W

hen I meet with Rabbi Borochov in his Kiryat Malachi home, I ask him the question that’s been niggling at me: What made this successful CEO of the Chabad Youth Organization, serving over 20,000 teens nationwide, decide to dedicate his life to documenting a Torah scholar who passed away close to a century ago?

And furthermore, a quick glance at his newly released book, The Rogatchover, reveals that this is no ordinary biography. In it, the reader is confronted with a massive amount of information, manuscripts, photos, letters, and countless newspaper clippings spanning decades of Yiddish-Russian press. I tell Reb Yair that by my estimation, this type of work could easily have spanned 20 years of effort on his part. My estimate turned out to be only partially true: Indeed, the actual writing of the massive biography spanned two decades but the initial effort of collecting facts and memorabilia started even earlier, when Yair Borochov was still a young yeshivah bochur learning in the Lubavitcher yeshivah in Migdal HaEmek.

In yeshivah, Yair’s maggid shiur was a Talmudic genius by the name of Rav Shmuel Shlomo Liphshitz (son of P’eylim founder and activist Rav Shalom Ber Liphshitz) who constantly quoted the chiddushim of the Rogatchover Gaon. Furthermore, the Lubavitcher Rebbe — one of only a handful of people who received semichah from the Rogatchover — considered himself as a talmid of the Gaon, and had maintained an extensive correspondence with him even when countries separated them, and often cited him in his talks, maamarim, and writings.

The Rebbe and the Rogatchover first met in person in St. Petersburg at the end of 1924, when the Rebbe and his father-in-law, the Rebbe Rayatz (Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson), spent about six months in the city (the Rogatchover resided there from 1915 to 1925). During those months, the Rebbe wrote, “I used to come and go to the Rogatchover.” The Rebbe also noted that they had at some point traveled together by train.

The two also met in Riga, the capital city of Latvia. The Rogatchover lived in Dvinsk, Latvia, for most of his life, and would come to Riga for health reasons. The Rayatz also lived in Riga for a period, and they met at a conference there organized by the Rayatz on behalf of Russian Jewry.

All this translated into an almost obsessive drive on the part of Rabbi Borochov to collect anything he came across relating to the Rogatchover.

“At first, this meant articles, photos, manuscripts, letters, and other memorabilia that were up for auction,” Rabbi Borochov says. “Since no biography was ever written on the Gaon, I painstakingly gathered stories and biographical information and kept it all categorized, although I was not yet sure what I would do with it.”

Years back, Rabbi Leibel Groner a”h, the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s longtime secretary, found out about Rabbi Borochov’s plans to some time in the future write a comprehensive biography of the Rogatchover Gaon, and actually pressured him to publish even an incomplete version of recollections that he had compiled until that point. It wasn’t Reb Yair’s vision, but he finally relented and decided to publish 2,000 copies of a rough biography in deference to Rabbi Groner’s request. When those copies were quickly snatched off the seforim store shelves, Reb Yair published another 2,000 copies that again were picked up in no time. At that point, seeing there was such a thirst for information on the Rogatchover, he realized it was time to invest his efforts in completing the full biography, released earlier this year in Hebrew and just recently in English.

R

av Yosef Rosen, the famed Rogatchover Gaon and the genius of Dvinsk, where he lived most of his adult life, was born in 1858 in the town of Rogatchov (now Belarus) into a family of Chabad-Kopust chassidim.

By the time he was eight, he’d already mastered all the tractates of Seder Nezikin, and at the age of nine was locally known as the “Illui of Rogatchov,” the title that would accompany him the rest of his life. It didn’t take long for his melamdim to realize that he’d long outpaced them, even as he was still a child. One of his teachers noticed that he would frequently run out of the classroom and one day found him sitting inside the high branches of a nearby tree. The melamed realized that this was no case of boyhood mischief — rather, it was a method young Yosef used to give himself the space he needed to learn without the childlike disruptions of his classmates. The Rogatchover held a lifelong debt of gratitude to this melamed for not pestering him about these escapades. To the contrary, from time to time, the melamed himself would climb the tree and sit with the Gaon on the branches, learning Torah together.

