Our generation is like a ship, moving farther and farther from the shore.

Among the passengers, there are some who don’t even remember what the coast looked like.

We are the children born on the ship — children who cannot possibly remember those things that we never saw. That’s why people like Reb Aryeh Alter, a scion of Gerrer royalty and a walking chronicle of modern history, are such a treasure. Their memories are invaluable, their own experiences a bridge connecting us to a bygone era.

“Well, I really don’t know so much,” demurs the 87-year-old accountant and scholar, chassid of five Gerrer rebbes, great-grandson of the Sfas Emes and brother-in-law of the Pnei Menachem of Gur. He’s not used to being interviewed, and doesn’t really see what the fuss is all about. But when he begins to share the story of his life, the listener can’t help but be transported back to a time when he too, could see the shoreline.

Sweet Rebuke

The family of Reb Aryeh Alter, born in Jerusalem in 1928, were the “Israeli relatives” of the illustrious Alter family. His father, Rav Mottel, was the son of Rav Moshe Betzalel Alter — son of the Sfas Emes and brother of Rav Avraham Mordechai Alter, the Imrei Emes of Gur. His mother was the daughter of the Viershover Rebbe.

Rav Mottel and his wife had little money, but they managed in the Holy Land while most of their relatives lived in Poland. On one festive day, the young Alter family went to a professional photographer to take pictures of their children. The photographer had the older daughters — Miriam, Rivka, and Tzipporah — stand together, and placed Aryeh, the youngest child, in the middle of the group. The picture was charming, and Rav Mottel, the happy father, mailed a copy to his father in Poland.

But the grandfather, Rav Moshe Betzalel Alter, didn’t share his son’s pleasure. “A boy should not stand among girls,” he wrote back, with typical Gerrer sharpness, “and besides, you don’t have any parnassah. Why are you going to photographers?”

Those who knew Rav Moshe Betzalel understood the message underlying the reprimand. It was precisely because he cared so deeply for his family that he was so particular about every detail of their chinuch and value system. In fact, he even had his grandchildren switch schools based on his investigations from afar — Aryeh was transferred from his original cheder to Chayei Olam, and Miriam was brought back to Poland for a year to study in a Bais Yaakov there.

With the outbreak of World War II, all that changed. Most of the Alter family was murdered, including Rav Moshe Betzalel, who was slated to succeed his brother, the Imrei Emes, as Gerrer Rebbe. The Imrei Emes, a prime target of the Nazis, managed to escape to Eretz Yisrael in 1940 together with some family members including his three sons — Rav Yisrael and Rav Simchah Bunim (already middle aged with families of their own), and the teenaged Pinchas Menachem. The Rebbe was assured that the remaining family members would escape in the next transport, but that didn’t come to be. They, along with most of the Jews of Gur, perished in the Holocaust.

By the time the Imrei Emes arrived, he was aged, weakened, and physically broken. Yet his arrival was also the culmination of his dream. He’d been to Eretz Yisrael several times in the 1920s and 30s, and encouraged his chassidim to buy properties in the Holy Land.

“We were bochurim in Yeshivas Sfas Emes at the time,” Reb Aryeh recalls of his great-uncle, “and we would occasionally peek at the Rebbe while he was receiving visitors. I personally witnessed him writing at superhuman speed. He would pick up a pen and it would whiz across the paper; he’d write a long letter within seconds. He also spent many hours receiving the public, until the Rebbetzin complained to his gabbai, Yankel Schlosser, that the Rebbe was too weak. Yankel, who knew how vital it was for the Rebbe himself, told her, ‘I’ll arrange for the Rebbetzin to see how the Rebbe receives visitors.’ He told her to look through a small crack in the wall, and when she saw how energized the visitors made her husband — he looked like the picture of health when he was with them — she was calmed. ‘You’ve reassured me,’ she told Yankel.”

But the Rebbe really was weak, and Reb Aryeh remembers how he even fell after Yom Kippur — a few years in a row. “The fast must have weakened him. Still, he continued receiving visitors and answering sh’eilos until the very end,” he says.

