With the passing of Rav Menachem Mendel Mendelsohn ztz”l lst week, the community of Komemius is like a lost ship without a captain. The entire moshav was like his own family – he was the father of hundreds of children. And although he was a renowned Torah giant, he chose instead to tie his life together with the simple farmers and kibbutzniks who looked up to him as their spiritual leader.
He would wake up every morning at 5 a.m. wash his hands and open the door of his house. The open door was the symbol of his life his relationship with the members of his kehillah and the farmers and simple folk in the surrounding moshavim. If someone knocked it was surely a stranger from far away; everyone knew they could just walk in. But last week moshav Komemius – the bastion of uncompromising strictures established in the 1950s by the Chazon Ish in Eretz Yisrael’s agricultural heartland – was in turmoil a despondent flock who had lost its leader.
The door would no longer be open. Rav Menachem Mendel Mendelsohn 73 had suddenly passed away.
Rav Mendelsohn a disciple of the Beis Yisrael of Ger a giant in Torah who sat together with the leaders of the chassidic courts and venerated roshei yeshivah and rabbanim chose instead to tie his life together with the farmers and kibbutzniks who looked up to him as their spiritual leader. His father Rav Binyamin Mendelsohn ztz”l was the first rav of Komemius known for his staunch advocacy of shmittah without compromise in a time when most agricultural settlements laughed off the sabbatical year as a relic of the past and a modern impossibility. Rav Menachem perpetuated the Komemius legacy when he took over the leadership of the moshav after his father’s passing in 1979.
He guided the community as his father had not deviating from the strictures on one hand and creating a unique experiment of unity on the other. Komemius made up primarily of Gerrer Vizhnitz and Belzer chassidim has only one shul one cheder one kollel and one rav.
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