Kessel Kosher

In 1923 the Chofetz Chaim decided that the community should provide kosher meals for Jewish soldiers. He named the project Kessel Kosher, the Kosher Kettle, and went to Vilna to ask Rav Chaim Ozer to back it. Rav Chaim Ozer declined, giving a number of weighty reasons why the timing was wrong.

The Chofetz Chaim shrugged. People think of me as a G-d-fearing man, he said, so when I reach the next world they will want to know why I did nothing about kosher food for the Jewish draftees. I will tell them that I was neither lazy nor indifferent, that I made the difficult journey to Vilna in my weakness, at an age beyond eighty, and that the Rav of Vilna, the gadol hador, ruled that I was mistaken. Who has a clearer view than the gadol hador of what is proper and what is not?

Rav Chaim Ozer saw that he had met his match. He arranged a public gathering in the main synagogue of Vilna, with the Chofetz Chaim as the speaker, and that is where Kessel Kosher began.