Rav Yisroel Kanarek was a strong believer in the ability of the Torah to reshape a person — especially when a yeshivah was located far away from the distractions of big city life. And so he found his dream location for Ohr Hameir in the “vald” ofPeekskill. Fifty years after Rav Yisroel recruited his first students, his son Rav Elya Kanarek reclaims those early days of the “Peekskill Mandate.”
Rav Yisroel Kanarek was a strong believer in the ability of the Torah to reshape a person — especially when a yeshivah was located far away from the distractions of big city life. And so he found his dream location for Ohr Hameir in the “vald” of Peekskill. Fifty years after Rav Yisroel recruited his first students, his son Rav Elya Kanarek reclaims those early days of the “Peekskill Mandate”
The Rosh Yeshivah’s home is a humble structure, perched — as if symbolically — at the summit of the sloping hill that is the campus of Yeshivah Ohr Hameir. But it’s what’s inside that gives a real clue as to what makes this yeshivah special. The front door opens directly into the Rosh Yeshivah’s dining room, without a foyer or entrance hall preempting it, showing whoever enters that the role of the Rosh Yeshivah is far more than didactic.
Rav Elya Kanarek, the present rosh yeshivah, didn’t create this atmosphere, though. He is just following the path hewn by his revered father, Rav Yisroel Kanarek, a soul from the vanished Torah world that arrived in America and started again. It was Rav Yisroel who traveled to this picturesque corner of Westchester County and said, “Here! Here we can teach Torah.”
Leipzig is a German city, yet it lives in the annals of Chassidus by virtue of a great chassidic rebbe who settled there, the Boyaner-Leipziger Rebbe. His shul in Leipzig drew many “Ostjuden,” Jewish immigrants from the Eastern European countries of Poland and Galicia who’d come to settle there. Reb Tzvi Mordechai Kanarek was among them.
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