Reb Aryeh smiles as he recalls the Kotzker sharpness that typified the Imrei Emes. “When he didn’t want to answer a question, or he didn’t have good news, he would say, ‘I can’t hear you.’ I remember that his grandson Pinchas Yaakov Levin was very ill. Pinchas’s mother, Mattel Levin, came to her father and asked him to daven for her son. The Imrei Emes replied, ‘I can’t hear you.’

“Mattel protested, ‘But sometimes people come to you who are very hoarse and have very weak voices, and you hear them!’ But it was of no avail. When he didn’t ‘hear’ someone, he didn’t hear them….

“The Imrei Emes insisted on complete integrity,” Reb Aryeh continues. “Absolute integrity, without the slightest compromise. A grandson once asked him for a document of verification that he was a partner in a major brokerage deal between certain chassidim. ‘Did you actually serve as a broker in the deal?’ the Rebbe asked his surprised grandson,  who assumed would get a signiature without a fuss.

“ ‘If I had, I wouldn’t need the Zeide’s recommendation,’ the grandson admitted. Needless to say, he didn’t receive it.”

Then there was the time the Gerrer shtiebel in Haifa received an eviction notice. The chassidim in Haifa sent Reb Avrum Rosenwasser, the Rebbe’s attendant from Haifa, to ask the Rebbe to daven for them. The Imrei Emes listened to Rosenwasser’s tale and then asked, “Are they in the right?”

At that moment, Rosenwasser knew that the shtiebel in Haifa was doomed. The chassidim were aware that they had sublet the shtiebel under questionable circumstance. Indeed, they lost the court case. The Imrei Emes refused to give his brachah to anyone who had not acted with absolute integrity, even in the case of a Gerrer shtiebel that his own chassidim had worked hard to establish.

Absolute integrity notwithstanding, the Imrei Emes was a pragmatic leader. Both in Europe and in Eretz Yisrael, he tailored his leadership to the needs of the generation, making any changes or innovations that were necessary for the times. He supported the establishment of Agudas Yisrael, encouraged the publication of a chareidi newspaper, and gave his blessing to Sarah Schenirer for the founding of the Bais Yaakov movement even while she was still enduring widespread opposition.

“When the first Bais Yaakov opened in Tel Aviv,” Reb Aryeh relates, “the founders were uncertain whether the girls should be taught in Yiddish or in Hebrew. The Imrei Emes sent them to my grandfather, the Viershover Rebbe, who was the rav of Tel Aviv at the time. The final psak was that the school should be opened as a Hebrew-speaking school, but the girls should be careful to use the chassidish pronunciation of the Name of Hashem. He wanted to make sure that anyone could send their daughters to the school, even if they weren’t part of our community.”

After his escape from Poland, the Imrei Emes was old and weak, but in spite of his condition, he continued leading his flock with great love, incredible integrity, and a strength he didn’t seem to possess.

“He used to check the report cards of all the girls,” relates Reb Aryeh’s wife Ruth Alter, a legendary educator who is also a great-granddaughter of the Imrei Emes. “One time our principal Rabbi Lieberman gave me grades even though he didn’t grade anyone else, so that I would have something to show my great-grandfather.”

No Expectations

In those days, the bochurim in Sfas Emes were regularly tested by the Rebbe’s son Rav Simcha Bunim — later to be known as the Lev Simcha. “One day, the Lev Simcha summoned me and asked what I was learning. I told him, ‘Gittin’, and he began asking a number of questions. I answered the questions adequately, but I had no idea why I was being tested,” Reb Aryeh relates. “A few weeks later, my sister became engaged to the Rebbe’s son. He was simply fulfilling the Gemara’s dictum that a person should investigate the brother of a prospective bride. I was her only brother, so they tested me.”

