You Survived for a Reason

While Rabbi Posen has, throughout his long life, acquired the architectural and engineering prowess that made him the world’s go-to authority in mikvaos, the formal education part is missing from his resume.

Rabbi Posen was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1928, five years before the Nazi party was installed into power. But already on election day in March 1932, a year before Hilter yemach shemo became fuhrer, Meir Posen’s father, Reb Yosef Yitzchok, understood that that the winds had changed, and that it wouldn’t be simple to leave. And so, before the votes were even counted, he packed up his family of seven — including a two-week-old baby — and left for Holland, where he had a sister.

Reb Yosef Yitzchok’s employer was a frum Jew from Frankfurt who owned an international firm selling heavy chemicals. They too moved to Holland, together with their employees, all of them religious Jews.

Meir Posen understood from an early age how a Jew only benefits when he sticks to his Torah principles, a condition he holds onto with tenacity, even in the complex situations and challenging communities in which he’s found himself over the years. Rabbi Posen recalls that in those years, communication was primarily through telegrams. Rabbi Posen’s father would always tell him about the time on one Erev Rosh Hashanah, when they were waiting to hear back from a potential supplier about a deal. When they hadn’t heard back, and Yom Tov arrived, it seemed like they’d lost the deal, since they wouldn’t be able to respond for two days. But when Yom Tov was over, they had a few telegrams waiting, each one sent after the other: The supplier, seeing that he hadn’t heard back on his earlier offer, kept reducing the price —  ensuring the family’s parnassah for the entire year.

In 1937, when he understood how the tentacles of war were about to spread, Reb Yosef Yitzchok wanted to escape to London. But he refused to leave without his colleagues — young men and bochurim. He felt it was his achrayus, fearing they wouldn’t survive otherwise.

It took two years until the British Home Office gave every employee a visa. And finally, in 1939, he was able to leave with the entire Jewish staff, saving their lives.

Rabbi Posen was only a child, but the chinuch he imbibed at home made its mark on his impressionable mind. So while he had little formal schooling, such scenarios shaped his sense of priorities.

On September 1, 1939, after a mere three months as a student in Avidgor, North London’s only local Jewish school (named for the father of the intrepid Holocaust hero Rabbi Dr. Solomon Shonfeld ztz”l), England was at war.

On that Friday morning, all children from the larger cities were evacuated to villages in the countryside to escape the bombing. Rabbi Posen and some of his siblings were evacuated with busloads of children to stay with non-Jewish families in Shefford. At the time, Rabbi Posen remembers, Rabbi Dr. Solomon Shonfeld gave them instructions: “Keep what you can, but remember, you’re going to goyim who have never seen a Jew. So anyone not willing to comply with the rules should leave now and not make any difficulties for the group.” Rabbi Posen’s older brother, who was already 18 and could choose against evacuation, decided not to join. For the rest of them, Rabbi Shonfeld was a one-man service team, in addition to his rescue work with thousands of children coming over from Germany. He’d drive to the countryside every week to bring the children kosher food and whatever else they needed.

“It was Erev Shabbos Ki Savo when we were transferred,” Rabbi Posen recalls. “I later heard from Rav Tuvia Weiss, who would become the gaavad of Yerushalayim, that he became bar mitzvah that Shabbos. He was all alone at his non-Jewish hosts, with no one to guide him, let alone celebrate. But he had such a good chinuch that he continued with his learning.”

Rabbi Posen, at least, had a sibling in Shefford. Shortly after they arrived at their hosts, he and his brother wanted to make Kiddush, but they had no idea what to make it on. So they made Kiddush in the street over half the small orange from the snack pack the government gave them.

“Although this was not al pi halachah, I don’t think any Kiddush I made in my life was so choshuv by the Eibeshter,” he says, attributing the unflinching strength the boys had to the chinuch their parents had given them.

During the war, he went to yeshivah in Staines (the Jewish community which was established by evacuees from London), under the Leizher Rav, Rav Chaim Yitzchok Weingarten ztz”l. Then he went to Gateshead, which was a bit more complicated: As a native German, he was considered an enemy alien and couldn’t travel more than 15 miles from the coast without the necessary permit.

The last day of war was a Monday afternoon. When the news came through, his mashgiach, Rav Moshe Schwab, told the talmidim, “The Allies won the war, but we did not. We’ve lost so many Yidden. The Eibeshter had rachmanus on us and spared us. Zolst kein mul meinen host gebliben leben tzi essen bulbos — [Don’t think you survived the war to eat potatoes]. You all have a duty to give something back to the Eibeshter.”

“And it was upon us survivors,” says Rabbi Posen, “to absorb that message. We kept it in mind for the rest of our lives.”

Jobs Well Done

Rabbi Posen married Ruth, the daughter of Dayan Eliezer Posen, his father’s first cousin. For years, he ran a printing company and did safrus on the side. Actually, he started off doing safrus for a living, but he found that the pace of scribal writing was too slow for his energetic disposition and required immense patience. “You can’t just hurry it up,” he says.

