2008 Woodie Awards
The Story Behind the Benjamin Hurwitz Award
Reuben Rudman
Issue date: 3/29/05 Section: YUdaica
- Page 1 of 7 next >
|
Each year The Benjamin Hurwitz Award for Excellence in Talmud is given to a deserving student of the Isaac Breuer College of Hebraic Studies of Yeshiva University. Who was Benjamin Hurwitz and why is an award given in his name?
R. Yekusiel Raphael Hurwitz, father of Benjamin Hurwitz, had been raised in Novardok with family in Maichat and studied in the Volozhin Yeshiva until it closed in 1893. R. Hurwitz, who received semikha from the son of R. Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor (after whom RIETS is named), was a cousin and close friend of R. Shlomo Polachek, known as the Maichater Illui (one of the early Roshei Yeshiva at RIETS), and knew the Soloveitchik family from Volozhin. Like many students in Volozhin, R. Hurwitz was an Ohaiv Zion; he taught his American-born children to speak Hebrew and had purchased land in Ranaana through the Achooza Aleph organization.
Born on May 4, 1910 in New York City, Benjamin Hurwitz had attended Rabbi Jacob Joseph Elementary School, where his grandfather, R. Moshe Eliezer Gavrin, was one of the founders. As an orphan, R. Gavrin had been raised by the Shatzkes family, one of whose sons, R. Moshe Shatzkes, later became a rosh yeshiva one of the three members of the RIETS semikha testing board. Thus, in 1929, the Hurwitz family had many ties, past, present and future, with Yeshiva.
In 1927, Benjamin Hurwitz graduated from Yeshiva's Teachers Institute and Talmudical Academy High School, now known as the Yeshiva University High School for Boys, where he had been president of the student's organization and business manager of the yearbook, The Elchanite. Soon afterward, Benjamin, together with his mother and two sisters, Deborah (my mother) and Leah (later Wachsman), left for Eretz Yisrael. They resided in Petach Tikvah while Benjamin learned intensively with an older cousin, R. Zvi Puchowitz, who had been a student at the Slabodka Yeshiva and a chavrusa with the young R. Yitzchak Hutner. Benjamin Hurwitz's father remained in New York, with plans to join them after he could arrange his business holdings.
In 1928, R. Puchowitz notified the family that Benjamin Hurwitz was now ready to enter a formal yeshiva. He suggested the Yeshiva Knesseth Israel in Hebron, a branch of the Slabodka Yeshiva that had opened a few years earlier, headed by R. Moshe Mordechai Epstein, author of the Levush Mordechai. Benjamin Hurwitz entered the Hebron Yeshiva in 1928.