World War II and Move To The United States
After World War I, the yeshivah moved from Slutsk to Kletsk in Belarusia. With the outbreak of World War II, Rav Kotler and the yeshivah relocated to Vilna, then the major refuge of most yeshivoth from the occupied areas. Reportedly Rav Kotler encouraged the yeshiva to stay in Vilna despite the approaching Nazis. Most of his students were murdered by the Nazis. Some did not listen to him and escaped to China. He was brought to America in 1941 by the Vaad Hatzalah rescue organization and guided it during the Holocaust. He settled in the Borough Park neighborhood.
In 1943, Rav Kotler founded Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood Township, New Jersey, with 15 students.
When he arrived in America, he was told that he is wasting his time trying to rebuild what was destroyed in Europe because Jewish students of college age were interested only in earning a degree that will enable them to make money and have no interest in learning and mastering the ability to understand the Talmud just for its own sake. Rabbi Kotler responded that he will "plant" Torah in America and declared this to be his life's mission. Through his yeshiva he rebuilt Torah throughout America. He would send the best of his senior students to open other yeshivahs throughout North America.
By the time of Rav Kotler's death in 1962, the yeshiva had grown to 250 students. He was succeeded by his son, Rabbi Shneur Kotler, as rosh yeshiva. As of 2011, Beth Medrash Govoha is run by his grandson, Rabbi Malkiel Kotler, and three of his grandsons-in-law, Rabbis Yerucham Olshin, Yisroel Neuman, and Dovid Schustal. By 2007 the yeshiva had grown into the largest institution of its kind in America with 5,000 college and advanced-level students, while the surrounding Lakewood community supports a network of 50 other yeshivas and over 100 synagogues for an Orthodox population estimated at 40,000.
Rav Kotler also helped establish Chinuch Atzmai, the independent religious school system in Israel and was the chairman of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah of Agudath Israel. He chaired the Rabbinical administration board of Torah Umesorah and was on the presidium of the Agudas HaRabbonim of the U.S. and Canada.
Upon the death of his father-in-law, Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer, he inherited his father-in-law's position of rosh yeshiva of Etz Chaim Yeshiva of Jerusalem. In an unusual arrangement, he held this position while continuing to live in America, and visiting Jerusalem occasionally. Today, his grandson, Rabbi Zevulun Schwartzman, heads a kollel located at Etz Chaim Yeshiva.
Read more about this topic: Aharon Kotler
Famous quotes containing the words united states, world war, world, war, move, united and/or states:
“In one notable instance, where the United States Army and a hundred years of persuasion failed, a highway has succeeded. The Seminole Indians surrendered to the Tamiami Trail. From the Everglades the remnants of this race emerged, soon after the trail was built, to set up their palm-thatched villages along the road and to hoist tribal flags as a lure to passing motorists.”
—For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Surely there is not a capitalist or well-informed person in this world today who believes that [World War I] is being fought to make the world safe for democracy. It is being fought to make the world safe for capital.”
—Rose Porter Stokes (1879–1933)
“Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Those who dare to interpret God’s will must never claim Him as an asset for one nation or group rather than another. War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.”
—Robert Runcie (b. 1921)
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)
“I do not know that the United States can save civilization but at least by our example we can make people think and give them the opportunity of saving themselves. The trouble is that the people of Germany, Italy and Japan are not given the privilege of thinking.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is AMERICANS—our inferior one varies with the place.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)