The Mashpia of Montreal   

Not everyone was enchanted by their mission. Samuel Bronfman, the founder of the Seagram liquor brand, exclaimed, “We left Russia to escape from G-d, and now you want to bring Him here? I’ll give you $5,000 to relocate to Toronto.”

But the Rebbe told them to stay in Montreal, and so they did. “They established a yeshivah that became the Harvard of Chabad yeshivahs,” says Rabbi Nissen Mangel, who survived the Shoah and was a talmid at the yeshivah before becoming a distinguished author and lecturer. His alma mater, Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim/Rabbinical College of Canada, has been thriving ever since.

Rabbi Mangel maintains that the success of the yeshivah was due in large part to its mashpia, Rabbi Volf Greenglass, one of the original group of nine and his rebbi for the  ten years he learned in the yeshivah. While many people outside the Chabad orbit may not be familiar with his name, Reb Volf — whose life was largely spent within the walls of the yeshivah — was a powerful force, leaving a lifelong impact on his talmidim and community. And even those who thought they knew him well didn’t always appreciate the depths of his learning, piety, deep humanity, and profound knowledge of Kabbalah.

“He was an authentic, old-school chassid,” Rabbi Mangel says. “He was from what we would call the chassidim rishonim.” Humble, devoted to his rebbe, and ever eschewing kavod, Rabbi Greenglass never wanted to be addressed as “Rabbi.” “Ich heis Volf,” he would say.