Reb Aryeh, of course, passed the test, and Tzipporah, the daughter of Rav Mottel Alter, became the kallah of Pinchas Menachem, the Rebbe’s ben zekunim who later became the Rebbe, the Pnei Menachem. With that shidduch, young Aryeh doubled his connection to the Rebbe again. The fathers of the bride and groom were now mechutanim, in addition to uncle and nephew.

“Well, we didn’t feel much of a change,” Reb Aryeh says. “The community was small and the family was small, and even before my sister’s marriage, we used to visit the Rebbe’s home and enjoyed a close relationship with him.”

Rav Mottel Alter’s home had three rooms: one for the parents, another for the young couple, and the third a room in between, where Aryeh slept. “Who would ever hear of such things today?” he muses. “Would any young couple today live in their parents’ home if they could help it? But that’s how we all lived at the time. Any family that had three rooms of its own would rent one room out to a tenant.”

The young couple lived with Tzipporah’s parents for two years, until the passing of the Imrei Emes in 1948. Then they moved in with Rebbetzin Feige Mintche, the Imrei Emes’s second wife and mother of the Pnei Menachem.

Reb Aryeh, today a successful businessman, doesn’t remember his childhood as an era of poverty. “I would call it simplicity,” he says. “We didn’t go hungry, but we didn’t have any sort of material abundance. We didn’t even buy leben — we used to make it on our own from curdled milk. We didn’t buy noodles either; my mother used to make our own noodles, and every bed in the house would be covered with noodles that she put out to dry. When a faucet broke, who thought of replacing it? We just kept fixing it. We would wait in line forever to order a quarter of a block of ice to put in our icebox, since we didn’t have a refrigerator. We didn’t have toys either, but we were happy playing with whatever scraps we could find.”

The Imrei Emes passed away on Shavuos 1948, during the siege of Jerusalem by the Jordanian Arab Legion in the War of Independence. As bodies couldn’t be moved to Har Hazeisim — which was under Jordanian control — he was buried in the courtyard of the Sfas Emes yeshivah (not far from the Machaneh Yehudah shuk in downtown Jerusalem). In his tzavaah, he designated his oldest surviving son, Rav Yisrael, as his successor. The Beis Yisrael assumed the mantle of leadership and began to lead the chassidus in his own unique uncompromising style, until his passing in 1977.

“He was particular about every last detail of halachah, especially halachic matters the people had become lax in,” Reb Aryeh recalls. “At that time, some people took the liberty of ignoring minor fast days. On Taanis Esther and Tzom Gedalyah, people either ate or fasted as they pleased. The Beis Yisrael put a stop to that. He gave instructions for everyone to fast, and for anyone who felt weak to consult with a rav for a heter to eat, rather than making the decision to break the fast on his own.

“The Beis Yisrael also abolished the practice of making Kiddush and eating before Mussaf. Once, the Rebbe wanted to give me an aliyah on Shabbos morning, and he asked if I had made Kiddush during the break between Shacharis and Mussaf.

“I was a bit of a young mechutzaf, so I asked him, ‘If someone made Kiddush, is it assur to give him an aliyah?’

“The Rebbe responded, ‘It is permissible to give him an aliyah, but a person shouldn’t make Kiddush before Mussaf.’

“The Rebbe also trained everyone to be careful about terumos and maasros. Many people had come to Eretz Yisrael from other countries and were unfamiliar with the special mitzvos of the land. There wasn’t the same degree of awareness that exists today. And then there is another seemingly forgotten halachah whose observance the Beis Yisrael revived: the prohibition of speaking during davening. To this day, thanks to him, in all the Gerrer shtieblach and, of course, in the main Gerrer beis medrash, everyone is very careful about this. You don’t hear a sound during davening.”

The Beis Yisrael often left his seat during davening to track down a conversation. He would direct a piercing gaze at the wall of chassidim surrounding him, causing everyone to move aside quickly and clear a path to the back of the room. There he would invariably find two men conversing at the back of the beis medrash, who blushed into silence as soon as they became aware of the Rebbe’s penetrating gaze.

