The thousands who came to Rav Steinman's home were unaware that upstairs, Rav Yitzchak Grodzinski’s modest demeanor hid the splendor of the last prince of Slabodka
Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Ariel Dvir
When a bankrupt contractor walked away mid-job from a small building project in Bnei Brak in the 1950s, the four young couples who had bought apartments on paper didn’t have much choice. Cash was scarce, and the families banded together to move into the unfinished shell. Slowly the apartments were completed by laborers after their day shift on the building site of a nearby yeshivah.
Having left the buyers to fend for themselves, the contractor didn’t dream that he’d just built an icon: a modest building, that 70 years on, feels like a museum of Torah greatness.
Those unpainted pebble-dash corridors and bare concrete walls watched as hundreds of thousands of Jews passed by to speak to one of the occupants. In the last decades of his 104 years, Rav Aharon Leib Steinman’s spartan apartment at Rechov Chazon Ish 5 became famous as the address for Jewish problems.
The thousands who climbed the steep stairway to the building may not have realized, but the other apartments had illustrious residents, too. Next door to the Steinmans lived the Levensteins; Rav Yitzchok Levenstein was Rav Steinman’s longtime gabbai.
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