Rabbi Shlomo Polachek: The Unassuming Iluy of Maichat

In 1923, an attempt was made by Rabbi Yehuda Levenberg to found a European-style yeshiva on the American shores, the Yeshiva of New Haven. But a year earlier, Dr. Bernard Revel, a president of RIETS since 1915 (who, although on leave from the Yeshiva at the time, remained its spiritual head), had already brought over a prominent European rosh yeshiva to teach the highest class at RIETS. He was Rabbi Shlomo Polachek, known as the Iluy of Maichat, favorite disciple of the master who had revolutionized the method of Talmud study in the Yeshiva of Volozhin, Rabbi Hayyim Soloveichik. R. Shlomo had studied under R. Hayyim during the last two years of the Volozhin Yeshiva's existence, and afterwards, when R. Hayyim served as rabbi of Brisk, for a total of over six years, from the fall of 1889 till the early spring of 1896.

Before describing Rabbi Polachek, let us define Dr. Revel's intention in bringing this great scholar to RIETS. Dr. Revel had an ambition: he believed that the Torah of Eastern Europe can be propagated in America, and he hoped to be the one to bring it about. Although there had been a tradition handed down by Rabbi Hayyim Yitzhakin (Volozhiner), who had died in 1821, that someday Russia would cease to be the world's Torah center and Torah would then wander across the Atlantic to America, there had been no conscious effort to transplant Torah to the New World until after the First World War. To be sure, there were European-trained rabbis in many cities on the North American continent who were great in knowledge, true geonim, even before the war; they had come to America as individuals seeking safety or a livelihood. There had indeed been cases in which not the rabbis themselves initiated their crossing of the ocean for personal betterment, but in which American congregations needed to infuse into their community the spiritual leadership that was available only in Europe - bringing Rabbi Jacob Joseph from Vilna to head a short-lived union of New York congregations is one of these. But neither the arrival of gedolei Torah in America of their own volition, nor the importation of great rabbinic figures to fill America's religious needs, was motivated by the desire to transfer Torah to a new home. Contrariwise, bringing into RIETS a man of Rabbi Polachek's erudition was not to fill a need, for the level of knowledge that the Yeshiva's students of that era had reached was much below the Torah plateau on which the Maichater Iluy functioned: he could not be expected to create talmidim in the Yeshiva - and Dr. Revel surely knew it. (It is interesting to note that when the Maichater's successor in RIETS, Rabbi Shimon Shkop, an aged European trailblazer in the modern method of Talmud study, took over the post, he felt that he needed to bring to the Yeshiva some of his former students at Grodno, Poland, in order to create a group which would understand his shi'urim. He invited students who were then still residing in Europe, or had gone to Palestine, to come to the United States to continue studying under him. Declaring, "Europe is oisgespielt [played out]!" he wanted to remain in America, but knew that the students present at RIETS were generally too weak scholastically to benefit from his tutelage. In fact, four of R' Shimon's former talmidim arrived from Palestine and three from Europe, and they were the mainstay of his class in RIETS.) The purpose of bringing the Maichater Iluy to RIETS was a conscious effort by Dr. Revel to implant Torah in a new home, the United States. This 1922 act is not to be confused with what the founders of the Yeshiva of New Haven did a year later. There was a basic difference in the philosophies of Rabbi Levenberg and Dr. Revel: the yeshiva that the former envisioned was totally European, effectively creating an extraterritorial locus on the new continent - reshaping a piece of America into a European entity; the latter was doing the very opposite, transplanting a chunk of Russian Torah onto the American environment - effectively a step in actuating the prognosis of R. Hayyim of Volozhin.

When Rabbi Laizer Yudel Finkel, a havver of the Maichater from the time they both sat at the feet of Rabbi Soloveichik in Brisk, visited Rabbi Polachek during a 1926 fundraising trip to the United States, he told his host that he had erred in leaving Europe because he could have been one of the most prominent rashei yeshiva there. Rabbi Polachek replied that had he been a European rosh yeshiva he would also be in America now - exactly what his interlocutor, the rosh yeshiva of the Mirrer Yeshiva in Poland, was doing. Aside from seeing the Maichater's sharp retort as a sample of his iluyus, it is worthwhile analyzing the verbal exchange between the two Torah leaders. Rabbi Finkel brought out the point mentioned above: the Maichater would not be utilized, nor appreciated, by the students in RIETS or by any yeshiva in America: So why did he leave Europe? Rabbi Polachek answered that, since Torah could no longer be supported physically in Russia (and in Poland, which had been Russia before the world war), Torah must already be seen as in a state of transition; Torah is on its way to America, and that is why he was there! The Maichater saw in the financial situation of the European yeshivas the beginning of the realization of the "prophecy" of R. Hayyim Volozhiner. (A characteristic of the Maichater comes to light: he did not confuse the idyllic state with the realistic one - much as the Tanna posited in Pirqei Avot (3:17) when saying, "Im ain kemah, ain Torah." He displayed the same practicality when replying when asked in 1905 why he took a post in the Lida Yeshiva which, unlike other yeshivas at the time, included secular studies in its curriculum, "Well, I'm not a son or a son-in-law of one of the heads of the normative yeshivas [and had no chance of acquiring a post in any of them].")

