From the Brooklyn streets of Brownsville and East Flatbush in the 1940s, a ten-year-old public school boy immersed in stickball, basketball and with dreams of becoming a shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers enters a fledgling yeshivah ketanah eager for new students. While his generation is leaving Yiddishkeit in droves, his loving rebbeim ignite a spark within him that grows in intensity as he progresses in his learning at Yeshivas Chaim Berlin, under the tutelage of Rav Hutner, and in Ner Yisroel under his rebbi, Rav Yaakov Weinberg.
After his marriage, the young rabbi, Nosson Nota Schiller, moves to Eretz Yisrael to continue his learning in Rav Mordechai Elefant’s Yeshivas Itri in Yerushalayim. Following a “chance” meeting with two secular, very bright young brothers (one a student at Harvard, the other at Columbia) who are in Israel for a year on a secular Zionist study program, he and his chavrusa, Rav Noach Weinberg, make a decision that will change the Jewish world: They’ll start a yeshivah for young Jewish men with limited or no background in traditional Jewish learning.
Despite a promising start and the strong encouragement of the posek hador, Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, they suffer a number of financial setbacks from a skeptical frum world, which has almost given up hope of a revival of halachic Jewry, and they’re forced to close. But, after a few years of indefatigable fundraising efforts, they manage to convince a few visionary philanthropists to share their dream and fund their enterprise. With just a handful of eager students and a passionate and stellar rabbinic staff, they launch what will become the forerunner of the baal teshuvah movement that will sweep the Jewish world and change it forever.
Yeshivas Ohr Somayach, located in the heart of Yerushalayim, is an educational institution for young Jewish English-speaking men. It offers a range of classes and programs designed for the intellectually curious and academically inclined—from those with no background in Jewish learning to those who are proficient in Gemara and other original source material.
Rav Nota Schiller, zt”l, was not just a rebbi for his talmidim, he was a father to them. Torah Jews have both a biological father and a spiritual father. Since most of Rav Schiller’s many students had no Jewish education or mesorah from their secular families, he was their spiritual father. He taught them to revere Torah u’mitzvos, and how to approach life.
Rav Schiller didn’t just believe that a baal teshuvah should be a person who is observant—i.e., keeping Shabbos, kashrus and putting on tefillin. He wanted his talmidim to be “regular” frum Jews who could fit seamlessly into a frum community. His desire was that wherever his talmidim ended up living, they would be “card carrying” members of their respective frum communities. Whether they live in Ramat Beit Shemesh, Passaic, Edison, Toronto, Chicago, London, Johannesburg or Melbourne, they should be indistinguishable from their contemporaries who were raised frum. They should not have “baal teshuvah” painted across their forehead.
How was he able to successfully achieve this goal? How did he enable his talmidim to integrate so successfully into the frum community?
He achieved this by stressing to them the preeminence and importance of learning Torah. He insightfully understood that if the baal teshuvah did not “catch up” to his “frum from birth” contemporaries in learning, he would be severely hampered in his ambition to raise a frum family. For men with strong intellectual capabilities and motivation who sense a disparity between their mastery of secular and Jewish subjects, possessing the ability to independently study Jewish texts is an urgent need. That is why the Ohr Somayach graduates are so successful in staying frum after they leave yeshivah, and why their children are also following in their parents’ footsteps. When someone can prepare a Gemara with Rishonim or the Mishnah Berurah by himself, he feels like a “regular” frum Jew, and he is able to raise healthy frum children. That was part of the hashkafah that the Rosh Yeshivah established in Ohr Somayach.
But the real question is how was Rav Nota able to impart this tremendously valuable and important hashkafah and message to his talmidim? How was he so successful in passing on this message to his many students?
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