Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz's rescue and rebuilding activities came during a busy career of rabbinical responsibilities

Title: An Angel Called (Rav) Avraham

Location: Global

Document: Buffalo Evening Times

Time: 1926

Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz (1887–1964) is primarily remembered for his heroic rescue work during the Holocaust, including almost singlehandedly funding the Mir Yeshivah’s escape from Europe and its existence in Shanghai. But his rescue and rebuilding activities came during a busy career of rabbinical responsibilities.

His decades of leadership overlaid the tumultuous first half of the 20th century. Following his Torah education in Eyshishok, Slabodka, and Telz, Rav Avraham assumed his first rabbinical position in Rakov in 1913. World War I was the impetus for his lifelong engagement with rescue operations. Refugees fleeing the crosshairs of invading armies found a receptive home and heart with the young rav.

Following the Treaty of Riga in 1921, Rakov wound up in the newly independent Republic of Poland, on the border with the Soviet Union. As the rabbi of this border town, Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz emerged as an early activist for Soviet Jewry. He raised awareness of their physical needs and issued a clarion call warning of the decimation of their spiritual life under the Communists.

Over the course of the 1920s, the dynamic young rav with boundless energy moved into public service on a national scale. He assumed leading roles in the Vaad Hayeshivos, enjoying a close relationship with its titular leader Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzenski; and in Agudas Yisrael, where he was one of the youngest members of its Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah.

He also became known as a charismatic speaker. Mir rosh yeshivah Rav Leizer Yudel Finkel hired him as president and fundraiser in 1926. In this capacity, he began traversing Europe and the United States on fundraising missions. His renown as a respected talmid chacham and posek was also spreading; he was soon hired as rabbi of the much larger town of Tiktin (Tykocin), while also heading a kollel for young married scholars in the Warsaw suburb of Otwock under the aegis of the Vaad Hayeshivos and Mir Yeshivah.

Following the outbreak of World War II, he was dispatched to the United States to fundraise for the refugee Mir Yeshivah. That role soon expanded to funding the rescue of the Mir, and he rose to the helm of the nascent Vaad Hatzalah organization. In that capacity, his rescue efforts came to include all refugee yeshivos and stranded rabbis. Toward the end of the war, the Vaad broadened the scope of its rescue activities to cover general rescue of all Jews under Nazi occupation, and Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz was at the forefront of these last-ditch attempts.

After the war, Rav Kalmanowitz turned his energies to new projects, new initiatives, and a massive rebuilding effort. He was ultimately successful in bringing over the entire Mir Yeshivah from Shanghai to the United States, where he proceeded to procure a former Coast Guard base in the Rockaways to host the refugees. He ultimately built a yeshivah in Brooklyn, where it remains today. (He also helped raise funds for Mir Yerushalayim and Bais HaTalmud.) Vaad Hatzalah’s postwar operations turned to assisting survivors in the DP camps and helping them emigrate to various other countries.

At around the same time, Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz applied his prodigious energies to another crisis emerging in the Jewish world. In 1940, the Committee for the Forgotten Million had been established to provide social, economic, and spiritual help to Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East. In 1944, these initiatives were consolidated within the new Otzar HaTorah educational network established by Isaac Shalom of New York and Joseph Shamah of Jerusalem. Their ambitious goal was to create Torah-oriented schools in Sephardic communities worldwide that were rapidly secularizing. Isaac Shalom and his team raised part of the funding, with the balance coming from the Joint and other philanthropic organizations.

As the Vaad Hatzalah wound down its activities in Europe, the new Torah institutions it had created in France began to fill up with students arriving from Morocco, and Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz found his new calling. Joining forces with Otzar HaTorah, he encouraged many of its leading graduates to continue their studies in yeshivos worldwide, and especially facilitated the admission of many Moroccan yeshivah students to Mir Brooklyn. In 1947 he traveled to Morocco to oversee the activities of Otzar HaTorah and to expand its reach. Through his efforts in Morocco, Syria, and other Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East, he helped pave the way for a Torah renaissance in the Sephardic world.