T
he lobby of Manhattan’s United Nations Hotel is a flurry of ambassadors and bureaucrats, neckties knotted tightly, briefcases clasped close as they whisper to each other in a babble of languages.
Rabbi Dovid Refson strides across the lobby in marked contrast to the bevy of officialdom: Tieless, he appears very British in a wool sweater, his imposing frame, cheerful smile, and exuberant greeting so different from the hushed, polite tones all around us.
It’s been a year spent in transit for the dean of the Orthodox world’s largest all-women’s college. Unprecedented financial challenges have forced him out of his beloved classroom and on to the fundraising trail.
If he appears a bit weary, he compensates with humor, candor, and insight.
The builder of one of the kiruv world’s flagship institutions has been called farsighted, even visionary, but as he eases into a red-and-gray-striped lobby chair, he waves away the labels. If Dovid Refson had a goal when he was young, it was simply to make himself useful.
Not an Easy Sell
The seeds of the English Torah world were planted when Rav Elyah Lopian made the decision to leave Lithuania for England in 1928. His children and talmidim would become the key figures in the post-war European Torah world, but the beginning wasn’t easy.
Rabbi Refson sits back on the overstuffed lobby chair. “Reb Elyah was simply miserable when he first came. Let’s just say that there wasn’t an overwhelming demand for Kelmer mussar in the London of the late 1920s.”
Reb Elyah himself would refer to the period as his “bittereh yohren,” the difficult years. The yeshivah he established had a hard time attracting talmidim — except for during the war years, when draft dodgers saw it as a convenient hideout.
At a time when friends were few, Reb Avrohom Abba Refson of Sunderland — Dovid Refson’s father — was one of those balabatim who appreciated the sainted Mashgiach, and stood ready to help him.
Eventually, Reb Elyah saw the realization of his vision: In 1950, when his own children and students took their place at the helm of the emerging yeshivah world, he was able to fulfill his own dream of ascending to Eretz Yisrael.
Dovid Refson, who had only heard stories about Rav Elyah from his father, first arrived in Eretz Yisrael in 1965.
“I had learned in the yeshivah in Gateshead, but didn’t see my future in learning Torah. I was simply touring, eager to see the Land. My father asked me to please visit Reb Elyah. Out of respect for my father, I did.”
Rav Elyah was the mashgiach in the yeshivah of Kfar Chassidim, a small settlement near Haifa established in the 1920s, but he was spending time in Yerushalayim. Dovid Refson expected a cordial visit with a revered mussar personality; he wasn’t counting on the Mashgiach’s fierce sense of hakaras hatov.
Dovid was introduced as Avrohom Abba Refson’s son. Reb Elyah, 89 years old and blind in one eye, peered at the visitor. “Where do you learn?” he asked.
The young man hesitated, as he wasn’t formally enrolled in any yeshivah at that time.
Reb Elyah picked up on the hesitation and offered a penetrating one-line analysis that shook his guest to the core. “Eighteen years old and not in a yeshivah? That means that you are an am ha’aretz!”
“The way he said the word, am ha’aretz, made it sound like the worst fate that can meet a man,” Rabbi Refson recalls.
The elderly Reb Elyah rose to his feet. Telephones weren’t yet standard, and the Mashgiach had to “book” a call, but he arranged a conversation with the rosh yeshivah of Kfar Chassidim, Rav Mishkovsky.
“I have a bochur I want you to accept,” Reb Elyah said. “He might not be on the level yet, but I have hakaras hatov to his father.”
“My Yiddish was weak,” laughs Rabbi Refson, “but I could tell that it wasn’t an easy sell for him. I don’t know who was less interested, me or the Rosh Yeshivah, but you couldn’t argue with Reb Elyah.”
Better than a Truck
The well-heeled British teenager boarded a bus for the long, hot road to the dusty yeshivah village.
He experienced no culture shock, he says, because “they love-bombed me.
“From the moment I stepped off the bus, I was flooded by warmth and genuine ahavas Yisrael. ‘Can I carry your bags?’ ‘Would you sleep in our room?’ and ‘Have you eaten yet?’ They treated me like a visiting dignitary. At mealtime, no one would begin eating until I had a portion too. The focus on bein adam l’chaveiro was obvious.