Once his melamdim could no longer teach him, the Gaon’s father assumed the responsibility, as he simultaneously searched for a high-caliber yeshivah setting suited for his son’s gifted mind. He found the suitable match of minds in the city of Slutsk where Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, the famed Beis Halevi and founder of the Brisker dynasty, opened a small but elite yeshivah. In fact, the Beis Halevi arranged that the 12-year-old Rogatchover’s chavrusa for the year would be his own gifted son Chaim (later to be known as Reb Chaim Brisker, founder of the Brisker analytical approach and derech halimud).

At one point, the Beis Halevi discovered that his son and chavrusa were spending too much time learning Rambam rather than focusing on the Gemara and other Rishonim. (The Rogatchover rarely cited sources later than the Rambam, whom he considered his rebbe, although they were separated by more than a millennium. And he wrote a commentary on the Rambam that was published in his lifetime.) At first, the Beis Halevi prohibited the Rogatchover from studying the Rambam at the expense of his required study of Gemara, and when that didn’t help, he locked up the volumes of Rambam in a closet and hid the key. Somehow the Rogatchover managed to get hold of the Rambam and when he was not in the beis medrash, a staff member discovered him sitting on top of a stove learning Rambam again.  The Beis Halevi, perhaps grudgingly impressed, teased him and called him a “sheigetz” for ignoring his ban. To this, the pre-bar mitzvah Yosef Rosen responded: “If one who merely studies the Rambam from time to time like myself is called a sheigetz, someone who learns Rambam the entire time must be a full-fledged goy, and if so, what would you call the Rambam himself?”

The Rogatchover’s next landing would be in Shklov, where he attended the yeshivah of Rav Yehoshua Leib Diskin (Maharil Diskin), known as the Rav of Brisk and later of Jerusalem. In fact, the Maharil’s relocation to Jerusalem was directly related to the Rogatchover. The Maharil once received a large sum of money for safekeeping, and the Rogatchover happened to be sleeping in the Maharil’s apartment the night that the money disappeared. Knowing that the police would first suspect the Rogatchover as the culprit, the Maharil awakened his talmid and told him to leave the city at once, which saved the Rogatchover from suspicion. Subsequently, the focus of the investigation fell on the Maharil himself, which eventually brought about his relocation to Jerusalem.

The Rogathcover revered his early rebbeim his entire life, and he also became close to Rav Shlomo Zalman Schneerson, the Rebbe of Kopust and author of the seminal Magen Avos. (Kopust was an offshoot of Chabad, established by Rav Yehuda Leib Schneerson, one of seven sons of the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Lubavitcher Rebbe. While the Tzemach Tzedek’s youngest son, Rav Shmuel, inherited the mantle of Chabad, Rav Yehuda Leib assumed the title in the town of Kopys [Kopust], and his son, Rav Shlomo Zalman, took over after his death. By the time of the Rebbe Rayatz, Kopust had rejoined Chabad.)

In 1889, he accepted the rabbinate of the chassidic kehillah in Dvinsk, where he shared the title of chief rabbi together with his non-chassidic counterpart, Rav Meir Simcha of Dvinsk, known as the Ohr Somayach. They served the town together until the late 1920s, and held great respect for each other (a compliment for the Ohr Somayach, as the Rogatchover was not always patient with second-rate scholarship and was known for his witty but acerbic comments when he failed to be impressed).

The Rogatchover was clearly born with a large measure of innate genius and a photographic memory, but he didn’t only rely on his inborn gifts: He learned unceasingly, even neglecting to cut his hair because he refused to begrudge even the few minutes it would take to uncover his head. Actually, this is only one reason given for his famed long hair. Rabbi Borochov dedicates several pages to explore other reasonings given by the Gaon’s confidants for his refusal to receive periodic haircuts, including a theory that cutting his hair was painful due to the rare condition of nerve endings in his hair, or that it was a certain type of nezirus.

The Rogatchover’s ability to bring forth hundreds of references at a time is obvious in his correspondence, which sometimes contain up to 2,500 Talmudic references. In his discussions and correspondences with other gedolim, he would often simply cite a list of references without verbal elaboration, assuming that anybody referring to these texts would naturally divine the obvious answer to the question.

