Venerable individuals still among us share their recollections of personal encounters with yesteryear's giants
Memphis, Tennessee
Renowned as a rabbi and posek, Rav Nota Greenblatt of Memphis, Tennessee, has had his fair share of travels throughout his long life. Along the way, he has met numerous luminaries, accumulating enough stories to fill a few volumes. While still in the United States, he studied in Boston for a few years in a short-lived yeshivah run by Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. His chavrusa was the Brisker Rav’s future son-in-law Rav Michel Feinstein. “Not one shiur passed that Rav Soloveitchik didn’t quote his grandfather Rav Chaim Brisker. He lived it.” Later as a teenager in Israel in the postwar years, he had the opportunity to meet Rav Yitzchak Zev (Velvel) Soloveitchik, the Brisker Rav, on several occasions in his home.
But there’s a childhood encounter that’s particularly luminous, and it is this one we ask him to share.
Rav Nota’s father, Rav Yitzchak Greenblatt, was a native of Brisk, and traveled to the United States to fundraise on behalf of the local Toras Chesed Yeshivah. He subsequently assumed a rabbinical position in Washington, D.C., where his son Nota was born, before assuming a position in Ellenville, New York.
In an extremely unusual decision for that time, he decided to move his entire family to Eretz Yisrael in 1930, where they settled in Jerusalem. Shortly afterward, the six-year-old Nota fell ill.
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