Rav Yaakov Yisroel Kanievsky

Three Tries at the Border

It is told that after the Steipler left the army, so many yeshiva students were stealing across the Russian border that it happened almost daily. Every crossing was a gamble with death.

When his group's turn came, a farmer was to take them across, and he divided the young men among the members of his family. Yaakov Yisroel was assigned to go with the farmer's daughter. Afraid of yichud (the prohibition of a man and woman being alone together), he fled from her and ran straight into the hands of the Russians. They put him in prison, but before long he escaped.

On his second try he needed to relieve himself. He could have held out until they were across, and the others would not wait for him. But he would not transgress bal teshaktzu (the prohibition against making oneself repulsive by holding back bodily needs), so he left the group and lost his chance.

On the third try, the time for Mincha came, and he would not let its zman pass. He went off to a quiet spot in the forest and davened, pouring out his heart to his Creator for a long time, unaware of anything around him. When he finished, the group was long gone. Lost, he wandered through the forest until he found himself beside a beis medrash. He asked where he was and was told: Slutzk, Poland. He had crossed the border.

Beaten for Shabbos

It is told that when the young Yaakov Yisroel was serving in the Russian army, he walked into his commander's office as Shabbos approached and declared that he would not desecrate it.

The officer was stunned. No recruit had ever dared such a thing, and it could easily have cost him his life. He said he would allow the young man to keep Shabbos on one condition. Before he could even say what it was, the future Steipler said yes.

“Fine,” said the officer. “Since you will be leaving extra work for the other soldiers, your fellow soldiers will get to beat you as much as they please.” He knew how cruel and how hostile to Jews those strong young soldiers were, yet he accepted the brutal beating with joy. Another account tells that he was court-martialed for “failing to do his duty” and forced to pass between two lines of soldiers under orders to strike him as he went.

In later years he said that he carried those moments with him all his life. Nothing he did afterwards ever brought back the life they had poured into his battered body. That was how he met every mitzvah, whether light or weighty.

Matza for a Widow's Seder

One year, shortly before Purim, a talmid chacham in Bnei Brak passed away. Some time later, one of the Steipler's close talmidim came to discuss a matter concerning the almanah (widow).

Partway through, the Steipler turned to a different subject. Pesach was coming, he said, and when the widow sat at her Seder table she would feel her loneliness keenly. She would remember how her husband had always used hand matza on that night, and she had very likely not bought any. He would give her some of his own.

He rose, brought out his package of matza and handed a portion to the talmid, telling him it would last through the Seder. He added one condition. The talmid was not to say the matza came from the Steipler, since one may not give a gift to a woman; he should say only that the Steipler had handed him matza to pass on to someone in need.

Afterwards the talmid said that no words could describe the excitement and the tears in the widow's home when he walked in and told her he had matza for her Seder from the Steipler.

New Seforim in the Three Weeks

The Rema rules (Orach Chaim 551:2) that building or planting for the sake of a mitzvah is permitted in the Three Weeks, and even in the Nine Days. The Mishnah Berurah (14) adds that a person who has no children yet and is to marry after Tisha B'Av may buy his wedding clothes even during the Nine Days.

On this basis, the Piskei Teshuvos (10) allows a person to buy seforim in the Nine Days if he needs them in order to learn. He notes, however, citing Orchos Rabbeinu, that the Steipler was stringent and would not let new seforim into his home during the Three Weeks.

Once, when a delivery of seforim came in the Nine Days, he told his family to leave it closed until after Tisha B'Av. New seforim brought him such happiness that he held back for himself: to him, they were far too joyous for those days.

Honoring Every Sefer

The Steipler was especially careful about kavod hasefer, the honor due to holy books. The sefer Toldos Yaakov gives several examples of his care and sensitivity.

Once, when someone took down the wrong sefer for him, he made sure to learn something from it before it went back on the shelf, so as not to “embarrass” it.

He repaired every tear in his seforim. When his Shas was rebound, he said, “I have pleasure from the fact that my seforim have been restored with their proper honor.”

If he fell asleep over a sefer after learning until his last ounce of strength was spent, he felt terrible about the lack of respect to the sefer.

Two of his own seforim, Birkas Peretz and Chayei Olam, were first sold at cost, because he felt they were worth spreading widely. Later he raised the price, feeling that so low a price did not befit the honor of the seforim. The profits went to tzedakah.