Throughout his lifetime, the Rogatchover would give thousands of teshuvos to people from all over the world. Scholars brought him their books for a haskamah, people asked him for brachos, and the greatest honor was to receive his semichah. The list of those who the Rogotchover ordained includes Rav Mordechai Savitsky of Boston, Rav Zvi Olswang of Chicago (brother-in-law of Rabbi Shimon Shkop), Rav Avraham Elye Plotkin, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Toward the end of his life, the Gaon suffered from illness, and was obliged to make frequent trips to Vienna for medical treatment. During these trips he would be asked by local shuls to deliver derashos, and in doing so made the acquaintance of a young talmid chacham named Yisrael Alter Safran-Fuchs. Fuchs was something of a prodigy himself, and the Gaon invited the young illui to come back to Dvinsk with him. Reb Yisrael accepted and soon became a close disciple of the Rogatchover, never leaving his side.

In 1936, Rav Fuchs accompanied the Rogatchover back to Vienna for surgery, but unfortunately, the Gaon did not survive the operation and passed away on 11 Adar. Upon the Rogatchover’s death, Rav Fuchs suddenly found himself as the Gaon’s successor. At the time he was still very young — only 25 years old and not yet married. He couldn’t dwell on that, though. Instead, he dove into the task of preserving the Rogatchover’s legacy, making it his mission to take all the Gaon’s prolific writings — thousands of correspondences, manuscripts, and the copious notes he had made in the margins of his seforim — and make them available in a more accessible form to the public.

The Rogatchover’s daughter, Rebbetzin Rachel Citron, came forth to help Rav Fuchs in this project. Mrs. Citron had married one of the Rogatchover’s talmidim, Rav Yisrael Abba Citron of Hamburg, and had moved with him to Palestine. There Rav Citron served for 17 years as the chief rabbi of Petach Tikvah, and also established nearby Kfar Avraham, one of the first Orthodox agricultural settlements in Eretz Yisrael. Rav Citron passed away suddenly in September 1927, and as their only son predeceased him, it meant that Rebbetzin Citron was left in the tragic position of agunah, as per her father’s ruling, when Rav Citron’s two brothers refused to perform chalitzah for her (one had become a communist and was stuck behind the border in Russia, while the other became an apostate and was living in Germany).

After the Rogatchover Gaon passed away in 1936, the widowed Mrs. Citron traveled to Dvinsk in order to help Rav Safran-Fuchs save the massive remaining amount of her father’s unpublished writings and make them available to future generations. They published two volumes before the Nazi onslaught prevented further publication in Europe, and with utter destruction approaching, they hurriedly photographed onto microfilm thousands of pages of the Rogatchover’s personal volumes of Talmud and Rambam (containing the Rogatchover’s notes and comments in the margins) and his correspondence files. From 1940 to June of 1941, they mailed these in weekly manila envelopes to Rav Safran-Fuchs’ great-uncle, Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Safern, in New York, begging him to be sure to deliver everything to appropriate rabbinic authorities for publication.

Shortly after the last envelope was mailed, the Nazis deported the Jews from Dvinsk to Breslau, where they were forced into a ghetto for nine months until June 3, 1942, when they were all taken out, shot, and thrown into a mass grave, many of them buried alive.

With the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe obliterated, Rabbi Hirsch Safern was now the sole possessor of the microphotographs. But with war raging and European Jewry being destroyed, it wasn’t until 1947 that Rabbi Safern contacted the Agudas Harabbonim in New York, hoping to get their help in publishing these writings that had been acquired at such great cost.

At the time, though, there were other pressing needs — until 1956, when Rabbi Safern’s son happened to meet Israeli scholar Rav Menachem Kasher, author of the encyclopedic Torah Sheleimah, and told him about the treasure. Rav Kasher had actually known the Rogatchover and had retained a passionate interest in his work. The Saferns then turned over all the encrypted material to Rav Kasher, who, working with Rabbi Dr. Samuel Belkin of Yeshiva University, succeeded in obtaining a sizeable grant and founded the Tzafnas Paneach Institute. Together with a group of about a dozen other interested scholars, he began going through the writings (by now with the help of a better enlarger) and transcribing them. Seven manuscripts were subsequently published by the Institute, and the work is still continuing in Jerusalem’s Machon Hamor.