“I was once in a shul in chutz l’Aretz where people were talking freely throughout davening,” Reb Aryeh relates. “After davening, I commented to the rav that hundreds of years ago in the large shul in Alexandria, the people used to wave handkerchiefs as a sign to the congregation to answer amen, since the shul was so large that the chazzan’s voice didn’t travel far enough. ‘In your shul you need to wave a flag too,’ I told him, ‘since all the talking makes it impossible to hear the chazzan.’ I’d gotten so used to the silence of our beis medrash that I forgot what talking in shul was all about.”

The Beis Yisrael habitually rose before dawn to learn until Shacharis. “All of us, myself included, would do the same,” Reb Aryeh relates. (He conveniently uses the past tense, but he wife later fills in that he still continues this practice until today. Every morning, he rises before dawn and learns until Shacharis — that part of his day in nonnegotiable.) “The Rebbe was able to see through his window who else had gotten up early to learn. After learning, he would daven together with the other early risers. But some bochurim would get up early and make sure that the Rebbe saw them; they would learn and daven, and then go back to sleep. That really infuriated me — but not as much as what happened one morning when I woke up at the usual time and headed for the beis medrash, but for some reason, no one else was there. Then I learned that the Beis Yisrael had gone away, and everyone knew that he wasn’t going to be there that morning, so they all stayed in bed.”

The Beis Yisrael wasn’t exclusive — he was demanding not only of “his” bochurim, but, in that era after the war when yeshivos had to be pieced back together, he took responsibility for everyone. It was rare to find litvishe bochurim learning in Gur, but the Rebbe had “his boys” in yeshivos all over Eretz Yisrael — and further.

“When Yehoshua Kleinlehrer wanted to learn in Sfas Emes, the Rebbe said to him, ‘Go learn in Chevron, and you’ll be my man in Chevron.’ And that’s exactly what happened. He knew what was going on in every yeshivah, sometimes even more than the faculty knew. The Rebbe once spoke with Yisrael Mordechai Bornstein, a Swiss bochur who had learned under Rav Koppelman in Switzerland, and asked him who served as the cleaning staff at the yeshivah. Bornstein told him that there was a non-Jewish cleaning staff, and the Rebbe asked if they were men or women. He then sent the bochur’s father, Reb Leibel Bornstein, to tell Rav Koppelman that it wasn’t appropriate for a yeshivah to have a female cleaning staff. ‘But don’t tell it to him as an order,’ he said to Bornstein. ‘Tell him only that I was surprised that they were there.’ The Rebbe didn’t want to interfere in the affairs of other yeshivos. He merely expressed his opinion; as involved as he was, he didn’t want to force his views on anyone.

“That was the Beis Yisrael’s way: He took responsibility for all of Klal Yisrael, but he did it quietly, behind the scenes, without making a commotion.”

Times Were Different

After his marriage, Reb Aryeh learned under the Tchebiner Rav, together with a group of top-notch avreichim who learned with the Rav in his home. “The group included Luzer Bein, Berel Scheinberg, Koppel Zilberberg, Mordechai Dovid Ludmir, and Peretz Rosenwasser,” he says, naming his good friends. “There were also future admorim in the group — the future Rebbes of Zvehill, Lelov, and Alexander.”

As his family grew, Reb Aryeh sought and found a means of earning a living: He was one of the first chareidi accountants in Eretz Yisrael, admitting that he was self-taught and making light of the fact that he passed all the tests on his own. What Reb Aryeh doesn’t say is that it was no small feat. In the early days of the state, accounting exams were particularly difficult and tricky, and set most applicants up for failure. They were designed that way deliberately by the Accountants’ Council, in an effort to maintain the exclusivity and high salaries of the profession. The members of the council decided in advance what percentage of the test takers would pass, while the rest could do nothing but wait for a re-test. Those with a borderline score were able to take an oral exam, where their fate would be determined by a group of judges.

Reb Aryeh was in the second category. He passed the oral exam — but that’s about as much as we extract about his profession. He’s a successful investor and his accounting business has flourished, but as far as he’s concerned, this is a tangential part of his life not worthy of additional mention. “Those were different times,” he says.

