הנחת אבן הפינה לשכונת וולפזון בירושלים

Hi, all! Nice to be back. Sorry for the prolonged vacation. I hope to be here more often from now on.
These pics are seemingly from an expansion to the institutions of Eitz Chaim, led by the late Rabbi Yechiel Michel Tikochinsky, who of course was a great admirer of Rav Kook. As was Reb Isser Zalman Meltzer, who served as Rosh Yeshiva from 1925 until his passing in 1953.
But you knew that.
The date is probably the late 20s or early 30s.
Or maybe it's a building project? Hard to tell. The internet wasn't very helpful either.

הגראי"ה קוק, הגרא"ז מלצר

הגראי"ה קוק נואם

הגרי"מ טיקוצ'ינסקי עומד ליד הגראי"ה קוק

 נואם - הגרי"מ טיקוצ'ינסקי

דער רבי דער בית ישראל האט פארשטאנען צו אהבת ישראל

Photo Source

Hirshel:

the Rebbe di Beis Yisroel is - in di velt - portrayed as more right wing than his father the Imrei Emes. Itche Meir Levin, the brother in law, was the father's shaliach, and the Beis Yisroel basically did not interfere. That's how they see it. The kanoyim who have a little bit of Yiras Shomayim blame Itche Meir and say that the BY had no choice but to go along with what he did, because he respected the father's choice. As if he was an Hungarian Rebbe... The "Eidah" people thought he is one of theirs. Zalminu Wienberg, the holy Tolner Rebbe's brother, writes a Mussar vort his brother heard the the Beis Yisroel give, based on Rav Kook as a role model. I assume it's not printed anywhere. Very un PC. Even for Ger.

Good Reading and a picture for your Thursday (and maybe some thoughts on AIC93)

That's Agudath Israel Convention 93...

Rav Moshe Mordche Epstein and Rav AY Kook in NYC, 1924

Chabad's Oldest Outpost Lingers on in Casablanca 
Muslims and their OTD/Radicalization problem
A Pilot and Holocaust Survivors are Reunited in Brooklyn

The link to the WNYC program about Muslims and their radicalization problem was inspired by this year's convention, which seemed to put some emphasis on our OTD problem. After listening to speeches about Achdus and underpaid Rebbis, we heard lots of talk about OTD, which by the way, is now to be known as XO, for X-Orthodox. This according to Eli Fink. Muslims have the opposite OTD problem. Their youth is being radicalized online, and our youth is going the other way, often quite radically, as well. Especially if you saw yesterday's news...So what we need to do is show our presence online. By our presence I mean normal, frum Jews doing everyday stuff, peeling potatoes for kugel and on Chol haMoed trips, raking leaves and making snow malochim. Stuff normal people do. That'll keep our kids from eating from the forbidden fruit.  Seems like this is Agudah's will to be the solution to every problem pertaining to the frum community under the sun. Soon they'll be providing filtered internet and shoes for Pesach. G-d bless them, if they can do it, but it seems like they're stretching themselves way too thin here. Focusing on too many issues depletes manpower and money. Maybe if they focused on getting money for Yeshivos and busing, and little else they would do a better job at it. From the clipping in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle it seems like some things haven't changed. They did the same thing 90+ years at the 1st KG in Vienna. Except that back then there were no solutions, all you could tell them was that the gates of hell awaited them. I imagine they didn't bring Psychologists and mental health professional onto the dais back then, and didn't talk about hugging kids smoking on Shabbos either....

Gotta run...

חבקו"ק שבירושלים במיטבו

Children of Jerusalem - Yehuda 

National Film Board of Canada

As you can see from the link posted here, this is a series of documentaries about the children of Jerusalem in the '90s. Yehuda is from what you might call a ChaBaKOOK family with very strong Carlebachian influences. He studies ספר המדות from Reb Nachman page by page and tries to remember it by heart. His father/parents may be Shlomo's mekurev, for all I know. כה נראה לי. אני לא מכיר אותם, אבל מהיפושים ברשת נ"ל שהם חסידי קרליבך. What is clear is that the family marches to their own beat... I doubt they could be told about dress codes and what kind of shoes to wear... Yehuda goes/studies at Cheder Toras Emes Lubavitch in Yerushalayim and is a talmid in Reb Yankel Bloi's class. There the other kids made sure to טשעפע him about his very long peyos. So much so that he cut them short one day and was embarrassed to show his face at home.... But now he's quite comfortable with them and likes to find other kids with similar side locks in the story books that he reads with his younger brother. I'd love to find out what happened to young Yehuda.