IN a burst of inspiration that would one day prove crucial, Reb Yair decided decades ago to seek out many of the surviving Yidden who knew and spoke to the Rogatchover during his lifetime. Of course, some of them were very young at the time and only knew the Gaon during their childhood years. He did, however, find some who were in their 20s and who were able to supply Reb Yair with priceless firsthand information. These testimonies would prove invaluable for the full biography he would only write some 25 years later.

Rav Yehuda Tzivyon, a mechutan of Rav Chaim Kanievsky and the longest-living person to have visited the Rogatchover, passed away just last month at the age of 100. Rav Tzivyon, who was born in Dvinsk in 1924, had the zechus to learn with both the Ohr Somayach and the Rogatchover, and was an important source for Rabbi Borochov, shared with Mishpacha how the Gaon made it a point to reply immediately to every letter he received.

“The Rogatchover thought that otherwise, it might have violated the prohibition of bal talin (delaying payment or obligations),” Rav Tzivyon said. “But then the Rogatchover went on to say that actually, this was contingent on the writer being a Torah scholar and presenting substantive questions. If he deemed the inquiry frivolous — what he referred to as bilbulei mo’ach (nonsense) — he would reply with the sharp note, ‘Forgive me, but I don’t have enough stamps to answer you.’”

And it wasn’t only the Jewish residents of Dvinsk who held the Gaon in such high esteem and knew he was the address for a fair judgment. Rav Tzivyon remembered how one non-Jewish resident of the town, who had been doing business with a Jew, once came to the Gaon’s home to file a complaint. He claimed the Jew had deceived him and owed him money from their partnership. The Gaon summoned the Jewish man, who quickly arrived, standing alongside the non-Jew. After both sides presented their arguments in Polish, the Gaon turned to the Jew in Yiddish and asked, “Ah, you tricked him well, didn’t you?” Confident the Gaon was siding with him against the non-Jew, the man winked and replied, “I sure did!”

“Return the stolen money immediately!” thundered the Gaon. “Do not ever sin again with another person’s possessions! You have no right to exploit anyone, even if they are not Jewish!”

Rav Tzivyon recounted one case where the Gaon sent a letter containing numerous Talmudic references, as was his custom, each citation beginning with, “Refer to such-and-such tractate.” Upon examining the letter and checking all the references, the recipient was surprised to discover that every reference pertained to instances in the Talmud where the term am ha’aretz (ignorant person) appeared.

Rav Tzivyon said that if the Gaon found the question entirely trivial, he would respond succinctly: “See Eruvin 20b, with the commentary of the Bach.” Checking the reference revealed a particular scenario of a cow emerging from its barn.

Yet those pithy comments notwithstanding, Rabbi Borochov, drawing on eyewitness accounts and evidence from postcards and handwritten letters, is convinced that the Rogatchover wrote more teshuvos and responsa than anyone before or after him, making him the most prolific rav in Jewish history.

Reb Yair bases his calculation on the testimony of Rav Pinchas Teitz, the legendary rabbi of Elizabeth, New Jersey and quiet trailblazer of the Soviet Jewry movement. (Rav Teitz made 22 trips to Russia during the years when 3,000,000 Jews were trapped behind the Iron Curtain, smuggling in siddurim, Haggados, esrog sets, other Jewish articles, and even the first siddur in Russian that he himself published.)

In 1921, when Pinchas was 13, his father became the rav in Livenhof, a town near Dvinsk. There, young Pinchas made the acquaintance of both the Ohr Somayach and the Rogatchover. And although he spent the next years learning in Slabodka, in 1931, when he returned home to recover from a medical procedure, Pinchas took a daily train ride to Dvinsk to study with the Rogatchover.