Different on many levels, says Reb Aryeh, referring to the fledgling state grappling for a modern identity while its founding fathers struggled with conflicting values of the heim versus the “new Jew” they were trying to form.

“But you know, we all lived together in mixed neighborhoods. In those days, the standards of modesty were much higher in chiloni society, not like the unrestrained crossing of all boundaries that marks society today, and no matter how secular or even hostile, most Jews were still aware of tradition,” Reb Aryeh reminisces. “What was a chiloni government minster like in those days? I’ll tell you. Rav Fogelman, the rav of Kiryat Motzkin outside ‘red Haifa,’ saw on a schedule that the train was to run on Shabbos. He was horrified, and he went directly to the office of the Minister of Transportation.

“ ‘Do you have an appointment?’ he was asked.

“Rav Fogelman was emphatic. ‘I don’t have an appointment, but this is an urgent matter. Let me in.’

“He went in, and demanded from Transportation Minister David Remez, ‘How could it be that in the State of Israel, there will be train service on Shabbos?’

“Remez immediately telephoned the director of the Israel Railroad. ‘We have to stop the Shabbos train routes,’ he said. ‘I’m not discussing cargo trains, but passenger trains must not run on Shabbos.’

“The railroad director complied, and the Shabbos trains were canceled. Remez then looked at Rav Fogelman and said, ‘One day, you will wish there were apikorsim like me.’ ”

It was a prophetic statement in an era when even the prime minster, secular as he was, spoke a heimishe Yiddish and had kavod for rabbanim. In those years, Reb Aryeh served in the military rabbinate, and experienced his own miraculous salvation in 1967 during the Six Day War. He was part of the army’s chevra kaddisha, where his responsibilities included collecting the dead from the battlefield.

“A pilot was once killed near Ramat Rachel,” he recalls, “and three of us — Leizer Ekstein, Chaim Shlomo Saviner, and I — went to retrieve his body. The area was filled with landmines, so we were accompanied by a sapper, who checked to make sure the path was clear ahead of us. We found the body and took it away, making sure to preserve the dignity of the niftar, and then the sapper guided us back along the exact path we had taken to get there. Or at least we thought that we were taking the same path back. But we apparently made a mistake, because we stepped on a mine.”

The mine exploded, taking a heavy toll on the group. Ekstein was severely wounded and lost a leg. Saviner was also wounded. Aryeh Alter was the only one who emerged unscathed. “In later years when we would walk to Kever Rochel on foot,” Reb Aryeh continues, “I would pass by that spot again — the place where a miracle happened for me.”

When the Beis Yisrael passed away in 1977, Reb Aryeh found himself the chassid of his third rebbe and cousin, the Beis Yisrael’s brother Rav Simchah Bunim, known as the Lev Simchah. The Lev Simchah — who had lived in pre-state Palestine for many years before returning to Poland and fleeing back to Eretz Yisrael with his father the Imrei Emes — was a businessman and a venerated talmid chacham before taking on the mantle of leadership; he surprised all those who thought he’d be a “passive” rebbe.

“He was fearless,” Reb Aryeh says. “The Lev Simchah was faithful to his understanding of truth, and he wasn’t intimidated by anyone. I remember how he once advised someone not to undergo a certain operation, even though the doctors had said that the operation was crucial to saving his life. When family members went to speak to the Lev Simchah’s son — the current Rebbe — after conferring with his father he told them, ‘My father takes responsibility.’ The man lived for a good few years after, but because he was dependent on harsh medications, the family eventually opted for the surgery. It killed him.”

The Lev Simchah, says Reb Aryeh, had a different style of leadership than his brother the Beis Yisrael. “His focus was largely his own flock, and he didn’t involve himself in broader communal matters. But in hindsight, it’s clear that all the improvements he made within ultimately benefited all of chareidi society — the way he encouraged young couples to live on the periphery and not in the expensive big cities, his limitations of extravagant spending at simchahs. It all began with us, within the chassidus, and it touched everyone else.”

