Building Worlds

30 years later, Rav Simcha Wasserman’s legacy endures 

Rav Simcha Wasserman built communities, one after another, but as soon as he established them on solid footing, he would hand over the reins and move on. He was in the background, which is exactly where he wanted to be. But the cornerstones he laid l’sheim Shamayim grew into solid edifices. Over 30 years after his petirah,  his legacy endures

The flourishing growth of the contemporary frum community would be unthinkable were it not for the seeds planted by great individuals in 20th century America. There were roshei yeshivah of towering stature and legendary mechanchim who founded institutions of lasting importance, klal activists who engaged in lifesaving hatzolah work, and pioneers of kiruv who brought countless Jews back from the spiritual brink.

And then there was Rav Simcha Wasserman.

For nearly three decades, from the 1950s through the 70s, he and his wife, Rebbetzin Faiga Rochel, crisscrossed the American Jewish landscape together — east to west and north to south — teaching Torah, seeding schools, touching lives with love and caring, and drawing distant Jewish souls near. Wherever they went, the influence they wielded was enormous, and endures still. And yet, three decades after his passing, Rav Simcha Wasserman remains a relatively lesser-known American gadol — which is precisely as he would have wanted it.

Reb Simcha’s story spans entire eras and four continents, and capturing his life in all its magnificent fullness requires a very wide lens. He once recalled how in Telshe, in far northern Lithuania, summer nights are extremely short, and while walking one Motzaei Shabbos in the fields on the town’s outskirts he saw a sunset and sunrise at the same time. This struck him as an apt metaphor for his own life, during which he witnessed the sunset of a thousand years of traditional European Jewish life, followed by the blackest of nights during the war years, and the simultaneous rising of the sun of a new Jewish generation in America and Eretz Yisrael.

The Novardok Launch

The eldest son of Rav Elchonon Wasserman, legendary head of Baranovitch’s Yeshiva Ohel Torah, Reb Simcha spent his formative years in the company of prewar Eastern Europe’s most storied Torah leaders. His father was the Chofetz Chaim’s prime disciple, and little Simcha spent time sitting on that renowned tzaddik’s lap. He was also a nephew of Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky, whose second wife, Yacha, was a sister of Reb Simcha’s mother, Rebbetzin Michla Wasserman.