Sweetness and Steel

The powerful tribute to Gaon Av Beis Din of the Eidah Hachareidis Rav Yitzchok Tovia Weiss ztz”l, by Mishpacha’s Hebrew editor Aryeh Ehrlich, accorded the Gaavad the honor he so greatly deserved. I add these lines to supply details that help amplify some of the themes that made this gadol’s life so unusual.

For his last two decades, Rav Weiss occupied a position of great prominence and honor as head of one of the most storied communities in Klal Yisrael’s most storied city. But much of his life until that point, especially earlier on, had been far different. He had undergone travail that might well have broken another person.

Orphaned by the accursed Nazis of both parents at age twelve, Tovia escaped to faraway Britain, where after a short stay in London he was sent to live with a non-Jewish family in the English countryside. The very first Shabbos there, was his bar mitzvah day, for which his gentile hostess prepared a bountiful spread of decidedly treif foods.

But the youngster refused to touch any of it, and when a Reform clergyman was summoned to render his “psak” that nonkosher meat was fit to consume so long as it was cold, Tovia replied that this was nonsense. At that, the clergyman slapped him on both cheeks, and for the rest of his life, the Gaavad proudly called those two blows “my bar mitzvah present.”