When the Lev Simchah was niftar in 1992 and the leadership was passed on to the Imrei Emes’s third son, Rav Pinchas Menachem, it was closing of the circuit for Reb Aryeh, who was not only the new rebbe’s cousin, but also his brother-in-law. Among Reb Aryeh’s many communal functions (he’s chief administrator of Jerusalem’s chevra kaddisha), he served as chairman of the United Gerrer Institutions during the Pnei Menachem’s lifetime and was also his close confidant — the Pnei Menachem knew he could consult with Reb Aryeh discreetly without any fears of a leak.

The Pnei Menachem and Reb Aryeh had been cousin-friends since the Rebbe came to Eretz Yisrael. “There is a very interesting letter from Rebbetzin Feige Mintche [the Imrei Emes’s second wife and mother of the Pnei Menachem],” Reb Aryeh relates. “She wrote a letter to my mother wishing her mazel tov on the birth of her daughter, Tzipporah. The letter ends with the words, ‘I must stop here; little Pinchas Menachem is calling me.’ Twenty years later, the daughter who was born at that time married ‘little Pinchas Menachem.’

“But even before he married my sister, I once asked him to learn with me as a chavrusa. Out of respect for him, as the son of the Rebbe, I spoke to him in the third person. He agreed to learn with me, but he absolutely refused to allow me to speak to him in the third person. To him, that show of respect was extremely excessive. After his marriage, as well, when he was given a seat at the head of the table in my parents’ home next to my father, he refused to sit there. He took his chair and moved it to the side.”

The Pnei Menachem’s simplicity and humility remained his defining features throughout his years of leadership, as Reb Aryeh saw firsthand. “He was once approached by a bochur whose mother had gotten divorced and remarried when he was an infant,” Reb Aryeh relates. “At first his mother kept the information about his biological father from him, but eventually he found out the truth and felt miserable. He came to the Pnei Menachem, who comforted him, saying, ‘I’m also the son of a divorc?e. It isn’t so bad.’ ” (Rebbetzin Feige Mintche had been previously married before she married the Imrei Emes.)

“He was my brother-in-law and my closest friend, but most of all, he was my Rebbe,” Reb Aryeh says, recalling the three and a half years he spent as a loyal chassid of the Pnei Menachem. “He was a genius in Torah and in every other area.”

During a period of several family tragedies, including the death of the Pnei Menachem’s son Moshe Betzalel, “the Pnei Menachem told me that he saw his uncle, Reb Mendele of Fabianitz, in a dream, and he asked his uncle why the family was suffering so many tribulations. His uncle quoted the pasuk, ‘Hashem’s judgments are true; together, they are just.’ When a human king punishes a thief, he explained, the thief’s family suffers, even though they themselves aren’t guilty. But when Hashem punishes someone, He calculates the exact amount of suffering due to everyone who is affected by it, and each individual gets what he deserves.

“ ‘In previous generations, when someone experienced suffering, his entire family and all his friends would share his pain, and it wasn’t necessary to punish all of them,’ the Pnei Menachem told me. ‘Today, when no one feels anyone else’s pain, Hashem is forced, as it were, to punish each person separately.’ ”

Every year on Simchas Torah in the Gerrer beis medrash in Jerusalem, Reb Aryeh Alter receives the same kibbud: right before the hakafos begin, he approaches the podium wrapped in the special tallis that belonged to the Beis Yisrael, and recites “Atah hareisa l’daas.” Who would be more fitting to recite the verses themed with “ein od milvado [“there is nothing aside from Him”]?”

Reb Aryeh has witnessed the hakafos conducted by five Rebbes. He watched them persevere through destruction and rebuilding, poverty and plenty, war and peace. Wrapped in the tallis, he raises his voice and shares his vision. And the strings trailing from the tallis serve almost like the rope of the anchor, bringing everyone — even those born at sea, far from the original sights of grandeur — back to shore.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 560)