Dr. Revel's attempt to bring Torah to America did not begin with the hiring of Rabbi Polachek. Four years prior, in 1918, RIETS was already busy trying to transfer the Torah center from Russia to America. As a result of the destruction wrought by the war, Vilna was thought to no longer be able to maintain its position as the publication hub of the Torah world, and a plan was drawn up by Dr. Revel for a joint venture together with the Agudath Harabanim (Union of Orthodox Rabbis) to republish the Shas in North America. The participation of RIETS in this project did not materialize because it was nixed by the Yeshiva's Board of Directors: but Dr. Revel had tried. If he failed with the printed Shas, he succeeded in bringing the "walking Shas," Rabbi Polachek, to America. Like the exiles at the time of the Hurban Beth Hamikdash who brought stones from the holy Temple to Babylonia to erect the mekom Torah there (see Rashi Rosh Hashana 24b and Megilla 27a, and Arukh, s.v. "shaf"), this visionary pictured the Iluy as a cornerstone in the erection of the Torah structure in its new home. In 1928, the year Rabbi Polachek died and RIETS moved from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to its present magnificent building Uptown, Rabbi Shimon Sivitz, rabbi of Pittsburgh since 1888 (a native of Tzitevian, Lithuania, where the author of this article was born seven decades after R. Shimon), wrote to Dr. Revel, "The first time I met you, I knew that... you were an angel sent by G-d to bring Torah... to the United States."

Who was R. Shlomo Polachek? Born at the end of 1877, this genius was discovered by a Volozhin Yeshiva student, Aaron Rabinowitz, on a farm near the town of Maichat shortly before his twelfth birthday. Aaron convinced the slight and bashful boy to accompany him to the Volozhin Yeshiva, and introduced him to the rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Naphtali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv) as a candidate for enrollment in the yeshiva. Surprised that Rabbinowitz had brought a mere child to his world-class yeshiva which students usually joined at 16-17, Rabbi Berlin made a dig at Rabinowitz and said, "Why didn't you bring his crib along?!" Aaron replied, "Let the Rosh Yeshiva test him and decide what size crib he needs." As the brilliant Torah flashes flitted back and forth between the little boy and the wizened sage, the assistant rosh yeshiva Rabbi Hayyim Soloveichik entered the room and joined in. Rabbi Soloveichik then brought the entrance test to a close by asking Shlomo where he was from, and when he received the reply, "From Maichat," R. Hayyim announced: "Then you are the Maichater Iluy." The epithet stuck to Rabbi Polachek throughout his lifetime: even his posthumously published sepher of hiddushei Torah was named "Hiddushei Ha'iluy Mimaichat."

Upon his acceptance to the Volozhin Yeshiva, R. Hayyim ordered him to cover ten pages of Gemara daily, and his roommates were assigned by the master to discuss with him each night before retiring the pages he had gone through that day. Rabbi Soloveichik himself would test the lad for several hours weekly, on Friday nights. His peers at Volozhin could keep pace with the iluy for not longer that an hour-and-a-half at a stretch, and Shlomo had to spend his eighteen-hour study day with 12 different havruthoth! His lightning-quick grasp and phenomenal memory made him the wonder of the yeshiva, but he remained as humble and unassuming as on the farm. When he became bar mitzvah, the Netziv made a festive breakfast in his honor one Friday morning - "possibly the first time the Volozhin Yeshiva celebrated a bar mitzvah of a student," according to the memoir of the Netziv's son - at which the youngster delivered his own pilpul in a demure fashion... and burst out crying.

When the Volozhin Yeshiva closed down, in the winter of 1892, Shlomo Polachek spent a short time studying on his own in Minsk, the synagogues of which housed Torah students of various levels - he later recalled how hurt he had been when, in an effort to weed out irreligious elements among the students, he was asked by the rav to show that he was wearing tzitzis - but as soon as R. Hayyim Soloveichik was appointed rabbi of Brisk, he invited his favorite student to join him there. Whenever a rabbinical guest visited the city, Rabbi Soloveichik would proudly have him "speak in learning" with his student, despite Shlomo's personal distaste for flaunting his knowledge. He was especially loved by R. Hayyim because their basic characters were similar; both were self-effacing and extremely sensitive to people's suffering. It is said that when Shlomo was in Volozhin, he would bring several shirts with him at the beginning of each semester, but never returned home with more than one: he had given the others away to students needier than himself. R. Hayyim was, of course, carried away by the Maichater's unique cerebral powers, and was to say in later years that, in all his life, he had never met as extraordinary an iluy (genius) as R. Shlomo.

