A School for Girls Comes First

Shraga Block, who called himself the Rebbe’s baal agalah (wagon driver), volunteered to drive Rav Elchonon around New York. Once he brought him to meet the residents of Brighton Beach, a remote Brooklyn neighborhood that lacked the means to build schools for boys and girls at the same time. The question was which came first.

Rav Elchonon said that if he had been asked in Baranovitch, he would have answered at once that the yeshivah comes first. In America, however, a girls’ school must come first. He explained that this follows the halachic order of priority in ransoming captives, where women are redeemed before men, and the same principle applied here.