had basically forgotten what he’d learned in school.”

The solution they hit on was to talk Hebrew, which Miss Steinhaus had learned while serving as a madrichah at the Or Hachaim seminary in Bnei Brak.

The epilogue to that story, according to his son Reb Naftoli Meir, came many years later, when Rav Falk’s seforim had become popular worldwide. “One day my father received a phone call from a man who wanted him to persuade his son to leave yeshivah and go to university. My father was taken aback and asked ‘What makes you turn to me of all people?’ The man answered, ‘I’ve seen your books, which are written in very good English, so you yourself must have gone to university.’ To which my father replied, ‘You’re right — I am the person to talk to. As a chassan, I couldn’t even speak English, and I picked it up later. You can rest assured that your son will manage fine by remaining in yeshivah.’”

Gateshead has a certain iconic feeling to it, like a place that’s both real and an echo of something bygone. It’s the crowds of bochurim filling the streets of this working-class English town, the front doors bearing legendary names, and the fact that so many of the town’s institutions were part of the struggle to establish Torah in England. And the rarefied atmosphere of the Gateshead Kollel, founded by Rav Dessler in the middle of World War II, probably hasn’t changed much since.

It was this elite institution that “Reb Eliyahu” joined after his marriage and where he grew into the world-famous expert in so many areas of halachah.

Rav Berel Knopfler, now a leading rav in northwest London, joined the Kollel some time after Rav Falk, and knew him very well from those years. “Have you heard it said that Reb Eliyahu was a “Mishnah Berurah Yid?” he asks. “That’s how it was. He concentrated completely on halachah, and he was very, very thorough in clarifying even the smallest details.”

It wasn’t just his laser-like focus on halachah that made Rav Falk stand out; it was, once again, his total commitment. “I remember a complicated sh’eilah involving the eiruv between Gateshead and Newcastle, the city across the river, that he spent months on,” recalls Rav Knopfler. “When others weren’t interested in the question, he threw himself into it because he felt it was a necessity.”

The other thing that stood out was his motivation. “The reason he succeeded in his learning was his yiras Shamayim,” says Rav Knopfler. “The Gemara says that if a person has yiras Shamayim, ‘devarav nishmaim — his words are accepted.’ On any point, it was never about trying to prove himself, only to establish and clarify the truth.”

If the young kollel avreich received his parents’ yiras Shamayim, he’d also inherited their financial struggles. “When my parents had been married about eight years, their fridge broke down,” says Reb Naftoli Meir. “They had no idea where to find the 25 pounds needed to buy another second-hand one, and their boarder, Boruch Yehuda Gradon (now Rabbi Gradon of Los Angeles’s Merkaz HaTorah Kollel), heard their dilemma. He offered to give them four or five months’ rent up-front, and they were able to replace the fridge.”

Early on, Rav Falk set the course which he would follow for the next half-century. Already in his mid-twenties, two key themes of his life crystallized: teaching halachah and his emergence as a posek. Both had the same modest beginning.

“Rav Mordechai Shakovitsky, the son of the old Gateshead Rav, used to give a Mishnah Berurah shiur to a small group of bochurim in the yeshivah,” says Reb Naftoli Meir. “When my father heard that he was leaving town, he asked Rav Shakovitsky if he could take over.” That shiur became a Gateshead Yeshiva icon.

“Almost every weekday for decades,” says Rabbi Moshe Boruch Katanka, a longtime talmid and chavrusa of Rav Falk, “a bochur would wait outside his house at 7 p.m. to walk him to the yeshivah. They would walk down the back alley of the yeshivah building, where some bochurim might be waiting to ask him a question, and with great effort, Rav Falk would climb the stairs to the shiur room, where he’d begin teaching. (In his later years, Rav Falk had difficulty walking.)  Afterward, he would sit and wait until every single question was answered and would focus all his attention on the questioner.

“Perhaps the Rebbetzin didn’t know, but the shiur only took 40 minutes, although he was away for two hours.”

Not long after he began in the yeshivah, Rav Falk started the second leg of his teaching career, giving up to three daily shiurim to the girls of Gateshead Seminary. And that was only the beginning, as he started to teach in Bais Chaya Rochel, known as the “New Seminary” as well. “On average he gave over 25 shiurim a week,” says his son, “including three to four shiurim daily in both girls’ seminaries, shiurim in the town’s yeshivah ketanah, to balabatim, and to women from the Gateshead community.”

According to Rabbi Simcha Kohn, Gateshead Seminary’s longtime head, it all began when there was an opening to teach hilchos Shabbos. “Rav Falk had tremendous clarity, but after a while, he saw that even by dictating notes, the girls weren’t absorbing it properly. So he wrote notes himself, which became his sefer Zachor VeShamor, a work of art in teaching halachah. For many years it was the same edition that he’d typed and corrected himself.”

But this was no sterile lecture; for Rav Falk, practical halachah had to be just that — practical. For clarity’s sake he would often use props, such as turning up with a pocketful of threads and textiles to convey the finer points of meleches kosher, or leaning over the back of a chair to demonstrate the correct method of leaning at the Pesach Seder.