“Besides” — of course there is an accompanying joke — “you can’t really escape from Kfar Chassidim. The bus service is kind of lousy.”
Reb Dovid would soon end up under the tutelage of the revered Mashgiach, Reb Elyah. In addition to joining the vaadim, he joined a rotation of talmidim who would sleep in a room with the Mashgiach and attend to him.
He is entirely serious. “I am not a talmid of Rav Elyah, not by any means. Rav Mattisyahu Salomon is a talmid. I don’t want to cause Rav Elyah embarrassment in the Upper Worlds by calling him my rebbi.”
Talmid or not, he merited a genuine relationship with the Mashgiach. When Dovid Refson joined the yeshivah for good, he came with his Land Rover, courtesy of his father, a well-to-do businessman. Owning a car afforded him the privilege of driving the Mashgiach to the mikveh each Erev Shabbos.
The first Friday, Reb Elyah thanked the new talmid profusely, telling him how difficult it had been to get to the mikveh without a car. The only means of transportation had been a truck, but Reb Elyah couldn’t climb into the truck to sit down. To help him, the bochurim had constructed a ramp: After Reb Elyah was seated in the truck, they would lift the ramp into the rear of the truck. Then, upon reaching the mikveh they would remove the ramp and help him down.
When he left the mikveh, the whole process would repeat itself, and again when they arrived back at the yeshivah.
Thus, concluded the mashgiach, he was grateful for the car ride, which spared the bochurim the hard work involved in helping him.
The next Friday, the Mashgiach again thanked his driver, and repeated the entire story of how he’d previously arrived at the mikveh and the inconvenience it had entailed for the bochurim. On the third Friday he told the same story, and also on the fourth.
“This went on for two years, each Erev Shabbos he would thank me and tell me the whole story. Once, I tried interjecting, ‘Rebbi, it’s such a kavod for me.’ Rav Elyah paused and then began the entire story from the beginning.”
Reb Dovid explains. “He would often quote the words of the Chovos Halevavos that ‘hergel,’ habit, can diffuse feelings of gratitude. Ironically, the more someone does for you, the less you thank them. In Kelm, they wanted to ensure that feelings of gratitude grow stronger, rather than weaker, and the Mashgiach kept reliving the favor, making sure he wouldn’t lose any of his original appreciation. That’s why he repeated each detail again and again.”
One Shabbos, the baal korei made a mistake while leining. Then he made another mistake. After the third mistake, a bochur reacted by making a disparaging sound, clucking his tongue by way of denigration. Reb Elyah didn’t even look: He merely instructed the assistant mashgiach (and present member of the Moetzes Gedolei Torah), Rav Dov Yoffe, to ask the bochur who’d done that to leave yeshivah. A “miskabed b’klon chaveiro,” one who gives himself honor through belittling another, had no place in his yeshivah. “It was a wake-up call to all of us, how real bein adam l’chaveiro is, how seriously it was taken. This was a good bochur, but the yeshivah was built on treating others right. For me, it was a formative moment.”
Not content to simply tell stories for the sake of nostalgia, Rabbi Refson turns pedagogue on me.
“You’ll often find that balabatim remember their yeshivah years as the best years of their lives, and that women reminisce about their seminary year with such longing.
Why is that?
“I was recently in a hospital and I noticed the head nurse teaching younger nurses how to make a bed properly: It was so tight she was able to drop a coin on it and watch the coin bounce. I asked the teacher if her students would always make the beds that way, and she said no, they wouldn’t. ‘But when you learn, you have to see it done right, how it ought to be.’
“Those years in Kfar Chassidim exposed me to life how it should be lived. Yeshivah life, seminary life, is life how it ought to be. People connect to that, and for the rest of their lives, they can draw on it.”
You Deserved It
Rabbi Refson’s resistance to titles or honorifics stems from an encounter with the Mashgiach as well. He is determined that our conversation focus not on him, but on the institutions and cause. “We are not discussing Refson,” he reminds me numerous times. And after hearing the story, I can understand his resistance.
