The Library Fire at JTS

In 1966, in college, it was hard to study, and I can't just blame the times. More than a civil rights revolution, a cultural revolution and the Vietnam War pulled me away from my studies. I.T., my best friend in college, and I, had our own self-created distractions.

We found charity or social work cases to take on. We worked for Soviet Jewry; we helped students struggling with gratuitous bureaucratic sufferings imposed on them by Yeshiva College. We also engaged in more than our share of philosophical discussions, engendered by what we regarded as, alternatively, brilliant or stupid remarks made by our religious studies instructors. We spent way too much time saving the world and far too little time studying.

One day, after a long stretch spending hours each day on all kinds of projects, we had a heart-to-heart. We just had to stop paying attention to the world and start paying attention to school. We reached a solemn agreement. No more cases. No more projects. No more discussions.

This was in the early afternoon. A couple of hours later, I.T. knocked on my door. He was only slightly sheepish, maybe not even that. Basically, it's as if we had never spoken that day and never reached an agreement. He says: A fire has burned down much of the library at the Jewish Theological Seminary. And what wasn't burned, is now about to be lost due to massive water damage. Books are water-logged.

What happened to our previous resolve, only a couple of hours old?

Did we even have that discussion?

We didn't even refer to it.

I.T. looked at me. I looked at him.

We had to save the water-logged, sacred tomes in the library. We had to do it.

Little did we know that we would miss a lot more than a few classes because of our new, next and biggest project yet.

I went down to JTS. The institution had a tower with a window at the top engraved (in Hebrew) with the words from Exodus, "The bush was burning but was not consumed." Ironically, from out of that window poured large and unending billows of smoke.

People were standing around, looking at the smoke, helpless. I found myself standing next to Abraham J. Heschel. He was short and a bit stocky. He was in great distress, looking up at the smoke. We had a short conversation. He asked me whether the boys at Yeshiva College read his books. This was important to him. He seemed to have no idea whether his books penetrated the Orthodox community. I responded that Yeshiva students read his work, The Sabbath. This seemed to gratify him.

I hurried back to Yeshiva.

The only way the books would be saved was by placing paper towels between each page. Think of it: thousands of books, who knows how many tens of thousands of pages. And, the word was, if somebody didn't get those towels in there fast, the books would rot or mold.

For this, huge manpower was needed. Who better than the students at Yeshiva College?

I.T. and I started going from room to room, asking students to put aside their studies for one night, to take the train down to the Seminary and spend the whole night there saving sacred books by stuffing paper towels between the pages.

It took us several hours, from late afternoon until 10 p.m. or so, to methodically cover all the rooms in Yeshiva College's dormitories. In the end, hundreds of students went, but we also had opposition. A significant minority of students wondered whether it was right for Orthodox students to be saving books at the seminary of Conservative Judaism. To I.T. and me, we were only saving holy books, and the ownership of the books was irrelevant. On this question, however, the truth was that we were out of our depth. We had no competence in Jewish law to answer this question, nor, even if we had the answer, did we have the authority to make it stick. We did, however, have a plan.

We went to Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and presented the problem to him. He tried to reach his father-in-law, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. At Y.U. in those days, Rabbi Soloveitchik was the man who had the power to make things stick. As our luck would have it, he was in Boston and his son-in-law could not reach him.

By now it was late. There was an alternative, however: the president of Yeshiva University, Dr. Samuel Belkin. Around that time, he had a policy of not meeting with students. Undaunted, we reached him at home around 11 p.m. and he agreed to see us. Dr. Belkin received us warmly and inquired about our progress in Jewish studies. To us this was a big deal. Undergraduate students simply did not sit and shmuess with Dr. Belkin, let alone at his home late at night. We told him about the situation at the Seminary and the water-logged books. We asked whether the boys at Yeshiva were halakhically obligated to leave their studies to help save these books. Had he said yes, we would have headed straight back to the dorm to all those students who wanted a halakhic decision before acting.

Dr. Belkin pondered, and then advised us to consult Prof. Saul Lieberman, the senior Talmudic scholar at JTS to pose the question to him. If he determined that there was a halakhic obligation to save these holy books (sefarim), then he, Belkin, would tell the Yeshiva boys to go.