Rav Tietz, who passed away in 1995, told a much younger Reb Yair that the Gaon responded to 30 or 40 questions a day in writing “without ever opening a single sefer for reference.”  Reb Yair sat down with a calendar and counted all standard weekdays, omitting Shabbos, Yom Tov, and Chol Hamoed, and reached the conclusion that the Gaon responded to approximately 100,000 questions in writing during his lifetime. While other estimates put the number at around 50,000, Reb Yair is convinced the number is double.

Upon receiving letters or postcards with questions, the Gaon would respond to them on the spot — but what did he do with the questions themselves? Rabbi Borochov discovered, through one of the Gaon’s own responses, that he had an unused bathtub in which he placed those letters and postcards. It seems that Rebbetzin Citron and Rav Safran-Fuchs managed to send out many of these papers to the US in their weekly shipments before the war.

Rabbi Borochov notes that, while the Gaon was known for his sharp responses to talmidei chachamim when he felt the questioner was sub-par, he didn’t hesitate to answer these thousands of questions from the simple masses which surely stretched his patience. Many questions would not require someone of the Gaon’s stature to respond — some of those answers could be easily found by simply looking into a sefer.

A popular Israeli journalist from years back by the name of Noach Zevuluni, who knew the Rogatchover personally, once wrote that he knew of people who simply wished to own the Gaon’s handwriting and therefore pestered him with simple and basic questions. The Gaon, however, answered each and every question with great patience and never chastised these questioners of amcha for wasting his precious time. He truly felt that answering these many questions was his personal method of disseminating Torah.

It also wound up being a significant expense for him. Since sending a letter or postcard to the questioner cost the Rogatchover postal fees, many questioners were sensitive enough to include this fee in their letters. However, many others relied on his good heart and were confident that they would receive a reply for free, expenses paid by the Rogatchover himself. At times the Rogatchover would use a system common in his times, where the sender would pay for half of a stamp and the recipient would have the choice to pay the rest if he wished to receive the letter. While it wasn’t cost-free, this system still saved the Gaon from paying the full amount.

Staunch Lubavitcher chassid that he is, Rabbi Borochov reveals that his partner in Rogatchover research is a litvish talmid chacham by the name of Rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Birnhack. In their years of collaboration, Reb Yair updated Rabbi Birnhack regarding any new developments in his research and gave him free access to any new documentation he found. Rev Avraham Yeshaya, who lives in Kiryat Sefer and doesn’t even own a computer, has printed several thick volumes of new responsa of the Rogatchover, never available before, under the title Shu”t Tzafnas Paneach Hachadashos. In his lifetime, the Rogoatchover published several volumes of responsa under the title Tzafnas Paneach.

The scope of Rabbi Birnhack’s efforts is hard to imagine. Painstakingly locating every postcard sent by the Rogatchover throughout his decades as a major posek for Klal Yisrael, Rabbi Birnhack managed to decipher the handwriting and the thousands of sources cited by the Gaon and presents the reader with a comprehensible teshuvah accompanied by many clarifying footnotes.

Meanwhile, it was Reb Yair who gave the context to those postcards and letters.

“I combed through each and every teshuvah of the Rogatchover that appear in all of these many volumes and searched for hints as to the Gaon’s whereabouts and activities, making note of the dates they were written on these postcards,” Rabbi Borochov says. He then structured a chronological timeline and managed to trace the Gaon’s life patterns throughout the years.

This is also how he was able to discover the vacation locales of the Gaon throughout the final decades of his life. Through one such discovery, Reb Yair pinpointed the precise street and house number of one such vacation spot. Problem was, that over the years and through changes in government, the street names changed entirely. Not one to give up so easily, Reb Yair located a local investigator who helped find the house, which now had a different street name and house number. (A picture of that vacation spot joins many others in Rabbi Borochov’s book.)

Rabbi Borochov says he constantly sees the Hashgachah pratis in his relentless pursuit of leads in tracing the Gaon’s life, even after publishing the biography. For example, he was told that the Tolna Rebbe had recently been given a volume of The Rogatchover, and was curious to know what the Rebbe thought about it. He actually called the Rebbe, who was thrilled to speak to him, mentioning how he himself felt a timeless connection to the Rogatchover and was excited to learn that a full-fledged biography had finally been released. Rabbi Borochov asked the Rebbe if he could share any anecdotes relating to the Gaon that he’d heard from his forebears.