In many shuls and yeshivos in Eretz Yisroel, a notice hangs near the seforim shelves about returning seforim after use instead of leaving them on the table. It tells of a time the Steipler finished learning in a yeshiva not far from his home. He had walked about a hundred meters, though walking was very hard for him, when he realized he had not put his sefer back. He turned around, went back to his seat, returned the sefer to its place, and only then went home.

The Steipler was a living Sefer Torah. We may never reach his level of Torah, but there is no reason we cannot reach his level of respect for the seforim in which the Torah is written.

The Steipler and the Elections

After the Steipler's passing, one of the hespeidim printed in the Hebrew edition of Yated, during its first year, carried the title “What Does the Steipler Say?” People went on asking that question even when he could no longer be asked, a sign of how deeply his leadership had shaped the Torah community.

The Chazon Ish had guided the small, struggling Torah community of the new yishuv through its first battles to stay loyal to the Torah, against constant pressure from the Zionist establishment. His brother-in-law the Steipler then led the community as it grew larger and stronger. He guarded it against those who would weaken it from within, made sure its voice was heard in public life, and left it stronger and more confident than he found it.

Two things marked his public leadership. One was his fight against Poalei Agudas Yisroel (PAI), which he called “the party of deserters.” The other was the leadership he shared with Rav Eliezer Menachem Shach. The two gedolim rarely met, yet they saw every question brought before them the same way, and each deferred to the other in a remarkable manner.

The Steipler held that voting for the chareidi list was a great mitzvah and a means of saving Yiddishkeit. When a questioner argued that voting involved Torah prohibitions, even an acknowledgment of avodah zarah, the Steipler wrote that this had no basis and that voting involved no prohibition at all. He did not wish the Neturei Karta to change their own practice, since their holding back came from zeal for Hashem. But even for the sake of zeal, he wrote, one may not read the Torah against the halacha, and a position built on something untrue can never succeed. The letter appears in Karaino De'igarto (vol. I, #203).

For him the elections were only a battle against those who would destroy Yiddishkeit, never a way to advance any group's interests. He had no party loyalty whatsoever and judged each question on its own merits, yet he never let emotional zealotry decide what the halacha required.

In those years some were questioning what the Chazon Ish and the Brisker Rov had ruled on taking part in elections. Before the elections of 5737 (1977), Rav Shach declared that he was not giving his own opinion: both the Brisker Rov and the Chazon Ish had held that one should vote, and the Steipler held the same. Had the Steipler ever heard the Chazon Ish so much as hint at opposition, Rav Shach added, he would never back voting today.

The Steipler himself wrote that some twenty years earlier the great majority of gedolei Yisroel, the Chazon Ish among them, had found no trace of a prohibition in voting, and that most Torah sages, living and departed, saw it as a true obligation. When someone suggested he add the words “except for Yerushalayim,” he refused. He did not want to be drawn into a second dispute over whether the authority of the Badatz bound only members of the Eida HaChareidis or everyone living in Yerushalayim (Karaino De'igarto #154, 156). His own view on that point can in fact be seen in another of his letters (vol. I, #221).

Standing Firm Against the Party of Deserters

Just as firmly as he held that one must vote, the Steipler ruled that PAI must be kept at a distance. The movement had begun in Europe as an organization of chareidi workers, part of the worldwide Agudas Yisroel movement, created as a counterweight to the workers' groups of the irreligious Zionists. Its youth wing, which included many members from Germany, founded several settlements in Eretz Yisroel.

As PAI became part of the country's farming life, its leaders took steps that amounted to a slow merger with Zionist bodies, and they drew away from the Agudah's Torah leadership, all the more so after the State was founded. In 5708 (1948) they placed their settlements on land of the Keren Kayemet (Jewish National Fund). This step had been debated years before with Rav Elchonon Wassermann, whom PAI's leaders had answered with marked disrespect, and now they claimed that the Chazon Ish's silence meant consent.

From then on, at every turn, PAI claimed the backing of a gadol who was never named: for mixed activities of boys and girls in Ezra, its youth movement, and for negotiating over Sherut Leumi (national service for girls). Over Sherut Leumi, the Chazon Ish wrote a PAI leader, Rav Kalman Kahana, a letter of fearsome rebuke, telling him that “a spirit of foolishness” had taken hold of them and that they were committing suicide.

