Volozhin Yeshiva
Article by Josh Leitner
In 1890, the famous Jewish writer Chaim Nachman Bialik was a 17-year old orphan, known then by the name of Chaim Zhitomirer. He applied to join the Volohzin Yeshiva, after reading a glowing report about the institution by Hebrew writer Micha Josef Berdyczewski (1865-1921). The article was written by Berdyczewski near the end of his studies at the Volozhin Yeshiva and it is filled with his admiration for the Yeshiva and its rabbis. Soon after he reached Volozhin, Chaim was introduced to the ageing revered dean, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (known as the Netziv), who instructed him to prepare a full tractate of Talmud for his entrance examination.
Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin
Chaim was a brilliant student and he passed his test with ‘flying colours within three months by studying assiduously and diligently’. The Netziv commented that he had rarely come across someone who was able to attain so much knowledge in such a short period of time. Chaim began to devote himself to intense study with “every intention” he later said,” of becoming a life-long student”.
But in reality, Chaim was quite disappointed with what he found in the Yeshiva. He had thought Volozhin would be a place where he could study the ‘Seven Disciplines and the seventy languages’, but what he found instead was hundreds of boys studying Talmud by rote in the study hall day and night.
Chaim knew that something wasn’t right in Volozhin. Over the coming months he discovered that the Yeshiva was in a state of turmoil, with two secret groups of Maskilim (Jewish enlightenment – the Haskalah ) operating from within. Meanwhile, the Yeshiva itself was in disarray and the Netziv was floundering from internal strife and external pressures. But Chaim now understood what Berdyczewski had meant in his glowing article. The enlightenment came not from the Institution itself but from the students who were teaching themselves the Seven Disciplines.
Just a short while later Chaim, soon to be known as Chaim Nachman Bialik, left the Volozhin Yeshiva and went to Odessa, the seat of secular Jewish education. Here, he abandoned his religious observance and became a champion of the Haskalah movement as well as a renowned Zionist icon.
Bialik wrote several famous poems about his time in Volozhin,. The most famous of all is ‘HaMasmid’, a wistful description of the devoted Talmud student, dedicating himself to the endless sea of Talmud in the hope that he will become the next greatest scholar. In the poem he bitterly condemns the Yeshiva movement which he sees as stifling promising youngsters and preventing them from achieving their true potential. He proudly declares “I have deliberately pitched my tent far from that existence, an existence that I despise with a passion.”
The poem became so famous that many years later a street in Israel was named after it.
Hamatmid Street
So what was Volozhin Yeshiva and what had driven Bialik to wish to join in the first place?
Let us briefly go back in time;to Belarus,White Russia; birthplace of the Lithuanian Torah world, where Hassidic Rabbis and deans of Yeshivot (Jewish Torah Schools) held court. The halls of the great Yeshivot, once brimming with life, are now of course silent, but the concrete walls that absorbed so much are still standing.
Jewish schools have existed for millennia.Famous Yeshivot flourished in Israel, Babylonia, across the Middle East and throughout Europe. In Belarus, the towns of Brest (also known in Yiddish as Brisk), Grodno, Minsk and others contained many well-regarded Yeshivot.
But, amongst all the Yeshivot of Eastern Europe, it was the Volozhin Yeshiva that was revolutionary in providing an antidote to the crisis of assimilation and the growth of Hasidism which both threatened to undermine the tradition of Torah and Talmud study. On the one hand, the Russian Government and the Haskalah movement were joining forces to pressurise Yeshivot into teaching secular subjects such as science, humanities, and languages; on the other hand, Hasidism’s focus on devaikut,(clinging to G-d with joyous prayers and chanting) was gaining more followers, leading them away from a stricter Torah and Talmud education.
Yeshiva Volozhin, located in the town of Volozhin, Lithuania, then part of Russia and now Belarus, was founded by Rabbi Haim ben Yitzhak, or Haim of Volozhin, a scholar of repute, who created a short-lived movement, called the Mitnagdim. This movement opposed Hasidism and banned its followers from entering traditional Jewish communities to try and entice yeshiva students away from Torah and Talmud. For his part, Rabbi Haim sought to fight Hasidism by establishing the Yeshiva Volozhin, with a sole focus on a Torah and Talmud education, excluding the Hasidic custom of Kabbalah, mystical visions, and cheerful chanting and the secular studies demanded by the Russian Government and the Maskilim.
Yeshiva Volozhin is often romanticised as the womb which bore and nurtured the greatest dynasties of gifted scholars; intellectuals such as Rabbi Abraham Kook, (1865-1935) the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, Yosef Dov Halevi Soloveitchik (1820-1892), and the Chofetz Chaim (1838-1933), who, among others, started religious movements that changed the Jewish world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Eastern Europe.
