Rabbi Berel Wein: An unquenchable love for the greatest saga of all — the survival of his people

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Mishpacha and family archives

For Rabbi Berel Wein, the historical narrative wasn’t just about the past, but about the present and future — about life itself, woven with the dramatic chronicle of unshakable Jewish faith. Yet his scholarly and rabbinic achievements rested on the foundation of his early life, growing up in Chicago among the previous generation’s gedolim — and on an unquenchable love for the greatest saga of all: the survival of his people

IF you walked into Rabbi Berel Wein’s Rechavia apartment in recent years, chances are  you caught a glimpse of something rare: the sight of real thinking.

Not the mere brain activity that most of us engage in, but sustained, active thought. Head in hand, withdrawn from the surroundings, pondering something deep — that was my first impression of Rabbi Wein a few years ago, when I asked for some time to discuss a Jewish history project.

When I entered, I beheld a legend. The larger-than-life rabbi, rosh yeshivah and raconteur who’d placed volumes on all of our shelves, and Jewish history on the Orthodox world’s curriculum. There he sat, his sight failing but his penetrating vision ranging through the Jewish ages.

What I discovered in that first conversation was that for Rabbi Wein, history wasn’t about the past for its own sake. It was about the present and future — about life itself.

The way he made sense of the world was by unlocking the treasure-houses of what had already been. The conviction with which he lived — what drove him through a career of unusual variety and creativity — were those thousands of years of Jewish history.

History undergirded his sense of netzach Yisrael, the call of the Torah ranging across time, the awareness of Jewish destiny.

Shaped by Lithuania

Rabbi Wein, who passed away last Shabbos at 91, was born in 1934 into a house with a pedigree of greatness. His father, Rabbi Zev Wein, was a talmid of Rav Shimon Shkop in Grodno, and later of Rav Kook in Yerushalayim, who emigrated to Chicago and served in its rabbinate until the 1970s.

That lineage afforded Rabbi Wein junior a second-hand encounter with the masters of the prewar yeshivah world. Those impressions were reinforced by his rebbeim at Hebrew Theological College, later known  as Skokie Yeshiva, founded by his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Chaim Tzvi Rubenstein.

Rabbi Rubenstein — whom Rabbi Wein described as his “hero” — was no ordinary personality either. He had been a chavrusa in Volozhin Yeshiva of the famous Meitscheter Illui, Rabbi Shlomo Polachek. It was he who set his grandson on the path to lifelong Torah scholarship.

He urged young Berel’s parents to remove their son from public school when he was 11 and place him in a class of 16-year-olds in the yeshivah. Until then, Mrs. Wein used to review her son’s school lessons with him every day, telling him what he should ignore.

The milieu that Rabbi Wein was raised in was that of Litvaks transplanted to American soil — an environment that was inhospitable to Orthodoxy until the great rise of the postwar yeshivah world. It  manifested the complexity of Jews who came from a storied past, yet struggled with observance in the present.

“I can still summon up the atmosphere in my father’s shul on Rosh Hashanah,” Rabbi Wein said in an interview for this magazine. “During the Shemoneh Esreh, one could feel the intensity and that we were truly hanging between life and death, chayim u’maves. And many of those who davened in his shul felt compelled to work on Shabbos.”

The Midwest’s first yeshivah featured an all-star set of roshei yeshivah who were some of the finest minds of the Eastern European Torah world. One was Rav Chaim Kreiswirth, an illui who had been close to Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski in Vilna. Later a legendary chief rabbi in Antwerp, he became Rabbi Wein’s main rebbi. Other strong influences there were Rav Mordechai Rogow and renowned mechanech Rav Mendel Kaplan.

The affinity for old-world greatness nurtured under these teachers meant that Torah leaders as diverse as the Ponevezher Rav and the Satmar Rav saw Rabbi Wein as a figure of stature.