Rav Chaim Michoel Dov Weissmandl

Early years

Rav Chaim Michoel Dov Weissmandl zt"l was born Michoel Ber in Debrecen, Hungary, on 4 Cheshvan 5664 (October 25, 1903), the son of Yosef Weissmandl, a shochet. A few years later the family moved to Tyrnau (today Trnava, Slovakia).

In 1931 he went to Nitra to learn under Rav Shmuel Dovid Ungar, and in 1937 he married the Rav's daughter, Bracha Rachel. He was an oberlander, from the central highlands of Europe, and not a Chassidic Jew.

Torah and leadership

Rav Michoel Dov was a scholar and an expert at deciphering ancient manuscripts. For his research he travelled to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. It is related that the Chief Librarian treated him with great respect after he correctly identified the author of a manuscript that the library's scholars had attributed to someone else.

The war years

On September 1, 1939, while at Oxford, Rav Michoel Dov volunteered to return to Slovakia as an agent of World Agudas Yisroel. When the Nazis gathered sixty rabbanim from Burgenland and sent them to Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia refused them entry and Austria would not take them back. Rav Michoel Dov flew to England, where he was received by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Foreign Office. He explained the tragic situation and obtained entry visas to England for all sixty rabbanim.

In 1942 the Nazis, aided by members of the puppet Slovak government, began their moves against the Jews of Slovakia. Members of the Slovak Judenrat then formed an underground organisation, the Bratislava Working Group, led by Gisi Fleischmann and Rav Michoel Dov. Its main work was to help Jews in every way possible, partly by paying bribes and ransom to German and Slovak officials. That year it opened high-level ransom negotiations with the Germans. After the group arranged a ransom deal of $50,000 (in 1952 dollars) with the SS official Dieter Wisliceny, the transports of Slovak Jews stopped for two years.

Largely by bribing diplomats, Rav Michoel Dov smuggled letters and telegrams to people he hoped would help, warning them of the steady destruction of European Jewry. His letters reached Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he entrusted a diplomat with a letter for Pope Pius XII at the Vatican. He was the first to propose bombing the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. That proposal, and later suggestions from others, were never carried out.

He and the Working Group also helped send the Auschwitz Protocols to Switzerland and many other countries. Large demonstrations followed in Switzerland, sermons about the plight of the Jews were delivered in Swiss churches, and the Swiss press ran a campaign of about 400 headlines protesting the atrocities. These events, together with other considerations, led Roosevelt, Churchill and others to threaten Hungary's Regent, Miklós Horthy, with retribution, and this was one of the main factors that convinced him to stop the transports from Hungary.

In October 1944 Rav Michoel Dov and his family were rounded up and put on a train bound for Auschwitz. He escaped from the sealed train by cutting a hole with a saw that he had hidden in a loaf of bread. He jumped from the moving train and made his way to Bratislava, where he found shelter in a bunker in the storage room of a private house. Seventeen other Jews were hiding there, among them the Rebbe of Stropkov, Rav Menachem Mendel Halberstam.

Rezső Kasztner visited the bunker several times, once, to the dismay of those hiding there, in the company of the SS officer Max Grüson. In April 1945 he came again with another SS officer, who took the group to Switzerland by truck, escorted by German soldiers. When Rav Michoel Dov arrived in Switzerland he suffered a major heart attack.

Rebuilding in America

After the war Rav Michoel Dov came to the United States, having lost his family and having been unable to save the Jews of Slovakia. At first he was so distraught that he would pound the walls and weep bitterly over what had happened to his people. Later he remarried and had children, but he never forgot his family in Europe, and he suffered from depression all his life because of the Holocaust.

His second wife was Leah Teitelbaum (1924/5 – April 9, 2009), a daughter of Rav Chaim Eliyahu Teitelbaum and a native of Beregszász, Hungary. They had five children.

In November 1946 Rav Michoel Dov and his brother-in-law, Rav Sholom Moshe Ungar, re-established the Nitra yeshiva in Somerville, New Jersey, gathering the surviving talmidim of the original Nitra yeshiva. With the help of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, he bought the Brewster estate in Mount Kisco, in Westchester County, New York, and moved the yeshiva there in 1949. There he founded a self-sustaining agricultural community known as the Yeshiva Farm Settlement.

At first the neighbors did not welcome the settlement. At a town hall meeting, however, Helen Bruce Baldwin (1907–1994) of nearby Chappaqua, wife of the Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times military correspondent Hanson W. Baldwin, was impressed by Rav Michoel Dov and defended it. She also wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times on its behalf.

Rav Michoel Dov planned the yeshiva on the model of the agricultural settlements described in the Gemara. A young man would learn Torah without interruption until he was old enough to marry, and then he would work the land by day and learn in the evenings. This approach was not fully realized, but the yeshiva flourished, and the settlement is known today as the Nitra community.

Seforim

Two of Rav Michoel Dov's books were published after his passing. Toras Chemed (Mount Kisco, 1958) gathers his religious writings, including commentaries and homilies as well as material of a kabbalistic nature on the methods of Torah interpretation. It contains the observations that led to what is known as the Torah Codes, and today he is best known for this pioneering work in an era before computers.

Min HaMeitzar (Yerushalayim, 1960) describes his experiences during the war. Its title is taken from the first two words of Tehillim 118:5, meaning "from the straits."

In 1958 the great work Kikayon D'Yonah by Rav Yonah Teomim-Frankel appeared in a new edition with Rav Michoel Dov's own footnotes and glosses. In his introduction to it he gives an emotional history lesson.

Later years and passing

In his later years Rav Michoel Dov suffered from chronic heart disease and was often hospitalized. In the early winter of 1957 he had a severe heart attack and spent several weeks in the hospital. Soon after he came home, he went to the yeshiva's fundraising banquet, and was then admitted to the hospital once more.

His health declined, and he passed away on Friday, 6 Kislev 5718 (November 29, 1957), at the age of fifty-four. His wife never remarried. His kever is in Woodbridge, New Jersey, at the Beth Israel Cemetery (also called Woodbridge Memorial Gardens), in the section of Khal Adas Yereim Vien.