“When he learned that Rav Lopiansky, then a maggid shiur in Mir Yerushalayim, was willing to consider the position, he made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Rav Ahron Lopiansky was a maggid shiur in Mir Yerushalayim when he was invited to head a yeshivah in Silver Spring. What is it about Rav Ahron’s own background and experiences that has enabled him to successfully integrate the values and passion of the Mir into this quintessence of American suburbia?
Silver Spring, Maryland is every bit as suburban as the name sounds, an upper-middle-class bedroom community that most of the Orthodox Jews employed by the federal government in nearby Washington DC call home. In a town where physicists and economists predominate and real estate moguls are scarce, Silver Spring’s longstanding frum community is one in which ideas are valued over mansions with Ferraris out front, and the brand of Orthodoxy is of a decidedly modern orientation.
But situated in Silver Spring’s geographic and spiritual center is an institution that, for two decades now, has been playing against type, creating a hub of Torah learning and living on a level that some said could never survive, let alone thrive, in these parts. The man at its head all these years is an improbable fit in his own right: a student of Torah greats like Rav Nachum Partzovitz and ybdlch”t Rav Moshe Shapiro and a Torah personality himself, his wife a scion of the Finkel family of Yeshivas Mir fame. Yet the more one learns about the institution, the Yeshiva of Greater Washington, and the longer one spends speaking with the man, Rav Ahron Lopiansky, the clearer it becomes just how much they and Silver Spring are a singularly successful match.
It was over 50 years ago that Rav Gedaliah Anemer, then a 26-year old talmid of Cleveland’s Telshe Yeshivah, arrived in the nation’s capital to assume rabbinic leadership of Congregation Shomrai Emunah. Seeing that the days of Washington’s Jewish community were numbered, he took two families and moved out to Silver Spring, where he established Young Israel Shomrai Emunah, founded on uncompromising fealty to halachah. As Rav Lopiansky describes it, Rabbi Anemer “picked his battles, but on halachah he couldn’t be shaken. He ran the town’s kashrus supervision with an iron fist, never taking money for it. He wouldn’t touch geirus because he knew that otherwise he’d be put in impossible positions.”
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