Twenty-five years after Reb Yonah Balkind's passing and thousands of students later, his legacy is preserved in the next generation

Photos: Chayim Stanton

Reb Yonah Balkind was not a rabbi, but to thousands of students who learned in his private home-based cheder — starting back in 1926 and continuing on for the next 70 years — he was simply “the rebbi.” During the week, many attended non-Jewish schools or Jewish schools with inadequate Jewish studies, and played in the rough-and-tumble urban streets of Manchester, but after school and on Shabbos afternoons, they spent sacred hours in Reb Yonah’s home, learning and absorbing Torah and Yiddishkeit from an incredibly talented educator who never formally learned to teach.

It didn’t matter whether a boy could pay the half-crown weekly cheder fee or not; if he wanted to learn, he could join the “Balkind Boys” and pick up fluency in davening, leining, and word-by-word proficiency in Chumash and Rashi. And it didn’t matter whether their parents kept Torah and mitzvos or not. With firm discipline and a huge dose of love, Yonah Balkind gave them an opening to their Jewish heritage.

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he table is covered with articles, tributes, letters and photos. Pictures of a tall, dynamic rebbi, rows of children, flashing electronic alef-beis wall charts. Personal letters from the Lubavitcher Rebbe and Dayan Yechezkel Abramsky, and handwritten correspondence from Rav Itzikel of Pshevorsk. Mostly, the memorabilia belongs to Reb Yonah Balkind’s son, Aryeh, and daughter Mrs. Channa Lopian, but some of it was brought along to our little reunion by former students Mr. Yechiel (Gerald) Liefman, a retired solicitor/attorney, and Mr. Sidney Kohn, a retired retailer, who learned in Balkind’s cheder from age four to 13.

Mr. Kohn and Mr. Liefman grew up about 15 minutes’ walk away, in Cheetham or Hightown — an inner-city area of Manchester — which was then bursting with descendents of Jewish immigrants. Today, Arab candy shops, Turkish barbers, and imitation brand-name knock-off clothiers line Cheetham Hill Road, while a multiethnic community lives in the crowded housing. Eight mosques are listed in those couple of square miles. But back then, there was the Warshawer shul, the Ustreicher shul, the Chevra Kaddisha shul opposite the Jewish hospital, the Elm Street shul, the Chevra Tehillim shul, the Bishops Street shul, and many other little places where the men davened before a hard day’s work in the city’s textile trade, others stopping in only as “Kaddish zoggers” or on Shabbos.

“My father davened with Rebbi Balkind in the Warshawer shul on Bell Street, there next to the shecht-house, where I used to have to take my mother’s chickens. Oy, the schmeck! If you could, you walked on the other side of the road,” Mr. Kohn reminisces of those days 60 years ago. “The Rebbi’s house, at the time I went to cheder, was at 38 Bignor Street. Until today, I sometimes stop when I drive by. I sit there for five minutes, just for the memories.”