The brief item in last week’s Inner Circle feature (Issue 342) brought back a flood of memories surrounding an unusual and moving encounter with Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman ztz”l the founder and rosh yeshivah of Yeshivas Ponovezh. I was a witness to that drama.
The news item told about the establishment of a shul in Kibbutz Ein Charod through the work of the Ayelet Hashachar organization. The Ponovezher Rav’s grandson Rav Leizer Kahaneman was invited to the dedication ceremony so that he could see with his own eyes how his venerable grandfather’s wish was being fulfilled.
Nice. For most readers this was an ordinary news item good news to be sure but nothing to get excited about. But for me and my contemporaries it was a momentous event the closing of a circle.
It carried me back in time to my days as a young bochur in Yeshivas Ponovezh when my friends and I had the privilege of listening to the fiery speeches of our rosh yeshivah. Time and again in those deliveries he declared his firm belief that even in such places as Ein Charod the people of Israel would one day do teshuvah and that we must prepare tefillin for these kibbutzniks. He held us spellbound with his rhetorical skills; his eyes would sparkle and flash shooting arrows of faith that pierced our hearts and lodged there infecting us too with the belief that this day would indeed come and that we must be ready for it.
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