Bentzion Weberman was toastmaster for an event featuring Rav Kook, and other fascinating links

BZW was the Williamsburg lawyer who found one Avrohom Ber Levin in a Catskills hotel and liked what he saw. He made sure all his kids knew about this man. He was a zealot, you might say. He didn't subscribe to the new style of Judaism being developed in America. But yet, he did what the headline here says he did. Well, I guess you could excuse it by saying that the event wasn't for RAYK himself, to honor him or anything, but for the Yeshivos in Europe. But we all know that a TRUE zealot would today not attend an event also attended by an adversary and ideological opponent such as the Yaffer Rov. Or maybe a true zealot could see the forest despite the trees and not be distracted by trivial matters such as who is attending. You might say just like RAYK himself, who left the comfort of the Holy Land to travel to the US to save the Yeshivos in Europe.

Click Here for an old newspaper clipping
In Boro Park don't distribute snuff during the Rov's derasha
Weberman/Schorr wedding

PHOTO SOURCE

Flashback - Jerusalem, 1919

1919: הרב קוק וויל ניט ירושלימ'ער רבנות

"דער מארגען זשורנאל, מאנטאג אקטאבער 6, 1919"

The Chabad Rov you never heard of who was a friend of Rav Kook and who was משיג on the לשם

Rav Pinchos haKohen Lintop of Birzh, Lithuania

This was a time where Rabbonim were, I guess, independent when it came to דעות, even if the Rebbe was of another opinion. Hebrewbooks tells us that Reb Pinchos was Rov in Vaboylnik.... at a time as well. How ironic!

 פרטים יבואו

can you drop $400-$600 and save this gem from those who want it removed?

See entire catalogue

In 1958 Rav Kook was still a מקור for Dayan Weisz from Manchester

Looking at this Tshuveh (Siman 'ט) with an iota of objectivity you might say that he was using RAYH"K to make his point, and not so much because he held of him as a m'kor. Sort of like what the Satmarers do when they wanna make a point regarding their favorite subject, Zionism. They'll bring Belzer letters and show it to a Belzer, and then they'll show letters from the Rebbe Rashab to a Lubavitcher, and so on. But then again, we all know that when asked why he's taking Rav Weisz as dayan in the Edah when he's not a kano'i, the Satmar Rov said that a Talmid Chochom can become a kano'i, a kano'i won't become a talmid chochom so quickly... Which is what happened; Rav Weisz fell in line with the Edah theology very nicely, just like the SR foretold. We bring you the Tshuveh in Minchas Yitzchok, and then the Tshuveh in Kol Yisroel from Rav Kook in 1933.

 

קול ישראל courtesy of  תוך כדי דיבור on Otzar haChochmah. Minchas Yitzchok courtesy of HebrewBooks.

Does this count for White Russia/Chabad?

These are recently released photos of Harav Kook's (יא"צ ג' אלול) visit to the US and Canada in 1924. He was accompanied by  the Kovner Rov, the Dvar Avrohom, Reb Avrohom DovBer Kahana Shapira, as well as Rav Moshe Mordche Epstein of Slabodka's Knesses Yisroel Yeshiva. RAYHK was already back in the Holy Land since 1919 or so, yet he made the long journey to America to help the Yeshivos in Europe. It's ironic that many of those Yeshivos, including Slabodka, are quite unaware of the great help he was in saving their Yeshiva. I would imagine that none of his seforim and writings can be found in any of the many branches and satellites of Slabodka, both in Israel and abroad. Yet, despite the badmouthing and brainwashing that has been going for generations his writings have enjoyed a tremendous renaissance among many Haredim, who see him as a great visionary whose only crime may have been that he has slightly ahead of his time... His teachings are quoted, at least verbally - we have yet to reach the stage where he'd be quoted in a Haredi sefer - and if you repeat a vort from him you may not even get a "gasp!" from the man listening to you... Rav Kook's Chabad connection is well known; his mother was a Bas Chassidei Lubavitch, and many of his writings are based on Chassidus Chabad, as well as MaHaRaL. His adversaries also knew about it too, as mentioned here many years ago. Despite the differences in opinion that he had with him and even the Agudah, the Frierdige Rebbe visited him - twice, I believe - when he visited Eretz Yisroel in 5689.

with RMM Epstein and an unknown figure of authority. Wiki says that it was the Mayor of NYC that he's pictured with. Yet, According to Wikipedia, John F. Hylan was mayor of NYC at that time, and this is not him. So either I'm confusing the dates of the trip or they got it wrong. click on photos to enlarge!

On the porch of the Yeshiva D'Montreal with the Kovner Rov and RMME listening intently to RK's words.

With the KR and RMME. Note that they wore their top hats while RAYHK wore his Rabbonishe Shtreimel the whole time. I wonder if that was some kind of arrangement that they made between themselves...

A "צאתכם לשלום" poster from his Yeshiva "Mercaz HaRav." 

Closeup of the porch at Yeshiva D'Montreal

with Rav Hirsh Pesach Frank, member of his Rabbinate and later Chief Rabbi of Yerushalayim. This picture is unrelated to the rest and was taken in the Holy Land.

Photos from Here and Wikipedia