The Rebbe happily obliged and shared the following snippet: The Rebbe’s grandfather, the previous Tolna Rebbe who resided in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood after making aliyah from Montreal, had hired an elderly woman to help the Rebbetzin in the kitchen. This woman, a native of Dvinsk named Sima Wolf, was the daughter of the Jewish painter of the city. She recalled how her father was hired by the Rogatchover’s family to repaint the Gaon’s dwelling. Helping her father carry the cans of paint, she merited to enter the Gaon’s apartment. The family was not home at the time and the Gaon opened the door himself. Based on his reaction upon seeing the painter with his cans and brushes, he apparently was not informed of the plan. He asked the painter what he wanted and the painter replied that he was sent to paint the Gaon’s apartment. The Gaon responded that he saw no need for it, but if the family hired him, he might as well come in and get the job done.

At that point, the painter and his daughter started to haul the heavy cans of paint into the room. Sima recalled how the color of the paint was called in Yiddish, “tunkel veiss,” meaning a sort of dark white color. The Gaon asked the painter for the name of the color, and when he heard it was related to the color white, he asked the painter where the color is mentioned in Shas. When the painter, who was a simple Yid, had no reply, the Rogatchover started naming all the references in Shas pointing out where the color is mentioned, citing the precise daf. Regarding one tractate, the Gaon remarked that the color does not appear in it but it does appear in a Tosafos in that tractate. Sima recalled that at the time she had no idea what the word “Tosafos” was referring to, and remembered asking her father about it when they arrived home after the job was completed.

Reb Yair says that it was pretty common for the Gaon to recall the entire Shas in an instant.

“One witness recounted that during Krias HaTorah, the Gaon would be running around the bimah, circling again and again until the Torah reading was over,” he says. “When asked about this peculiar minhag, the Rogatchover responded that as soon as he would hear a pasuk, his brain would immediately become bombarded with every reference to this pasuk in all of early halachic literature: Mishnah, Talmud, Tosefta, Sifrei, Sifra, Mechilta, Toras Kohanim, and the like. This constant onslaught of information made him restless and he had no choice but to run around the bimah to calm himself.”

Rabbi Borochov recounts that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who knew the Gaon well, once commented that Shabbos was a difficult day for the Rogatchover. As his mind was constantly racing, anything he came across or heard instantly opened new “windows” in his brain. During the week, he would sit down and channel all that into writing, which would force his jumping mind to concentrate. Since writing is prohibited on Shabbos, he suffered through the day with unrelenting mental activity.

The vast number of photos, documents, and other historical items included in the massive biography begs the question: How did Rabbi Borochov manage to track down so many photos and documents of someone who lived close to 100 years ago, with a world war in between? He says that he received some of the photos from libraries, and one photo in particular was actually a personal possession of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and is now housed in his library in Crown Heights. On the back of the photo is an inscription in the Rebbe’s handwriting indicating that it was a photo of the Rogatchover. On the other hand, Rabbi Borochov has a picture that had been in the possession of Rav Shach and that was subsequently given to him by Rav Shach’s grandson.

And there was another interesting source as well: There was a fellow named Dov Portnoy who used to go around to the various yeshivos in Eretz Yisrael peddling copies of photos taken by his father, who was a photographer back in Dvinsk. Naturally, many of his photos were of the two Torah giants who resided in the city, the Rogatchover and the Ohr Somayach. While Portnoy is no longer alive, Rabbi Borochov tracked down his family and managed to acquire some photos from them as well, including several rare photos of the Gaon’s funeral. In an interview with Israeli media before he passed away, Portnoy recalled that during the funeral, the president of Latvia, Kārlis Ulmanis, shut down the entire city out of respect for the Gaon. Portnoy pointed out that the city was never shut down in such a drastic manner even during national or religious holidays. Ulmanis, it turns out, was an admirer of the Gaon and frequented his home regularly to consult with him.

For Rabbi Borochov, it wasn’t really a surprise. After all, who wouldn’t have recognized the great man in their midst?

—Rachel Ginsberg contributed to this report

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1042)