Book Marks

Rav Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman, the towering rosh yeshivah of Baltimore’s Ner Israel whose 35th yahrtzeit is being marked this year on 14 Tammuz, was a self-described “shikkur for seforim.” Only someone thus intoxicated would pay one hundred dollars for the sefer Oneg Yom Tov, a staggering sum when he did so in 1938.

A favorite “liquor store” of his was Biegeleisen’s, when the famed bookseller was still on the Lower East Side, before relocating to its current Boro Park premises (with the iconic “J. Biegeleisen Hebrew Books” sign still out front in the window). When Rav Ruderman would return home after traveling to New York for a wedding, he would try to whisk his multiple newly purchased seforim past his rebbetzin’s gaze under his kapoteh.

Nor would he put a newly acquired sefer on the shelf until he’d gone through it first. Toward the end of the Rosh Yeshivah’s life, two bochurim would accompany him in the summer for a stay in Camp Agudah. Once, a vendor was selling seforim in the camp and the Rosh Yeshivah went to check out his wares. He bought three seforim, gave one to each of the bochurim with him, and kept the last one — a newly published volume of the Mishnas Rav Aharon — for himself. When he retired for the night, the bochurim helped him close the lights and put away his glasses, but one of them went back to check on the Rosh Yeshivah in the middle of the night and found him learning through the Mishnas Rav Aharon. Notwithstanding his extremely poor eyesight, he had found his glasses and arisen from bed in his eagerness to learn from the newly published sefer.

Rav Ruderman wasn’t just entranced by seforim in general, he authored a monumental Torah work of his own. Avodas Levi, on topics in Seder Kodshim, was published in Lita in 1930 and garnered haskamos from two of the prewar generation’s leading talmidei chachamim: Rav Avrohom Duber Shapiro, known as the Kovner Rav, and Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein, Rav Ruderman’s rosh yeshivah in Slabodka. These approbations stand out in their effusiveness about both the mechaber and the sefer. Reb Moshe Mordechai, for example, writes these astonishing words about the then 28-year-old author: “Hineni l’hadiya b’shaar bas rabim ki gadol hu migedolei u’geonei hazman, v’chidushav heima ne’emorim b’geonus  — I hereby publicly declare that he is a gadol among the gedolim of our time, and his chiddushim are sheer brilliance!”