A talmid chacham with a wide grasp of halachah and gifted with a practical side as well, he began delving into the subject of mikvaos. With his sh’eilos, he turned to Rav Chanoch Henoch Padwa, the late Gaavad of London, with whom he was close through his father-in-law, Dayan Posen. Dayan Posen was one of the initiators of the Kedassia kashrus agency, which was under the Gaavad’s auspices. In fact, in the 1950s when the London rabbinate was searching for a senior rabbinical figure to head the London beis din, it was Dayan Posen who traveled to Jerusalem together with Rav Elchonon Halpern to invite Rav Padwa — who had immigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1940 and was serving on the beis din of the Eidah Hachareidis — to assume the role of London’s Gaavad.

Rabbi Posen’s first project was the mikveh for Stamford Hill’s Bikovsk shul (commonly known as Pinter’s beis medrash after its founder, Rav Shmuel Shmelke Pinter), and next came the Adass Yisroel mikveh. After jobs well done, his good name preceded him and he became in high demand in an era when mehudar mikvaos were being constructed all over. It was a subject he had mastered in depth through years of learning, and was eventually collated into the seforim series Ohr Meir — with Rabbi Posen having pivoted from writing sacred letters on parchment to drawing plans for sacred buildings on paper.

“I quickly realized,” he recounts of his earliest experiences, “that a lot of architects hired to build these new structures didn’t understand what a mikveh is about, especially the fine differences in halachah. Even rabbanim were not always well-acquainted with turning the complexities of the halachos into actual workable technical plans, and in turn, they couldn’t explain to the architects how to apply the halachah to the actual construction.”

And that’s when Rabbi Posen came to the conclusion that the two people in charge of building a mikveh — the rav and the architect — should optimally be one and the same. Indeed, there are often raised voices in his meetings with non-Jewish architects, for whom design far outweighs the placement of pipes, holes, and pumps.

“Architects naturally focus on making the outside nice,” Rabbi Posen explains. But often the external dramatic effect is at the expense of practicality and maximum efficiency of inside space. And there’s no building where the inside specs have as far-reaching significance as a mikveh.

In 1969, Rabbi Posen traveled to Paris for Rabbi Mordechai Rottenberg’s community. The Ponevezher Rav happened to be there from Eretz Yisrael, and asked if Rabbi Posen minded if he sat in a corner and listened in on his meeting with the architects. “The Rav was very technical,” says Rabbi Posen. “In building his own mosdos, he was his own contractor. After our three-hour meeting, he told me he wanted me to come to Teveria, where he was planning a new center.”

The Ponevezher Rav, however, was niftar before he could make it happen, but clearly, he recognized Rabbi Posen’s expertise. Still, says Rabbi Posen, “Al tishallel chacham b’chachmaso — Don’t praise a clever person, because whatever talent he has isn’t really his — it’s a gift from Heaven.”

Meanwhile, back in France, the mikveh work continued. The halachah requires that the tray used for gathering the rainwater be cast on-site, so it shouldn’t be deemed a kli (vessel) beforehand. Rabbi Posen wanted to see if he could move the tray, to test if it was cast as required. It turned out that the tray moved, meaning it had been done off-site and brought in. After much prodding, the builder eventually admitted defeat and they had to cast all trays again on-site, under supervision.

“I don’t know what made me move the tray,” Rabbi Posen admits. “At the end of the day, we can only think what the Eibeshter puts into our heads.”

Called To Task

Over the years, Rabbi Posen has been called to build mikvaos from places like the Congo, an African state that straddles the Equator, to Singapore, to Stockholm. Besides for use by the local residents, many of the mikvaos in exotic locations are commissioned by businessmen who travel with their wives.

Around the globe, Rabbi Posen relies on the Chabad houses for a minyan and food. But he never eats meat outside his home. “Once you start picking and choosing where you eat, people get insulted. So I’ve made a blanket rule.”

When Rabbi Posen started out, he didn’t take any renumeration for his first few projects, until he encountered Rav Padwa at the Adass, the site of his second mikveh. “If you don’t take money for your work,” said the Gaavad, “I won’t speak to you. It’s impossible for you to continue like this, since it takes you away from your other income. And if people don’t pay you, you’ll stop and that’ll disadvantage the tzibbur. So I’m going to force you to charge.”

As a world-renowned globetrotter, he has become a learned expert on zemanim too, especially those near the dateline, like Tokyo. He constantly fields calls about Shabbos in remote countries, but he starts by telling those callers, “Before you ask what time Shabbos is there, ask what day Shabbos is there.”

