The building that was home to the renowned Yeshiva Chachmei Lublin in Poland was renovated and is open for private tours, COLlive was told.
Lublin was sometimes called the Jewish Oxford and the Polish Jerusalem because of its tradition of learning going back centuries.
The elegant six-story yellow building opened in 1930 by Rabbi Yehuda Meir Shapiro, who also founded the revolutionary idea of Daf Yomi, learning a page of Gemara every day.
The Yeshiva operated until the 1939 invasion of Nazi Germany at the start of World War II. When the Nazis took over Lublin, they stripped the interior and burned the vast library in the town square.
After the war, it was used by a medical academy, but was returned to the Jewish community in 2004.
While some of it has been renovated, the building remains abandoned, photographer Israel Bardugo told COLlive after a recent visit with a group of U.S. Jewish businessmen.
The AP reported that renovations may continue, ideas under consideration include building a center for the city’s tiny Jewish community; building a museum of Chassidism; or a hotel that could serve as a base for those touring Jewish-related sites in Poland.
Poland was home to about 3.3 million Jews before the war. Most of them
perished in Nazi death camps and ghettos, and many of those who survived were later driven out by postwar violence and communist repression.
Rabbi Yisroel Yitzchak Piekarski, Rosh Yeshiva of 770, and Rabbi Tzvi Yosef Kotlarsky, board member of United Lubavitch Yeshiva in Crown Heights, are both alumni of the Lublin Yeshiva.
Bardugo added that for many, visiting the historic building is a moving experience, especially for those whose grandparents learned in what was considered the “largest Talmudic school in the world.”
I’m from Poland and people always say- there’s nothing in Poland anymore… but is that really true? The sparks are still there, and they need some big people to bring them out! Even though the “Jewish World that was” is gone the sparks are still there! It’s hard to just leave your home and start all over again, a new life… We need people to come and teach those Jews that still live there! Y. From Poland.
In 1999 we were 2 couples & we visited this Yeshiva!
Look, I love business, I’m a business person myself, but I dont like the idea of a hotel in the Lublin Yeshiva, lets not do that…
How about we make it a mir yeshiva type of place where anyone who wants can come and learn?
Really.
The biggest heads got in there. You had to know 1000 blatt. Rabbi Shmuel Wosner, the Posek Hador learnt there. What a chorban that its gone, Polands beautiful Jewry.
The main point is missing: 1,000 blatt gemara baal peh was the entry requirement. When Reb Meir Shapiro became too busy raising funds, he looked for a mashgiach or sho’el umeyshiv. He noticed, on one of his visits to Warsaw, that the same yid was always in the back muttering for half an hour or so, after davenen. So he went over and asked him what…? He managed to extract, that he was saying 7 blatt gemara baal peh every day… (That would be a one-year cycle). He took him. (Imagine if he had been a yid living in Der… Read more »
Since the pictures in this article were taken, the Beis HaMidrash has been completely renovated to match how it originally looked. Windows that were bricked up by the Nazis have been reholed in the Mizrach wall to match the original ones, the Aron and Bimah have been rebuilt based on old photos, and an impressive chandelier rehung to match the original one.
Chochmei Lublin and all the other Heiliger Erter should have an Aliya and move to Yerushalyim with Moshiach Now! Let’s get out of Poland and golus for good!