A week from Sunday, March 26, the Mir yeshiva in Jerusalem will celebrate its 200th anniversary. Founded in 1817 as a small school in a small East European shtetl, the institution continues today as the largest yeshiva in Israel. We can think of no other Jewish educational insitution with this record of longevity and continuity.
Think what has happened to the Jewish people over these past 200 years: extreme poverty in Eastern Europe, kidnapping under the tsars, brutal pogroms, mass migrations and expulsions, devastation in WW I, Holocaust in WW II, and eight wars in Israel. The Mir yeshiva was caught in them all and survived them all, including eight historic years in Shanghai, 1939-1947, as the only yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact, under the storied leadership of Rabbis Chaim Shmuelevitz and Ezekiel Levenstein.
The one major development omitted from the list above is the rise of Israel, to which the Mir yeshiva now makes a major spiritual contribution.
Over these two centuries the yeshiva has been blessed with other inspired leaders, hardly least the late Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel, who refused to take medicines for his Parkinson’s Disease so that he could continue to lead the institution to its greatest period of growth despite his pain.
As it did before WW II, the Mir yeshiva attracts students from around the world. It is singularly focused on the study of Torah, removing itself from the various political currents that surround virtually every institution, educational and otherwise, in Israel.
No one could have forseen the future of a small Jewish seminary in Poland two centuries ago. Our good wishes for the future seem so inadequate compared to the divine dispensation under which this remarkable yeshiva has survived and flourished.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
