Postmarked for Eternity

When brothers Heiri (Elchonon) and Scholem Erlanger from Lucerne left home in the 1930s to learn in yeshivos in Hungary and Poland, they were definitely an anomaly. While Jewish life in their Swiss city was wholesome and frum, Torah education wasn’t of a high caliber. Children attended non-Jewish schools and supplemented their education with basic after-school Hebrew classes, whose curriculum didn’t include Gemara.

Determined that his sons would learn Torah, their father, Yaakov Erlanger, hired a haus-lehrer, a melamed, to teach his four sons. It would prove to be a pivotal move. Dr. Michoel Posen from Frankfurt, a genius who had no less than seven doctoral degrees, would change the trajectory of the boys’ future. As young adults, while the Erlanger boys were inclined to make aliyah and develop agriculture in Palestine with the Religious Zionist youth movements, Dr. Posen convinced their father that they needed to learn in yeshivah.

While this wasn’t a common move in Switzerland back then, in 1933, Scholem Erlanger left home to learn in Shopron, Hungary, where Dr. Posen’s brother, Rabbi Shimon Yisroel Posen, served as av beis din and led a yeshivah. (The Posen brothers were scions of a German rabbinic family, but Rav Shimon Yisroel had changed direction and became a distinguished chassidish rav.) Scholem became very close to the Ruv, whom he viewed as a surrogate father. After two and a half years in Shopron, during which he served as the Ruv’s haus bochur, he moved on to learn at the larger yeshivah in Galanta.

Meanwhile, his older brother Heiri (Elchonon) Erlanger left Lucerne in 1935 to learn in the Lithuanian-style yeshivahs of Baranovich and then Mir. Feeling that nothing could come close to the intense learning of those yeshivahs, he urgently called Scholem to join him. After some persuasion, and receiving the blessing of the Shoproner Ruv and the Galanta Rav, Scholem acquiesced and joined his brother in the Mir. The two brothers learned together until 1939, when the rumblings of World War II reached Poland and cut their time short.