Several bochurim in the yeshivah of Kfar Chassidim were engaged in doing battle with missionaries, who opened schools in Israel’s development towns. One of the missionary activists accused the British bochur of physically attacking him, and before the situation was cleared up, young Refson was incarcerated in a Haifa prison for a few weeks.
It was an unpleasant experience, and the bochur was disturbed at the fact that his sacrifice and courage had landed him in such a situation.
“I didn’t deserve that,” he remarked to Rav Elyah, upon his return to yeshivah.
Rav Elyah jumped up in alarm. “A kofer, right here in our yeshivah,” he wailed, “someone who doesn’t believe that there is a precise cheshbon in Heaven. If it happened,” the Mashgiach stated, “then you deserved it.”
Rav Elyah asked for the sefer Orchos Tzaddikim, and turned to a teaching in Shaar Hagaavah. If a talmid chacham is new to a city and he receives honor and accord due to his scholarly appearance, he is meant to dissuade locals who overrate his scholarship and to insist that he is less lofty than they’d assumed.
Why, wondered the Mashgiach: We are talking about a legitimate talmid chacham who hasn’t actively courted honor. Rather, they see his radiance and draw their own conclusions! We see from here, the Mashgiach continued, how vigilant one must be not to receive undue credit or honor. If they see him as more than he is, he is obligated to disabuse them of that notion!
Rav Elyah concluded his impromptu shmuess with a phrase that has echoed through the decades. “If you got bizyonos you didn’t feel you deserve, it’s probably because you got credit when you didn’t deserve it either.”
Along with this searing indictment of kavod, Rav Elyah once shared another dictum that would come to influence his talmid’s life. They were at a chasunah, and Rav Elyah noticed a young man with a ponytail and ripped jeans. “You speak English. Go invite him to come to yeshivah,” the Mashgiach directed his British talmid.
“I looked on in wonder: This kid was a beatnik, about as far from religion and yeshivah life as could be. I didn’t know what the Mashgiach wanted, so I said, ‘English people are proper, I can’t just walk over to him without an introduction of some sort.’ ”
The Mashgiach fixed his talmid with a penetrating look. “If his clothing were on fire, would you also wait for an introduction?” he asked. “I’m telling you that all of him is on fire!”
Dovid Refson swallowed and approached the young man: The invitation was turned down, but Refson — known until today to use his gift for casual conversation to engage strangers in hotels and on airplanes in meaningful dialogue — had received marching orders for life.
Always the Right Place
After his marriage to Devorah Koppenheim of Manchester, Reb Dovid joined the kollel at the Harry Fischel Institute in Jerusalem and learned toward rabbanus.
It was at the very beginning of the kiruv explosion. The post-1967 euphoria in Jewish communities across the world resulted in a steady stream of tourists, many of whom were looking for more than Jewish trinkets; they wanted a Jewish identity. They came with questions, and a new cadre of bright, eloquent scholars stood at the crossroads of history, ready to answer.
Young Rabbi Refson seemed perfectly suited to the call. He started delivering shiur to visiting American boys, and in 1970, the time seemed ripe to open an institution of his own.
That summer, he advertised his new yeshivah in the Jerusalem Post.
“I thought yeshivah meant for boys,” he deadpans, “but apparently, in some places, yeshivah can means a girls’ school as well. On the first day of the semester, a few girls showed up, so we adapted, and started with three girls.”
Some might suggest that he was in the right place at the right time: Rabbi Refson disagrees. “Every person is in their right place, at the time right for them. I didn’t set up shop with a vision of what it might become. Reb Elyah would say that a people have to align themselves with Hashgachah, to get the wind into their sails, so to speak. Hashem has a plan for every person and it’s our job to make ourselves keilim, to let that plan lead us, not to work against it.”
Soon enough Rabbi Moshe Chalkowski joined the administration of the new school. “He was a talmid muvhak of Rav Wolbe, who’d run a school for girls in Sweden after the war, so we were fortunate in being able to enlist his guidance.”
The dean of Neve Yerushalayim — the name given to the new seminary — was soon busy with teaching, guiding students, and raising money.
“I didn’t have the time to contemplate if it’s what I wanted to do, there was too much to actually do.”
(Originally featured in Mishpacha Issue 534)