In the spring of 1896, 18-year-old Shlomo Polachek was convinced by his fellow student Laizer-Yudel Finkel to leave Brisk for the famous Musar yeshiva in Slabodka run by the latter's father, R. Noson-Zvi Finkel (known as the Alter of Slabodka). But the teenager did not take to the Musar philosophy - not even after spending the month of Elul in Kelem in the proximity of R. Yisrael Salanter's prime disciple, R. Simcha-Zissel Ziv. (Seventeen years later, when the ba'al musar R. Archik Bakst repeated to him a profound musar-talk they both had heard from Rabbi Ziv, Rabbi Polachek began pacing the room and muttering, "Oy vay, I had no ears then to listen and understand!") After the disappointing Musar experience, Shlomo continued his studies in the "kibbutz (study group)" operated by R. Chaim-Ozer Grodzensky in Vilna. While learning Torah in that maskilic city, the young genius was introduced to the world of higher mathematics and Russian literature and developed an auxiliary lifetime interest in these subjects. He then married a wealthy young woman from the town of Ivenitz and tried his hand at business. After failing the profane venture, he returned to his holy studies in Vilna, wherefrom he was invited in 1905 to head the Zionist Lida Yeshiva by its founder, Rabbi Yitzchok-Yaakov Reines, rabbi of Lida, initiator of the Mizrachi movement. R. Shlomo stayed at this post until the outbreak of World War I: Lida turned out to be the locus where he remained for the longest duration in his lifetime. It is worth noting that despite Rabbi Hayyim Soloveichik's strong opposition to Zionism, his admiration of Rabbi Polachek was undiminished by the latter's career choice.

The war saw R. Shlomo and his family exiled to deep Russia, wandering from place to place. One of his stations was Yelisovietgrad (renamed Kirovograd after the Communist Revolution), where he served as head of a small yeshiva. Another of his stops was Kremenchug, where several exiled Lithuanian yeshivas were located at the time. He lived through the battles of the Whites and Reds and the pogroms which killed an estimated 100,000 Jews in the Ukraine. He was finally repatriated in Bialystok, Poland, in 1921, and served as a lecturer in its Tachkemoni school for a year. R. Shlomo, always immersed in deep thought, did not commit his lectures to paper, but his talmidim in Lida would write down the shi'urim he delivered and give him a copy; the valise laden with the manuscripts was stolen during his wanderings in Russia, and he mourned this loss till the end of his life.

His final destination was RIETS, where he delivered his shi'urim four to five times weekly. He was also a distinguished member of the Agudath Harabanim, and his presence highlighted its conventions. He was active in raising funds for the assistance of destitute rabbis in Europe through the Ezras Torah organization, and was a member of Mizrachi. When he once expressed his wish to go to Palestine and become "a gemara teacher" there, but humbly felt that he did not know Hebrew well enough, someone remarked, "How can you judge what you know and what you don't know? You believe that you don't know how to learn [Torah], either!" Devoted to his rebbi until his own death, the Maichater was involved, together with several other great European and American scholars, in urging the children of R. Hayyim Soloveichik to publish the master's hiddushei Torah. The volume "Hidushei Rabbenu Hayyim Halevi" finally saw the light almost two decades after the 1918 death of R. Hayyim. Similarly, the Maichater's hiddushei Torah - gleaned by his survivors from the writings of his students both in Europe and in the United States - did not see the light until 1947, 19 years after his demise.

The Maichater Iluy was only 50 years old when he was summoned to the Yeshiva on High. In memoriam, RIETS published a gazette called "Aidainu (Our Tragedy)" mourning his loss to the Yeshiva and the entire Torah world. No person could meet R. Shlomo Polachek and not be overwhelmed by his genius: the only one who did not comprehend his brilliance was the Maichater Iluy himself. For as great as he was in Torah, he was equally great in character refinement, in midot tovot: Zecher Zaddik Livracha.

Rabbi Nathan Kamenetsky is a son and a son-in-law, respectively, of the late Torah sages Jacob Kamenecki of Mesivta Torah Vodaath, and David Lifshitz of RIETS. He lives in Jerusalem since 1968, and is the author of the much-talked-about book about historical yeshiva figures, "Making of a Godol."