Also known as the “mother of all Yeshivot,” Volozhin opened its doors in 1806 and closed them in 1892 in the midst of an epic struggle between traditional and modernising forces. The closure of Yeshiva Volozhin had tremendous repercussions on the yeshiva world of that time as it stopped producing dynasties of religious intellectuals and is still a source of debate in American yeshivas today
Rabbi Haim was one of the main disciples of Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna, in nearby Lithuania, who was known simply as the “Vilna Gaon” (the Vilna Genius). Together they revolutionised the way Talmud is studied and emphasised moral character and development. In 1802 Rabbi Haim issued a public letter calling on all Jews in the region to support his new Yeshiva.
One of Volozhin’s innovations was its source of funding which came from emissaries who travelled throughout Eastern and Western Europe rather than relying on local support.
Within the Volozhin Yeshiva, students studied in shifts – there were always students in the Study Hall, 24 hours a day. The Jewish learning never ceased.
Its curriculum, based only on Torah and Talmud, was meant to avoid bittul Torah or wasting time on superfluous subjects. The study of Torah and Talmud took place all day from dawn to late evening throughout the year, with no terms or vacation time. Advanced knowledge of Talmud was required for admissions and students could work independently or with study-partners. Basically, study for its own sake was the Yeshiva’s goal. Within 10 years, Rabbi Haim of Volozhin increased the number of students from 10 to 200 as the Yeshiva’s reputation spread beyond Lithuania’s borders.
After Rabbi Haim’s death in 1821, the leadership of the institution was taken over by his son, Rabbi Yitzhak Berlin (1780-1849). For the next decade, the Yeshiva remained a family business. On Rabbi Yitzhak’s death,his son-in-law, Rabbi Eliezer Yitzhak (1809-1853) became dean of the Yeshiva and when he too died, the mantle of leadership passed to his younger son in-law, Naftali Zevi Yehuda Berlin, who governed for four decades.
Volozhin Yeshiva
It was during Rabbi Berlin’s tenure that the Yeshiva experienced its greatest success. It became celebrated not only as the most prestigious institution of Torah and Talmud learning in the world in the nineteenth century, but also as the pinnacle of opposition to the lure of Hasidism and the assimilationist movements of the Russian Government and of the Haskalah.
From this point on the future of the Yeshiva was never again assured. The Russian establishment tried to curb the intensity of Jewish learning by insisting on the inclusion of secular studies into the curriculum with the help of the enlightened Jews who aggressively supported a new educational system that combined Judaism with secular studies and professional training. By 1848, Maskilim, encouraged by grants from the Government to push for mixed education, created an infrastructure of enlightenment institutions, media outlets in Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish and even founded a Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia in St. Petersburg in 1863 to support young students seeking Russian acculturation. It planned to attract Yeshiva students after achieving its goal to abolish Volozhin.
The Yeshiva remained stubborn and resilient against those who wished to dilute its curriculum but during the latter half of the 19th Century, cracks began to appear from within. Many students were quietly reading academic papers in between Torah sessions and some were even leaving to join the city’s universities.
The turning point came on December 22, 1891, when the Government ordered the Yeshiva to adopt new rules for its curriculum, student body, teaching staff, and administration. Four rules stood out: (1) Secular studies were to take place daily between 9am and 3pm; (2) no more than ten hours a day could be spent studying; (3) no Jewish studies were allowed at all at night; and (4) teachers and administrators had to speak Russian and hold a diploma of secular studies. The Government’s total intrusion into the Yeshiva’s autonomy weighed down on the Rabbinic leadership. The moment to make a decision had finally arrived. Should they bow to the pressure of the Russians and adopt a modern type of education, or close the Institution altogether?
History is not clear as to the full depth of the Netziv’s attitude to the addition of secular classes running alongside Torah studies
Reb Chaim of Volozhin’s grave
. Some argue that he was severely opposed to any reduction of Torah learning to the degree that he would rather see the Institution closed than yield even an inch. Others say that the Netziv had made the decision to include some secular studies, albeit against his will.
The Yeshiva existed for almost a full century. However on Wednesday, February 3rd 1892, a high government official accompanied by soldiers, entered the Great Hall carrying an order from the Minister of Education to close the Yeshiva.
The Netziv’s fight was a long and arduous one. It was the Netziv against the world, traditional Judaism versus secularising forces and the Russian Government against G-d. The Netziv resisted as much as he could, torn between following the Higher Authority or submitting to the Russian one.
Bialik may have left Volozhin disillusioned but he still wanted to be remembered as one of its ‘star students’. In his poem he calls the academy “the place where the soul of the Jewish nation was moulded.” The Volozhin Yeshiva will endure in the annals of history as one of the most important Torah institutions of recent times.
In 2024, the building that was the Volozhin Yeshiva was opened as a museum with the support of the Belarus authorities, and no longer stands empty and abandoned – click here to read more. As part of The Together Plan’s work to build a Jewish Cultural Heritage Trail – this site of enormously important Jewish provenance will be included on the route and highlighted so that more people around the world will learn about it and about the story it tells.