In 5711 (1951) PAI's leaders backed an irreligious candidate for mayor of Petach Tikva over a religious one. Rav Yechezkel Sarna and Rav Meir Karelitz, the Chazon Ish's older brother, forbade it in a letter issued by the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. Rav Meir Karelitz was then PAI's official rav; when its politicians refused to listen, he resigned from every position of rabbinic or other leadership. For years after that, the Agudah, loyal to its Torah leaders, tried to sway PAI's leaders through its ordinary members, and the two still ran together in national elections.

In 5720 (1960) their joint list won six Knesset seats, three of which went to PAI's faction under B. Mintz. Then the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah ruled against joining the coalition of the leftist government, and PAI joined anyway. The secular press hailed it as “PAI's independence day,” meaning independence from the Torah leadership. Roshei yeshiva, Rebbes and leaders gathered and declared that PAI had broken away from Agudas Yisroel. The Rebbes of Ger, Vishnitz and Boyan, together with the Tchebiner Rov, told their followers to give up their PAI membership even if it hurt their livelihoods, and from then on the two parties ran on separate lists.

Rabbi Y. M. Levin passed away in 5733 (1973). He had chaired the Agudah's central committee and had always worked to hold the movement together. Soon voices within the Agudah began calling for PAI to return to the list. With elections approaching, the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah was hastily called together at very short notice, with rabbonim present who had never sat on it before.

The Steipler wrote to Rav Shach that merging with the deserters, whose ideology was the idol of Zionism and who would turn against the Moetzes again the moment they saw some gain in it, would be “a dreadful chillul Hashem.” It would be read as approving all their scheming, and as proof that defying the Torah and the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah pays well. He begged Rav Shach to do all he could to prevent it, warning that many members stayed with the Agudah only because it was not joined with the other side.

Rav Shach read the letter aloud at the meeting. A politician who favored the merger proposed putting it to a vote, and most of those present, the new members included, supported it. The joint list was called the United Torah Front. Rav Shach at once resigned from the Moetzes, and Rav Shlomo Berman of the Agudah's presidium also resigned in protest at how the matter had been handled. Their signatures, and those of other gedolei Torah, were missing from the campaign, but since there was no other chareidi list, no open opposition was voiced.

Rabbi Shlomo Lorincz, who headed the Agudah list and followed the gedolim faithfully, was told not to resign, but not to campaign for the list in Yerushalayim or Bnei Brak. He was allowed to speak in outlying towns, so that the chareidim there would not lose their connection to the movement. An avreich who asked whether to vote was told that this time no instruction to vote had been given, and without such an instruction one does not vote. The combined list won five seats, one fewer than the six the two parties had always won together.

The Gerrer Rebbe, the Beis Yisroel, instructed in 5737 (1977) that the party run separately from PAI, so as to unite the chareidim once more and win Rav Shach's agreement to return to the Moetzes. Rav Shach returned and called on the public to vote. The Steipler added a warm letter of his own, closing with praise for Rav Shach as one of “the remnants of the Knesses Hagedola.” In those elections the Agudah held its ground, and PAI was left with a single seat.

Just a year later, in the Bnei Brak municipal elections, a joint list was formed with a PAI candidate at its head. That PAI had found a way back in so soon, and in Bnei Brak of all places, drew a strong response from the gedolim. The Steipler and Rav Shach had Rav Chaim Shaul Karelitz publish a notice telling the public that the Aguda list must not receive their votes.

Some argued that the instruction was meant only for bnei Torah, and that their families and others could still vote for the list. After davening in the Lederman shul, Rav Chaim Kanievsky, the Steipler's son, walked over to the notice board and wrote beneath the notice in his own hand that it applied to talmidei chachamim and amei ha'aretz alike, to the men themselves and to their wives, and to their sons and daughters.

Before the elections of 5741 (1981), Aguda activists asked the Steipler for a letter of support, and he sent them away. Rav E. Tabaschnik, who often visited his home, heard from him then that he was unhappy with the state of things in the Agudah and did not mean to sign for them at all. A few days later, though, a letter from the Steipler appeared urging people to vote Aguda, in somewhat reserved language. Rav Tabaschnik went to ask what had changed. The Steipler explained that he had indeed meant not to write, but when he heard that his refusal had upset Rav Shach, he agreed.

Three days later word came out that people from inside the Agudah had strengthened the separate PAI list. The Steipler quickly sent out a second letter, warning that every vote for another list was “demolition and destruction for Jewry,” and that whoever voted that way was among those who lead the public to sin. In those elections PAI fell short of the votes needed for even one seat and vanished from the political map. It has only declined since.

