Fueled by Fire 

With a burning sense of mission, Rav Elya Meir Bloch resurrected Telshe yeshivah in America’s spiritual wasteland

When Rav Elya Meir arrived in America in 1940, intending to rebuild a world that had gone up in flames, others thought he was indulging in wishful thinking. America was the New World, they reasoned. There was no place to replicate the yeshivos of Europe. However, he was undeterred by popular opinion, as the following anecdote shows. Wishing to purchase a Ketzos Hachoshen, a classic sefer in the litvish derech halimud, Rav Elya Meir trekked up and down the Lower East Side, then the center of the fledgling frum community in New York, without success. Finally, the proprietor of one Judaica store found him the coveted sefer. “Rebbi,” he said, as handed Rav Elya Meir the dusty volume, “this is the last Ketzos in America.”

Rav Elya Meir, who had lost so much but still held on to his drive to rebuild, looked at the man and responded. “No, my friend,” he said. “You are mistaken. This is the first Ketzos in America.”

My grandfather sincerely believed that regenerating Torah in America was his sacred duty and that this mission was the reason Hashem had spared him from the inferno of the Holocaust. In the notebook where he recorded his Torah thoughts, in the middle of a shtickel Torah, there is a chilling entry.

“I have just received official confirmation of my worst fears — my family was decimated by the Nazis.