A personal tribute.
I have recently pointed out some of the negative aspects of the Yeshiva World. This week I want to pay tribute to a remarkable example of the best of the Yeshiva world.
Rabbi Aviezer Wolfson was not widely known outside of the Charedi world, where he was a giant. He died recently and was eulogized in the Charedi press. But because they always censor anything that does not conform to their mind set, I dare to give you a more nuanced perspective of someone who was highly influential in my life.
Ivor Wolfson, as he was known as a boy, was one of the first students at Carmel College, the school my late father founded in 1948. He was the nephew of Sir Isaac Wolfson of Great Universal Stores fame, the Glasgow born benefactor of Wolfson College in Oxford, the head of the United Synagogue in Britain, and numerous institutions in Israel. But Ivor was a modest young man. He was four years older than me and therefore in the English boarding School tradition, a semi-god whom I looked up to.
He was incredibly talented in so many different areas, from music to sport and academic excellence. He loved to sing with my father, and they used to harmonize together around the Shabbat table and in the Synagogue. He won a science scholarship to Oxford University. My father had a real soft spot for him. He called him Shai, based on anacronym of his Hebrew name. But also, because Shai means a gift in Hebrew, and he was one.
In his gap year between school and Oxford, Aviezer went to Montreux yeshiva in Switzerland. There he was inspired by Rabbi Yechiel Weinberg ( one of the great rabbis of that generation) to devote himself to Torah (and incidentally become an expert skier). As a result, he abandoned Oxford and then moved to Israel to study in Beer Yaakov Yeshiva.
At that time, I had been sent as a rebellious and reluctant sixteen-year-old to Israel to Kol Torah yeshivah in Bayit Vegan. I did not enjoy the austere, rigid atmosphere. Although I made some lifelong friends there. Aviezer came to visit me at Kol Torah and invited me down to his yeshiva Beer Yaakov for a Shabbat.
Be’er Yaakov was a series of primitive wooden huts plonked in the middle of orchards and near an army camp, near Ramle. But there was a warm, personal, atmosphere, under the guidance of two very different but brilliant rabbis Moshe Shmuel Shapiro and Shlomo Wolbe who had studied with my father at the same time in Mir in Lithuania. One a Talmudic genius and the other a Berlin educated philosophy graduate, a charismatic, spiritual force. The yeshiva was small and personable, and I loved it so much that with my father’s permission I transferred there right away. And they made a real effort to accommodate my age and ignorance.
Several months later I was lying in my bed with the flu, when Aviezer’s uncle Sir Isaac came to visit. My father was something of a personal guru. A Yeshiva was not on the itinerary, but my father pushed, and he came. He was so shocked when he found me lying in my bed in a primitive hut with bedbugs crawling up the wall, he decided there and then he had to support the yeshiva. Which may well be have been at the back of Aviezer’s mind when he invited me to come down there in the first place.
But I developed a more personal relationship with Aviezer, and he tried very hard to get me to stay in Israel and forget about the secular world outside. I told my father that I wanted to stay in Yeshivah. But my father was not a parent prepared to be overruled by his son. He wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted me to finish my secular education, and I returned home.
When I came back to Israel two years later, Aviezer took me under his wing again. By then he had married a wonderful partner, began a family and had moved to a salubrious suburb of Tel Aviv where I was often invited for Shabbat. I was so impressed by the comfort, the food, the whiskey, and the singing, which, together with his words of Torah I took as a model I wanted to emulate. He tried to get me to become as involved as he was in the Charedi world to which he had devoted himself from every point of view. He continued to study in various Kollels and became renowned scholar. At the same time he used the good fortune of his family’s wealth to become a major benefactor of religious life.
He was disappointed again when I returned to study at Cambridge. But he persevered in our friendship, even if I could not subscribe to his absolutism. And when I returned yet again to Israel to study at Mir, he arranged for me to study privately with the great Rav Yitzchok Scheiner Rosh Yeshivah of Kamenitz.
Again, I disappointed him when I left Israel and went into the Rabbinate. Yet despite this he maintained our friendship. When I became headmaster of Carmel College one of my goals was to set up a kind of a mini yeshiva within the school. Most pupils were not that religiously committed but there were a handful who were, and I wanted to attract more. Having a yeshiva option in the school was one of the solutions I experimented with. I contacted Aviezer and asked him if he would be prepared to fund a Torah library which he did both enthusiastically and generously.
In the year in which I left Carmel and spent a sabbatical in Israel again our dialogue recommenced. But the differences on how far to accept absolute authority within the Charedi world was essentially the dividing line between us. We kept less frequently in touch, and he spent more time in Russia to devote himself to outreach and setting up and heading a yeshiva. The last time I saw him was when he came to the circumcisions of my grandsons in Jerusalem.
Our Jewish worlds had differed so much yet we both dedicated ourselves to the Jewish religion in our different ways. I was honored to call him my friend as well as teacher. Some like to hog the limelight. But I prefer those who work quietly behind the scenes. And when people pick on the negatives in the Charedi world, they ignore its wonderful side and the many good people who put the others to shame. He was a wonderful example.
Jeremy Rosen
January 2025