Shielding the Daughters of Yisroel

In 5731 (1971) the Steipler was shown a report in the journal Hapeles that the government meant to bring back a law making national service compulsory for all girls. He wrote at once to a rav in America, pleading with him to do anything that might help, perhaps an influential delegation to the consul, perhaps an article in a widely read paper, so that the daughters of shomrei Torah umitzvos would be spared.

The letter made a deep impression. Its recipient passed it on to a friend, who asked the Steipler for permission to post it in the batei medrash. The Steipler hesitated. His wording, he explained, made it sound as if he were testifying that a decree was being planned, while he was “a dweller of tents” who knew only what others told him. The year before he had heard of such a plan, and then heard that the aim was only to stop irreligious girls from passing themselves off as religious; he did not know the true facts.

He had written, he said, in shock at the Hapeles report of erev Shavuos, which made the decree seem very near with no one acting to stop it, and he had never imagined the letter would be publicized. Anything made public needs very careful wording, and its source should be given rather than appearing as his own testimony.

Two days later he wrote to the same person again. There was now a persistent rumor that the danger was very great, and he renewed his plea that every possible effort be made. The rav could use the earlier letter as he saw fit.

In 5732 (1972) the law came back with new force, and the Steipler acted again. He first drafted a declaration that the prohibition against conscripting girls in any form, which all the gedolei hador had proclaimed with trembling some twenty years before because it leads to immorality, was still fully in force. In the end he chose instead to republish the original ruling of Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank, Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, Rav Zelig Reuven Bengis and the Tchebiner Rov, with a few lines explaining why it was being publicized and that it still applied. He then decided that his own opinion should appear explicitly, and he asked Rav Shach to sign as well, so that it would be clear that both of them agreed.

The announcement was signed in that form on the 20th of Cheshvan 5732. Two days afterwards the decision was made to send it on to Agudas Yisroel's Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. A small change was made, and four of its members signed it, Rav Shach among them. Since the Steipler did not sit on the Moetzes, his name was left off that letter and appeared instead on a second version printed beside it. A month later the Steipler and Rav Shach wrote jointly to Britain's Chief Rabbi and asked him to step in.

The Minister at the Door

When the question arose of the lineage of the Indian community known as Bnei Yisrael, the Chief Rabbinate, prompted by the Ministry of Religions, leaned toward allowing them to marry Jews. The Steipler spoke out against this. Together with Rav Shach he published a letter stating that the gedolim of Bavel and of Yerushalayim had forbidden them ever since the question arose a century earlier, that every beis din that dealt with it had followed that ruling, and that the prohibition stood in full force.

In further letters to a gathering of rabbonim on the subject, the Steipler urged the gedolei Yisroel to make a permanent takanah (enactment), to last until Moshiach comes, that anyone wishing to marry must first prove beyond doubt that he does not descend from those families or from others who had mixed with them. So fierce was the opposition that the authorities could not go ahead.

Dr. Zerach Warhaftig of the NRP, who was then serving as Minister of Religions, heard how strong the opposition was and asked to meet the Steipler. One day he knocked at the Steipler's door with his entourage. Told who had come, the Steipler refused to see him. Anything he said, he explained, the minister would twist and quote in his name as meaning the very opposite.

Only after several messengers had pleaded with him did he agree to receive the minister, and even then he said he would not answer him on the subject. The minister came in and asked whether they were forbidden to marry Jews. The Steipler would not reply. Must he then instruct rabbonim not to perform their weddings? Again the Steipler declined to answer. He made only one request: that the minister not harass rabbonim who chose not to perform such weddings. On the question itself, he repeated, he would say nothing.

As he left, the minister was heard telling his companions that the Rav had said he need not instruct rabbonim to refuse such weddings. On the following day Hatsofe, the NRP's paper, reported that the Steipler had ruled this way for the minister. When the Steipler heard, he rushed to deny it. He had never said that a rav who permits such a marriage may perform it, he wrote. Knowing they would not listen if he asked them to cancel the permission, he had asked only for a small concession, that rabbonim who did not want to take part not be pressured, and he had said so explicitly so that no one would take it as grounds for permitting.

In this connection, the Steipler would tell what the Brisker Rov had told him about the care a ruling demands. When the Balfour Declaration promised a “national home,” people came to ask the Brisker Rov whether Hallel should be said. Hallel had no connection to the matter at all, he replied; a question about shehecheyonu would at least have made more sense. The questioners left, and later reported that the Brisker Rov had ruled that the beracha of shehecheyonu should be made.