Rising Above 

For many years, Rav Pollak worked with the local authorities on matters pertaining to the welfare of the community. But as Nazi propaganda began to influence the local populace, things began to change. The burgermeister (mayor), who’d been cordial and helpful in the past, now greeted him with coldness and indifference. Another time a gentile teenager slapped him across the face, without any provocation.

Rav Pollak had a sense of foreboding that bad times lay ahead. In 1940, through the efforts of Reb Hershel Gluck, a concerned relative living in America, Rav Pollak and his wife Rebbetzin Yehudis immigrated to New York City, where he accepted a position as rav of the Chevra Bachurim Shul on the Lower East Side. The inflexible immigration quotas meant that Rav Pollak’s two married daughters, their husbands and children, and his two single adult sons were unable to leave Hungary. But while he must have been desperately worried about the family he left behind, Rav Pollak invested himself fully into community needs. He became involved in kashrus matters, Vaad Hatzalah work, and matters of ishus, as well as helping recent immigrants find suitable employment and generally trying to inculcate Yidden with Torah and yiras Shamayim.

One rav he found common language with was Rav Moshe Feinstein, who himself had recently arrived in America in 1937. Rav Moshe headed Mesivta Tiferes Yerushalayim and already then was considered a major posek. While Rav Moshe spoke a heavy litvishe Yiddish and Rav Pollak spoke a classic Hungarian-style Yiddish, they understood each other very well, and mutual respect and love defined their relationship.

It might not have been so simple. There were significant halachic disagreements between them. One of the major issues of the time was whether an eiruv could be constructed around Manhattan to enable people to carry outdoors on Shabbos. At the behest of the Agudas Harabonim, Rav Pollak wrote a lengthy kuntres about this wherein he paskened that an eiruv around Manhattan is permitted.