We headed off to JTS around midnight and found the scholar in his study. He, too, received us warmly, and thanked the Yeshiva boys for helping save the books. It was not common for him to meet students from the Orthodox Yeshiva College, and he engaged us in discussion. He went on at some length praising the Talmudic scholarship of Rabbi Soloveitchik. There were, he was opining, certain people who had a reputation for being talmidei chachamim (first-rank Talmud scholars), and then there was the far smaller group of genuine talmidei chachamim. Rabbi Soloveitchik was one of the select few, he was saying. We had no basis to evaluate this and, almost like spectators, just took it all in.

Turning to the matter at hand, Prof. Lieberman said that, in his judgment, the students at Yeshiva were obligated to leave their studies to help save the books. He wrote a personal letter to Dr. Belkin, put it in an envelope, sealed it, handed it to us, and we were off to Dr. Belkin again. He read the letter, accepted the decision and told us it was fine to have Yeshiva boys go to the JTS to save its books.

This led us back to a mimeograph machine at Yeshiva, and to a wee-hours posting of Prof. Lieberman's decision, and of Dr. Belkin's acceptance of it, throughout the Yeshiva dorm.

Then, as they say, all hell broke loose.

Given the excitement, with boys coming and going to JTS all through the night, the dorm supervisors were up. Shortly after our poster went up, the supervisors saw it and immediately called us in. Apoplexy might not be too strong a word for their response.

By now it was around 1:30 a.m. In the middle of the night, officials at the Y.U. public relations department were aroused from their slumber by dorm officials, lest, they feared, The New York Times be informed that Samuel Belkin, president of the Orthodox Yeshiva University, had accepted a halakhic decision from Saul Lieberman, professor at the Conservative JTS. As the night wore on, it became clear that the status of me and my friend at Yeshiva was in jeopardy, for, in the eyes of the administration, we had besmirched Y.U.

Meanwhile, we were riding up and down the subway between JTS and Y.U., alternatively checking out the progress on saving the books, and encouraging more boys to come down and help. Various administrators at JTS thanked us profusely, but couldn't suppress an occasional comment to the effect that the students from Yeshiva seemed to be doing more than the students from JTS.

Shortly before sunrise, we went to Brooklyn, hoping to enlist the help of other yeshivas. But by the time we got there we were utterly exhausted and headed back to YU. The sun had risen. Between the subway stop near Yeshiva and our dorm room, we were approached by many friends and others, and warned: "Disappear! The administration is out to get you. It is furious over the Belkin-Lieberman poster, and is denying the whole thing." In our naïveté, we couldn't believe that an idealistic effort, which, no less, had followed the channels all the way to the top, could turn sour.

We managed surreptitiously to slip into a dorm room, which, at least in those days, blessedly could be locked from the inside without being able to be opened from the outside.

We davened the morning prayers without a minyan. We had no food, but fell in bed exhausted. All day long, there were fierce poundings on the door, which we totally ignored. The people on the outside would have to guess as to our whereabouts; we offered no response at all.

In the very late afternoon, somewhat rested up, not knowing what to expect, we ventured out. The going seemed safe, the door-pounders were not in evidence.

We went to the Yeshiva cafeteria, ate, returned to the dorm room, locked the door and went to sleep for the night.

The next morning, we hoped that things had quieted down. We prayed, ate and went to classes.

One of the most beautiful moments of my life occurred that morning, 24 hours after the all night book-saving session.

Having come out of hiding, we went to class as if nothing had happened. But the word was out that our wee-hours poster was grounds for our expulsion from Y.U., and Rabbi Moshe Besdin, dean of the morning program, called us in. He sat us down, looked us straight in the eye, and asked, simply, whether everything in that poster was true. We said yes. The merest hint of that impish smile of his flashed across his face. He took us at our word. He told us to go back to class, thereby preserving our right to study Torah. Rabbi Besdin was prepared to defend the word of two young unknowns against the accusations of his eminent superiors and the issue was never brought up to us again.

Rabbi Besdin's integrity is a shining memory of my years at Yeshiva.

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg is Executive Editor of the Intermountain Jewish News.