But a Saraf,Rav Aharon Kotler built a foundation for the future of American Torah Jewry through a relationship with his talmidim of mutual esteem. He appreciated their desire to learn Torah amid a spiritual wilderness, and they in turn were awed by his greatness and moved by his love for them. Rav Yechiel Perr, a close talmid of the Rosh Yeshivah, shares his memories of the early days ofLakewood, and of the Rosh Yeshivah’s concern for a public that extended beyond the walls of the study hall.
In Yiddish ah yohr mit ah yoiveil connotes a very long period of time. But a literal yoveil — 50 years — is long enough in itself and this year on the second of Kislev it will indeed be the proverbial yoveil shanim since that giant of American Torah Jewry Rav Aharon Kotler ztz”l left the world.
I’ve come to speak with Rav Yechiel Yitzchok Perr, a close talmid of the Rosh Yeshivah from Lakewood’s early days, who himself went on to teach countless talmidim at Yeshivah Derech Ayson, which he founded many decades ago in Far Rockaway, New York. Rav Perr arrived at the Lakewood yeshivah as a 21-year-old in 1956 and remained there for seven and a half years. During those years, its student body was comprised of only 70 to 80 bochurim, enabling him to take full advantage of the opportunity to draw close to the gadol hador.
By the time Rav Aharon arrived on these shores in 1941, he had already gained renown as a leading figure of the Torah world — first in Slutsk, where his father-in-law, Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, headed a major yeshivah, and later heading his own yeshivah in Kletzk. After his frenetic wartim e efforts with the Vaad Hatzalah to rescue Jews from Nazi Europe, Rav Aharon focused his brilliant mind and boundless energies on building Torah in the country to which Divine Providence had seen fit to send him.
Rav Perr sits with a small blue loose-leaf notebook containing hundreds of entries detailing stories or conversations involving Rav Aharon that he personally witnessed or that he heard from someone else who did. And that, too, is something he learned from his rebbi. “The Rosh Yeshivah was known as a very big baki in stories about the Vilna Gaon. He once told me that everything he knows about the Gaon he received personally from the Chofetz Chaim, who first came to Vilna as a 17-year-old bochur. This was only 47 years after the Gaon was niftar. Everything the Chofetz Chaim knew about the Gaon, he heard from someone who knew it firsthand from the Gaon, or from someone who heard it from someone who knew it firsthand. I once told this to Rabbi Samson Rafael Weiss, who said it can’t be, because the numbers don’t add up. After he said that, I stopped quoting the number ‘47 years’ when telling this over.”
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