by Rabbi Yair Hoffman for 5tjt.com The section below was originally entitled, “From American Universities to the Polish Yeshivas.”  It was written by Chaim Semyatitsky (1908-1943) and published in Sefer Mir.  I believe that he had studied in Mir in 1932. *** In America one often hears about restless youth who wake up one morning and set off to wander in foreign places. Their daily routine at home bores them. Their fresh blood yearns for the wide world, for unknown landscapes. Where do they go? Many become sailors and travel the wide seas; others set off for the wilderness of South America, and so forth. Among them are many Jewish youngsters. Recently, however, many American Jewish youngsters can be found where one would least expect them: in the old Jewish shtetlekh of Poland and Lithuania, far away from big cities and railroad lines, where only one melody has sounded for many years, the melody of Talmud study. There one can meet Jewish young men from New York and Cleveland, from Pennsylvania and Kansas, from every part of America. In the yeshivas of Mir, Slobodke, Volozhin, and Telz, dozens of boys with yarmulkes in their heads stand at wooden lecterns with open Talmuds in front of them. They have left their comfortable homes in America and crossed the Atlantic in order to study Torah in the far-flung shtetlekh of out grandfathers and great-grandfathers. American yeshiva boys in Poland and Lithuania, young students in the old country, who have already graduated collage – this is something new. The Jews who live in the towns shrug their shoulders without understanding: they’ve seen Americans coming for a visit to their relatives, and just as quickly going away again, but strapping young men of eighteen and twenty, without friends or relatives in town, coming four thousand miles to study for twelve of thirteen hours a day – this has never happened before. The largest colony of American yeshiva boys is located in the small town of Mir. The town lies a mere twenty viorst from the Soviet border. In this out-of-the-way corner there are forty-eight boys from New York, Brooklyn, Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and even as far as Winnipeg in Canada. If you think that studying in such a yeshiva is easy, you’re mistaken. At seven o’clock in the morning one must be in the yeshiva, ready for the morning prayers, and study concludes only at ten o’clock in the evening. The only times for rest come at breakfast and lunch, and during a brief walk in the nearby woods in the evening. The rest of the time all the students are steeped in study. The bokher from Baranovitsh debates with the boy from Harvard University, as they both lean over the dusty pages of the Talmud, which bears the marks of the many generations that have studied from it. The Americans are mostly sons of wealthy parents, except for several children of American rabbis. None of them lacked the best of everything in America. Yet when they came to Mir – a place that isn’t even on the map – they had to change their entire lives. The hot bath, the playing field, and the automobile, the neatly pressed suit, and the theater – Mir knows nothing of all this. Indeed, it was difficult […]

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