Perfect Arrangement

This Elul marks an entire Yovel since the passing of the great master of mussar, Rav Eliyahu Lopian, in 1970. As one of the relatively small number of great baalei mussar who emerged from the decimation of European Jewry, he played a significant role in transplanting its teachings and worldview to new locales, first in England and later in Eretz Yisrael.

Reb Elyah was firmly rooted in the mussar tradition of Kelm, and the heads of the famed Talmud Torah there held him in the highest esteem for his greatness in Torah and yiras Shamayim. His son-in-law, Rav Leib Gurwitz, who headed the Gateshead yeshivah, Beis Yosef, related that each year, Reb Elyah would be asked to blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah in the Talmud Torah.

As it happens, Reb Elyah’s efforts as baal tokeia were usually not very successful. Each year, the scene would repeat itself, as after a few tries it would become necessary to replace him with someone more adept at shofar-blowing. Nevertheless, the following year the menahalim of the Talmud Torah would once again request that Reb Elyah serve as baal tokeia, because, they’d explain, “just a few tekios of Reb Elyah are sufficient to soften the Divine judgement.”

There was another reason, too, for Reb Elyah’s stellar standing with the great men of Kelm: He was a man of action, who went looking in the cities of Lita for young men of promise, hoping to draw them near to Torah. It’s well known that it was he who discovered the young lad who went on to become Rav Mordechai Pogramansky, the Torah genius and baal mussar who was a legend in the prewar European yeshivah world, as well as later in postwar France.