And it wasn’t all halachah. The highlight of his week was the Wednesday hashkafah shiur that he would deliver to the girls, rigorously prepared every time afresh. Based on Tehillim, the mix of stories and hashkafah was recorded on Kol Halashon, and achieved popularity well beyond Gateshead. When Rabbi David Ashear, author of the Living Emunah series, discovered the recordings, he was so inspired that he incorporated many of the themes in his own popular books.

“In recent years, when people tried to persuade Rav Falk to give up this shiur, which took a lot out of him,” says Rabbi Katanka, “he patently refused. ‘Maybe the zechus of this shiur is what’s keeping me alive!’ he would say.”

It was part of Rav Dessler’s legacy that girls in Gateshead had a major posek as a teacher, but did they appreciate it? “They did appreciate that he was a major talmid chacham,” says Rabbi Kohn, “so that gave them respect for Torah and for halachah.” And that daily association gave Rabbi Kohn himself a unique perspective on Rav Falk: “He was so humble — he never even realized what a gadol he was.”

At about the same time as he took his first steps in the teaching world, Rav Falk started to clarify halachah in the form of teshuvos — what would eventually turn into his well-known work, Machzeh Eliyahu.

The first volume was printed when he was in his early thirties, a major achievement for such a young man. The glowing haskamos made it clear that Rav Falk was a halachic force to reckon with. Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach commented that the thoroughness of his style resembled an earlier generation of posek. From distant America, Rav Moshe Feinstein wrote that the young rav’s halachic decisions should be treated like a “chacham she’horeh — a sage who has ruled,” which was rare for him to say about such a young man.

But while he dealt with the full array of halachic issues, from kashrus to esrogim, eiruvin to brachos, Rav Falk soon started to leave his mark on little-trodden halachic paths, beginning with bug infestation and hilchos tolaim.

Today checking fruit and vegetables for bugs raises no eyebrows; it’s become so standard that a booming produce industry has grown to accommodate it. But that industry in large measure has its roots in Rav Falk’s own kitchen and in the booklet he authored in 1978.

“Every day for years he would buy fresh fruit and vegetables in order to check the rates of infestation in different seasons,” remembers Reb Naftoli Meir. “What he wrote in his sefer on tolaim was not about forbidding things — he tried to devise ways to clean the fruit as well. He had a positive approach to halachah — wherever possible to find a way to permit it.”

In a pattern that would repeat itself many times, Rav Falk became interested in this area of halachah because he was asked to give a shiur about it. “I remember how it began,” says Rav Berel Knopfler. “He would give a shiur to the women of the community twice a month, and Rebbetzin Rakov, the previous Gateshead Rebbetzin, asked him to explain hilchos tolaim. He didn’t have particular expertise in this, so he started to learn, and then went on and on. Whatever he felt Klal Yisrael needed, he delved into.”

But the interest in this particular area might have extended further back. An early influence on Rav Falk’s life was Rav Dovid Feldman, rav of Manchester’s Machzikei Hadass community who, like the Falks, hailed from Germany. Rav Feldman was not only a founder of the day school that the young Pesach Eliyahu attended, he was the author of several seforim, including the sefer Ir Dovid on the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch — and he also wrote on tolaim.

“Rav Falk would often mention him, and he must have been a source for Rav Falk’s own research,” says Rabbi Katanka.

But for all that Rav Falk was a man who lived and breathed the vast array of halachic issues, he is most associated with the sensitive area of tzniyus and his major work on the subject. “When my father came to the editors of a major publisher with his Oz Vehadar Levushah, they answered, “It’s a wonderful work, but you’re a hundred years too late.”

But in fact, Rav Falk had written a bestseller — the sefer went on to sell over 100,000 copies in five different languages, becoming a standard work in many communities worldwide.

Inevitably, dedicating himself to exploring the finer details of tzniyus drew fire — he was simultaneously attacked for being both too strict and too lenient. “If he’d been worried about his reputation, he would never have touched these subjects,” says his grandson Yitzchok. “But the bedrock of his life was responsibility, and he felt that he needed to clarify things.”

If you didn’t know Rav Falk, these works might give an impression of someone inflexible, persnickety, and consumed with seriousness — but that couldn’t be further from the truth. “For my father,” Reb Naftoli Meir stresses time and again, “halachah wasn’t a set of severe directives — it was the most beautiful zechus to have guidance at every stage of life. It was all about living in an upbeat, geshmak way, with a feeling of ashreinu mah tov chelkeinu. His life was essentially a combination of deracheha darchei noam and veromamtanu mikol haleshonos.”

Rav Falk’s joyous approach to life was implemented to the fullest when he and his rebbetzin, his eizer kenegdo who served as a sounding board for every article he wrote,

were raising their family of 14 — all of them in klei kodesh, spread across the world in Israel, England, and Toronto. “He was so down to earth,” says grandson Yitzchok Falk. “When I came to visit recently, I brought two new CDs of Belz and Motty Steinmetz niggunim, and he enjoyed listening to them. The day after my grandmother ended her aveilus year, he wanted to put music on for her.”

