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He was a close confidant of the Chazon Ish and a faithful shaliach of gedolei Yisrael, but Reb Nochum Yoel Halpern’s children remember something else: a man who ran from honor even as it pursued him

It was Succos of 1942, and a frum Jew from Tel Aviv named Benzion Shulevitz decided to take his family on a Chol Hamoed outing to the moshavah of Magdiel (today Hod Hasharon, on the outskirts of Petach Tikvah). As they passed through one of the adjoining secular kibbutzim, Reb Benzion noticed part of a sefer Torah, splattered with mud and chicken blood, lying on a crate by the kibbutz’s chicken coop. Reb Benzion picked up the scroll — it went from parshas Vayakhel to parshas Korach — and, cutting short his family’s tiyul, ran to the home of Magdiel’s rav, Rav Dov Maayani ztz”l to report his find. Rav Maayani — a venerated talmid chacham who was close to the litvish and chassidish gedolim of the generation — was horrified. With Reb Benzion at his side, the Rav hurried to the nearby kibbutz and asked the people in charge for the scroll. They were happy to give the partial Torah to the Rav, but said they had no idea where the rest of the scroll was, or even how this section wound up in the chicken coop. They assumed the parchments were left by the members of Kibbutz Beit Oren, who had originally settled this tract of land and had recently relocated to the Carmel region.

Rav Maayani, who had the unenviable task of upholding Torah and maintaining the peace between the traditional residents of his kehillah and the surrounding secular kibbutzim, brought the yerios back to the shul in Magdiel until he could research it further. But word of the discovery got out, and an investigation by some Agudah activists showed how the real story was a sad reflection of the times: It turned out that the son of a certain rabbi in Russia was one of the founders of Kibbutz Beit Oren, and when the young pioneer departed for Eretz Yisrael, his saintly father naively thought he’d need a sefer Torah there. Due to weight and transportation restrictions, the rabbi divided the scroll into several sections and lovingly wrapped each separately, to be reattached once they reached their destination. But the kibbutzniks had no need for those archaic folios: One package wound up in the chicken coop, and the others were never found.

When the Chazon Ish heard about the disgraced parchments, he set his mind to restoring their glory — and he immediately knew whom to summon: Reb Nochum Yoel Halpern.

Reb Nochum Yoel was a young askan the Chazon Ish relied on implicitly to navigate the complexities facing the Torah community of those years. (Reb Nochum Yoel had come to Eretz Yisrael from Europe with his parents a decade before, and he and his father were the founders of the Zichron Meir neighborhood of fledgling Bnei Brak.)