The Children Come First

I

t was Shabbos but Rav Rafael Baruch Toledano the av beis din ofMeknesMorocco was devastated. He couldn’t bear the sights that assailed him every week on his walk home from shul as the precious children of his community who had enrolled in the “Alliance” school — ensnared in the net of the Haskalah — gathered immodestly in the town square. What was happening to the youth ofMorocco?

“What will become of the children?” he would ask his voice breaking as his wife Rachel filled his plate with chamin. “What will become of Yaakov and Nissim and Michael?” He was crying for his own children and grandchildren — yet each child of the kehillah was just as important to him. Those tears would become the impetus for the eventual establishment of a whole world of yeshivos for Moroccan bochurim.

Rav Rafael Baruch leader of the Jews of Meknes for most of the 20th century was an unusual combination of warmth emotion scholarship and determination — and when these forces joined together in his mission to educate future generations nothing could stand in his way. When the rosh kahal the leader of the Jewish community of Meknes opposed the opening of a cheder dedicated solely to Torah study Rav Toledano dressed in his majestic dayan’s robe marched to his home and prostrated himself humbly kissing each of the rosh kahal’s feet. He then rose to his full height and sobbing heavily he fell onto the shoulders of the shocked community leader pleading “If you would just agree to open the Talmud Torah I would give you half of my Olam Haba!” So it was that Talmud Torah Eim Habanim was founded staving off the winds of secularism that threatened the souls of the children of Meknes.

Head and Heart

The Toledano rabbinic line goes back even further than the 15 generations since the family was driven out of Spainon Tishah B’Av 1492. Their name was derived from their hometown Toledo where generations of talmidei chachamim lived. Under the direction of the family patriarch Rav Daniel ben Rav Yosef Toledano — known as the leader of the sages ofCastile — the family made its way toSalonika Greece and from there to Fez Morocco where Rav Daniel established a yeshivah. But one thing the family swore they or their descendants would never do and that was to return to Spain the land that spewed them out. According to legend to perpetuate the memory of that vow they changed their family name to Toledano — meaning “Toledo no.” (“No” means the same thing in Spanish and English.)