When he was in Australia, Shabbos zemanim were so complicated that, for future trips, he made sure to travel only from Sunday to Thursday, arriving back on Friday. Similarly, in Helsinki summers, there are no nights. Maariv is one o’clock in the morning. And in the winter there, davening is so late that on one trip, he organized a meeting in the early morning, before Shacharis.

Yet he never goes touring — he keeps his trips as short as possible in order not to leave his wife for long.

“Does your wife accompany you on any trips?” I ask, reckoning how often she must have been alone all these years.

“Rarely, because I don’t want the tzibbur to incur the expense of another ticket. Instead, I stay as short as possible. I’ve been to Paris a dozen times for mikvaos, yet I’ve never been to the Eiffel Tower.”

Mrs. Posen did join on three occasions over the years, though. One time she traveled with her husband to South Africa and another time it was to Chile, where it worked out cheaper to stay over Shabbos together than for one person to leave before the weekend. That Shabbos they were guests of Rabbi Eliezer Dovid Friedman, who headed a kollel in Chile before becoming a rav in London. In that country, she remembers being mesmerized by how the sun’s path seems to go in the opposite direction, from right to left, and that the moon hangs in the sky the opposite way. “You notice it right away,” she remarks.

The third time was to Russia, soon before the fall of the Iron Curtain. She joined her husband, she says, “because it was the only way we’d look like innocent tourists.” She’ll never forget the sheer feeling of terror when the passport clerk, who didn’t look to be more than a teenager, looked her in the eye for a few extra-long seconds to confirm she was the same person as the photo.  The Posens were required to stay in a certain hotel, and on Shabbos they couldn’t go out at all because they couldn’t carry the required ID cards. Staying indoors wasn’t exactly Shabbosdig, as the radio could not be turned off throughout their stay (probably ears for the KGB). They were advised that anything private should be discussed in the bathroom — with the faucet running.

“The only thing the KGB got to hear was the Shabbos zemiros,” she quips. “Even the local Yidden were scared to talk to us or meet us in the hotel, because we were foreigners.”

Even if he’s clocking a 17-hour flight to the Far East, Rabbi Posen does not request business class travel so as not to create an extra expense for the community he’s traveling to.

A year and a half ago, just before COVID hit, he visited Rav Ze’ev Feldman, rav of the “69” shul, who told him, “I’m annoyed with you because you don’t travel business class. You’re entitled to it.”

In any case, just a few weeks later, coronavirus stalled his travels.

No Slowing Down

On one of his subsequent trips to the former Soviet Union, Rabbi Posen went to visit the mikveh in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, which had been built by the local shochet. Government officials, however, suspected he built it for profit and confronted him. He told them he wasn’t allowed to slaughter animals unless he immersed in the mikveh beforehand, and they let him off.

There in a courtyard in central Asia, Rabbi Posen had a watershed moment.

“Your fathers went East, my fathers went West,” he told the crowd that had gathered, Yidden from a culture that seemed worlds apart. But not really. “We’ve been separated for centuries and now we sit here like brothers, as if we’ve always known each other.”

“Their mesirus nefesh was unbelievable,” he remembers. “Some of them had a trap door under their dining room table that once led to a mikveh. We can’t even fathom what they endured.” His descriptions evoke images of “Yakob” (Reb Yaakov Potash), the protagonist of Yom Tov Erlich’s famous composition, skirting over those very same Uzbek mountains in the dead of night, in order to remain a Yid.

Rabbi Posen built state-of-the-art mikvaos in all these places. “People don’t realize that it really doesn’t cost more to build a most mehudar mikveh,” he says. “It just needs more supervision and guidance.”

Ironically, mikvaos in Eretz Yisrael do not have the luxury of those in many other countries, where digging for water is not a problem. So, whereas mikvaos elsewhere use natural water from underground, in Eretz Yisrael, where digging is prohibited, rainwater is used instead. Not that digging is always an easier option. When Rav Elchonon Halpern’s shul mikveh was being built, it required 200-meter-deep digging, double the standard 100-meter dig, as Golders Green is up a hill. In South Africa, the labor for that would be rock-bottom, but in England, it’s over the top.

While the most opulent mikveh he’s supervised is in the renovated Chabad community center in Moscow, his largest mikveh to date, I’m amazed to learn, is the one currently under construction just a stone’s throw from me in Stamford Hill. And his smallest? Those would be the countless home mikvaos he built for private people, which spiked in demand during corona.

Rabbi Posen is no longer a youngster, to say the least, but he has no plans to slow down, even if COVID travel bans have done their own thing. This past year, he’s been directing from behind the screen and if he can’t be there in person, Zoom has proven to be an adequate substitute for now.

“My rav, Rav Henoch Padwa ztz”l, once told me that as long as he had koach, he would continue to pasken and officiate as rav [he was 92 when he passed away in 2000. –Ed.]. Some of my chaverim didn’t survive the war. I have to give back to the Eibeshter for the fact that He spared me and kept me going all these years.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 866)