Rav Yitzchak Dovid Grossman reflects on half a century of miracles in this turned-around development town

Photos: Menachem Kalish, ArtScroll

Whatever you’ve heard about Israeli development towns is probably unpleasant. Thrown together with no foresight to house teeming groups of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, these 1950s-era outgrowths of the ma’abarot featured Second World construction, inadequate utilities, few services, no amenities, and little prospect for escape. Unemployed men loitered in town squares, and the musty, dusty streets were too dangerous to walk at night.

Migdal Ha’emek, in the center of the Lower Galilee, was probably the most notorious of these towns, the poster child of the gritty immigrant cities in the 1950s and ’60s.

Enter the town today, though, and you’ll see something more like a tidy inner-ring suburb: solidly middle-class, well-maintained modest houses in neat yards, thriving shops and businesses. An entire section of the town is given over to a large, landscaped educational campus.

As we arrive at the modern, well-appointed head office of Migdal Ohr Institutions, the mayor of Migdal Ha’emek, Eli Barda, is taking leave of his host, Rav Yitzchak Dovid Grossman.

The mayor’s bearing is all deference and respect as he and his staff back out of the office. Rav Grossman blesses the mayor with heartfelt wishes for success, which Barda accepts gratefully.

Eli Barda is himself a product of Rav Grossman’s transformation of this northern outpost. As a child, Barda participated in an after-school Torah program organized by the kollel avreichim Rav Grossman had brought to town some five decades ago. During a Chanukah learning program, young Eli performed well enough on a test to earn a prize he still treasures today: a book about Eliyahu Hanavi.

The contrast between the tableau that has just played out in Rav Grossman’s office and the suspicion that greeted him upon his first arrival in Migdal Ha’emek in 1968 couldn’t be more stark.

“At the beginning, when I first got here, the mayor and the town elders thought I had been sent here to recruit for the Agudas Yisrael political party,” he says. “They couldn’t believe I had come here strictly to spread Yiddishkeit. So naturally they made problems for me. Ultimately they realized this wasn’t about politics — I only wanted neshamos.”

Rav Grossman seats his guests at the broad conference table in his office, the walls of which are lined with photo after photo of groups of students of all ages. The occasion for this conversation is ArtScroll’s release this week of Living Legend: Rav Grossman of Migdal Ha’emek, by noted storyteller Rabbi Nachman Seltzer, cataloguing 50 years’ worth of stories about Rav Grossman’s life and career.

For Rav Grossman, it offers an opportunity to reflect on the worlds that have been built over the last half century and to apply some of the lessons he’s learned to solving the conundrums facing the Torah community today.