As someone who knew Rav Falk as a maggid shiur, this dimension comes to me as a bit of a surprise, but Yitzchok adds: “He knew how to enjoy a joke, and when one of his sons bought a new car, he said, ‘Come, let’s go for a spin,’ because he knew the good feeling that it would give him.”

Rav Falk wasn’t just an understanding father, he loved all children — whoever they belonged to. “He made each one of us feel like we were the only grandchild,” remembers grandson Yitzchok. “When he had a decision to make, he would ask us for our opinion.” And Rabbi Moshe Boruch Katanka adds: “He once saw my young son holding the Haggadah he’d made in school. Rav Falk admired it and delighted him by asking, ‘Where can I get one from?’ He was just so full of goodness.”

That good-heartedness expressed itself in many different ways. “Once someone asked him to phone a wealthy man for a loan,” recalls Yitzchok Falk. “My grandfather happily agreed to make the call, but when the man was leaving, gave him 50 pounds from his own pocket, saying, ‘Buy your wife something nice for Yom Tov.’”

The Phone Never Stopped

It could be the beginning of a joke: What do you call two people who sit and talk for an hour each night for ten years by phone, despite living only a few doors apart?

Answer: Rav Falk learning with his chavrusa.

“It all began when we started to work our way through his hilchos Shabbos sefer Zachor VeShamor in order to add footnotes,” says Rabbi Moshe Boruch Katanka. “The Falks lived at 146 Whitehall Road, and we live at number 86, so I went there to learn with him.  But then the phone started to ring with sh’eilos, and we couldn’t learn. One solution was to unplug it, but Rav Falk would never hear of it. “People will just ring and think nobody’s there.”

“So we began to learn by phone, even though we lived practically next door. At least that way, Rav Falk’s phone would be busy, and people would know to call back.”

This intriguing arrangement captures, more than anything else, who Rav Falk was. For decades, he quite literally had an open-door policy. Even when robberies forced the installation of a combination lock on the inner door, half the town knew it, while the outer door remained symbolically ajar.

And sometimes if it was an emergency, food came together with the psak. “When someone had a problem of bishul with their cholent on Shabbos,” says Yitzchok Falk, “they went to Rav Falk, and they’d either get a heter or some cholent.”

The same open-door policy was true of the phone, with countless calls coming in from all over the world until the wee hours of the morning — and none of those calls went unanswered.

“I’m getting tested on my learning the whole day,” Rav Falk would say, referring to the sheer range and number of questions.

“In the morning the calls would come from Eretz Yisrael, which is two hours ahead,” says Rabbi Katanka. “Then there would be local sh’eilos, a caller from London, a lady from Manchester about checking beans — afternoon sh’eilos would often be about cooking. In the evening rabbanim would consult him, and later the questions from the US would start.”

One Purim during my own time in Gateshead, I found myself walking through the famous open front door on Whitehall Road and into Rav Falk’s blue-carpeted, seforim-panelled front room.

“Yes, that was where he answered those thousands of phone calls,” confirms his son. Sitting at the little wooden desk in the corner and leaning back in his chair, he’d close his eyes and listen as if the question was the only one he’d received that day.

“He’d get phone calls from mashgichim in Taiwan and elsewhere about kashrus,’ says Reb Naftoli Meir. “London’s Kedassiah relied on him as their Shulchan Aruch on tolaim, as did the OU and other major kashrus organizations. There were a lot of questions about Shabbos, and about tzniyus. The phone never stopped ringing.”

But sometimes it wasn’t just the question that tested him, but the questioner. “There was a lady who called from overseas, wanting to know which school to send her son to,” remembers Rabbi Katanka. “Try as Reb Eliyahu might, she wouldn’t accept his answer that he simply knew too little about the boy, the school, and the teachers to advise from a distance.”

The patience with which Rav Falk answered questions was born of humility and a total disdain of kavod in any form. “After the shiur in the yeshivah he would sometimes stay for Minchah,” says Rabbi Katanka. “But he didn’t want the bochurim to stand up for him when he came through the beis medrash, so he circled the entire yeshivah campus in order to enter from the front. It was an enormous circuit for a man who wasn’t in the best of health.”

As he left the yeshivah the Sunday night before his sudden petirah, clutching his beloved Mishnah Berurah, Rav Falk’s route home through Jewish Gateshead took him past the major stations of his life.

Behind him was the kollel where he’d grown into a halachic phenomenon; the yeshivah, where he’d taught generations of bochurim with a mixture of precision and genuine care for each one of them; the seminaries up the road, where thousands of future Jewish mothers gained a knowledge of halachah that came from his patience and clarity; and further on was his house, the phone undoubtedly ringing with an urgent halachic question.

Six decades before, a young boy had turned his back on the seforim store and pursued his dream of Torah. On the way, Gateshead’s legendary posek had filled bookshelves all over the world with his works. But that last Sunday night shiur was the final chapter in a tale of how love for Torah can overcome any bounds.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 799)