A surprising solution arrived at the yeshivah’s doorstep almost immediately after Rav Doniel’s return
The yeshivah in Dogevezh in northwestern Lithuania was one of the prominent yet forgotten prewar yeshivos. Rebuilt after World War I and split off from a rival yeshivah in the same town, its mission statement was to make Dogevezh great once again.
The new yeshivah initially trumped other yeshivos in the region. The rosh yeshivah, Rav Doniel Orange, was a talented maggid shiur and a very successful fundraiser, but eventually he fell into disfavor with the bochurim and the local townspeople and departed the yeshivah in 1920. It wasn’t long before Rav Doniel made it clear that he was extremely dissatisfied with the situation — and still referred to himself as the Dogevezher rosh yeshivah — even going so far as to say that yeshivah was stolen from him.
While Rav Doniel’s replacement came highly regarded, his open-door policy led to the yeshivah filling to the brim, with the vast majority of the new arrivals arriving illegally, crossing the sealed border that divided interwar Poland from Lithuania. Fatherly figures on the yeshivah’s new faculty graciously welcomed these newcomers without even asking them to take a basic farher and immediately provided them with a weekly allotment of 35 zlotys and accommodations in a local hotel. Oftentimes, despite the financial constraints facing the yeshivah, these new refugees were provided with more resources than the local talmidim, which generated resentment.
As the yeshivah’s economic situation began to deteriorate, the talmidim and executive committee of the yeshivah decided that with all of Rav Doniel’s weaknesses, they needed to bring him back; otherwise, the yeshivah’s debts would force its closure. Rav Doniel accepted the offer and upon the recommendation of his son Binyomin (fondly known as Reb Ben), invited a young prodigy named Rav Yosef Dov Vanetsky to serve as segan rosh yeshivah. Their first task was to clean up the yeshivah’s deficit — which was growing daily.
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