Voices from a Vanished World

Sunday, Parshas Korach, 24 Sivan 1939, Krakow

To the esteemed hanhalah of the holy yeshivah Yachel [Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin] in Lublin,

I would like to pass the entrance exam for the upcoming zeman, and I wasn’t aware that the application deadline was 10 Sivan. I therefore am requesting that the honorable hanhalah not turn me away and not reject me from the yeshivah, because I wasn’t aware of the deadline. Please send me the application questionnaire, because I have a great desire to be accepted to the holy yeshivah, and I really hope that you fulfill my request.

With respect,

Shlomo Hammer

Whether Shlomo’s postcard was answered or not is unknown. It’s also not known whether Shlomo was to be found, the following Elul zeman, in the beis medrash of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin’s magnificent edifice at 57 Lubartowska Street in Lublin, Poland.

But it is almost certain that he shared the fate of 90 percent of Polish Jewry and of the yeshivah he so desired to join. Less than three months after Shlomo wrote his letter to the yeshivah hanhalah, and just two weeks into the upcoming Elul zeman, the Nazis invaded Poland, the yeshivah dispersed, and over the subsequent years of the Holocaust, the Jews of Krakow, Lublin, and the rest of the country were massacred by the Nazis, leaving few survivors.

Yet through a fascinating course of events, his postcard, along with an entire cache of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin correspondence, did survive. This collection of letters from fundraisers and applicants provides insight into the inner workings of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin. It even contains personal letters to Chachmei Lublin’s esteemed founder, Rav Meir Shapiro, sent when he was still rabbi of Piotrkow, Poland, prior to his ascension to the Lublin rabbinate with the yeshivah’s establishment in 1930. These postcards, written in Hebrew or Yiddish, provide mundane details of daily Jewish life in Poland in the context of its greatest yeshivah, and open a rare window onto a lost world.

Piotr Nazaruk is a Polish scholar who has dedicated his life to restoring the Torah library of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin, which was largely lost after the Holocaust. (See “The Legend of the Lost Library of Lublin” in Issue 939.) His research has uncovered a wide range of documentation on the yeshivah in general. He recently recovered this collection of postcards, sent to the yeshivah during the 1930s, under a unique set of circumstances. In our correspondence with Piotr, he shared the background to this discovery.