“When Willie speaks, he takes away your free choice with his powers of persuasion”
T
he board of governors at Pardes House, North West London’s pioneer elementary yeshivah, urgently needed to make certain changes in the running of the school and the allocation of classes. Chairman of the governors, Mr. Willie Stern, took upon himself the task of explaining the challenging changes to a senior staffer, an old-time, European-born rebbi. He came back to the board and reported that the rebbi had given his agreement. The next day, when another board member mentioned the matter, the rebbi declared that he did not agree to the changes at all. “But Willie spoke to you, and you agreed,” the man protested, incredulous.
The elderly rebbi waved it away. “Yes, because when Willie speaks, er nemt avek der koiach habechirah (He takes away your free choice with his powers of persuasion).”
Budapest-born and Harvard-educated, Mr. Willie (Zeev Wolf HaKohen) Stern was equally articulate and persuasive in English, Hungarian, and French. He was ever eloquent, always diplomatic, one of London’s most masterful askanim, with an outsized sense of responsibility to the klal and a heart to match.
WILLIE’S COMMUNITY-CONSCIOUSNESS was inherited from his father, Chaim Stern, who was a prominent Jewish communal activist in pre-war Budapest, a textile manufacturer who supplied goods to the Hungarian government and heavily involved in rescue work once the war began. Once the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944 and the deportations to the death camps began, Chaim Stern secured several dozen places on the “Kastner Train” in the summer of 1944, which was to take its 1,684 Jews to neutral Switzerland. On the way, the train’s cattle cars detoured to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where the Jews languished for six months until finally being released and transported across the border. At the time, Willie was nine years old.
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