Twenty-five years after Reb Yonah Balkind's passing and thousands of students later, his legacy is preserved in the next generation
Aryeh Balkind remembers once asking his father how he had managed to make a mandatory program on Shabbos afternoon when this was unheard of in other places. Rebbi Balkind explained that he’d started by letting a boy get out of any deserved punishment during the week, if he could answer “yes”’ to the question, “And were you here on Shabbos afternoon?”
Twice in the 19-year period that Mrs. Lopian was growing up, the family went on vacation to local seaside towns. Otherwise, Rebbi Balkind did not take vacations. He taught on Pesach, sharing gigantic sacks of nuts with the boys, and he taught on Tishah B’Av afternoon. During the summer school holidays, instead of taking a break, he’d offer two cheder sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, to accommodate the boys’ vacation schedules.
Where did the passion for chinuch come from? Reb Yonah Balkind was born in Gateshead, Northern England, in 1909. His father passed away in 1914, leaving his mother, Esther (née Guttentag), to raise two children alone. Reb Yonah told his children that he remembered standing up on a chair to say Kaddish. An immigrant from Stanislaw, Esther was determined that her son go to yeshivah. Gateshead had no yeshivah at that time (the famed Gateshead Yeshiva opened in 1929), so Mrs. Balkind sent Yonah to Manchester, where Rosh Yeshivah Rav Moshe Yitzchok Segal took the teenager under his wing.
He was 17 in 1926, when an established trader named Mr. Preida Smith approached the Rosh Yeshivah with a request. His grandchildren needed some Jewish teaching: Could the Rosh Yeshivah recommend someone to learn with them during the daily two-hour school lunchbreak?
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