Heaven on a Hilltop  

Three unlikely Holocaust survivors — a French rav, a Polish scholar bereft of his entire family, and a talmid of the Chofetz Chaim — climbed a hilltop in the French resort town of Aix-les-Bains and declared that Torah would rise again. Eighty years later, talmidim remember Rav Chaim Yitzchok Chaikin, the humble giant who carried the flame across continents. This is the story of a yeshivah called “Aix,” and the man whose light still illuminates it

1945.

The German troops who’d occupied France for five years have finally gone, leaving behind a small and wounded Jewish community — those who managed to survive the roundups and deportations to the East. Now, in the resort village of Aix-les-Bains, a vacation destination for nobility and the wealthy in the east of France, a French rav joins up with a Polish scholar and sole survivor of his family, together with a talmid of the Chofetz Chaim who’d just spent five years in a German POW camp, in order to rebuild Torah in this devastated region.

They rent a 900-year-old mansion on a hilltop — the locals say the villa was Queen Victoria’s summer vacation home, and they also say it’s haunted by ghosts. But ghostly sounds don’t bother them — they will fill it with the sound of Torah.

A trickle of refugees from Eastern Europe arrives at the yeshivah. Soon, French teenagers join, and afterward, a constant stream of North African bochurim from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco fill the shiur rooms. The mesivta, beis medrash, and kollel become the linchpins of Torah in France, as a Bais Yaakov seminary and community grows around them.

2025.

Thousands of talmidim gather in Paris to honor their yeshivah, a lighthouse of Torah in little Aix-les-Bains (pronounced “eks le bah”). It has cultivated over 6,000 talmidim to date, among them hundreds of rabbanim and dayanim leading communities across Eretz Yisrael, France, Morocco, and the United States.