Yeshivah students across Israel knew that Rav Leizer Yudel had a “weakness” for bnei Torah
Just weeks after the armistice ending the 1948 War of Independence was signed, the Mir rosh yeshivah, Rav Leizer Yudel Finkel, turned to the legendary Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung in New York for assistance with his fledgling yeshivah in Yerushalayim. With a student body of 91 and stipends still paid out in Palestinian lira, the monthly budget rounded out to the whopping sum of LP 1,264. As the Palestinian pound had been pegged to the British pound until the end of the Mandate a year prior, this amounted to an annual budget of over 15,000 pounds for the nascent yeshivah.
As he had done previously, Rabbi Jung continued to assist the yeshivah, even obtaining funds for a building from one of his well-heeled congregants, the great Torah supporter Samuel Kaufman.
Rav Leizer Yudel, having escaped to Eretz Yisrael from Europe in 1941, spent the war years apart from his beloved yeshivah, which had fled across Asia to Shanghai. He first settled in Tel Aviv near his son — and future mashgiach of Mir — Rav Chaim Zev Finkel. The latter was one of the founders of the Slabodka branch in Tel Aviv, Heichal Hatalmud. Though Tel Aviv was teeming with Torah scholars, chassidic rebbes, and yeshivos, Rav Leizer Yudel made it clear that his stay there was just a stopover on his itinerary.
In 1944 he founded the Mir Yeshivah of Yerushalayim, with ten Yerushalmi talmidim in a modest shul in Batei Milner, not far from their current location in the Beis Yisrael neighborhood. Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, at great personal sacrifice, sent top talmidim from his own Etz Chaim, which formed the nucleus of the original elite group at the Mir. The yeshivah grew slowly but steadily into the great citadel of Torah we know today — now the largest in the world, with close to 10,000 talmidim.
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