הרב אברהם גרודזינסקי

Rav Avraham Grodzinski (5642/1882–27 Tammuz 5704/1944), the mashgiach of Slabodka, was among the great baalei mussar of the last generations — the foremost talmid of the Alter of Slabodka, and the yeshiva’s leader until his petirah al kiddush Hashem in the Kovno Ghetto. He was born in Warsaw to Rav Yitzchak (Reb Itcheh) Grodzinski, one of the heads of the Warsaw kehillah, whose table fed tens of poor guests daily and who founded and carried a yeshiva in the city — the Chofetz Chaim said of him that Reb Itcheh saved Jewish chinuch in Warsaw. Rav Avraham would later say that he was so busy from childhood helping in his father’s chesed that he had no childhood.

At seventeen, after short periods in Radin and Lomza, he entered Slabodka and became a talmid of the Alter, Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel. He gave two full years to a single midah — receiving every person with a pleasant countenance — and those who knew him testified that the pleasant face never left him, even masking his grief in the ghetto years. At twenty-one the Alter sent him with three chosen talmidim to Telz to help Rav Eliezer Gordon plant mussar there; on his return he joined the hanhalah of the yeshiva. In 5671/1911 he married Chasya Gisa, daughter of the mashgiach Rav Dov Tzvi Heller. In 5685/1925 he was sent with Rav Yechezkel Sarna to found the yeshiva’s branch in Chevron, and after setting it on its feet returned to Slabodka; from 5687/1927, when the Alter and Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein settled in Eretz Yisrael, he led the yeshiva as mashgiach — and in the last years before the churban as rosh yeshiva as well. The Alter called him “my portion in all my toil,” and his maamarei mussar appeared in Tevunah, the journal of the Slabodka talmidim.

When the war broke out he labored beside Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinski of Vilna to save as many Jews as possible, his own worsening illness notwithstanding. Under the German occupation of Kovno he went on teaching: rabbanim and roshei yeshiva learned in hiding in his home, and when soldiers burst in and murdered several of them, he survived because he lay in the attic. When the last Jews of the Kovno Ghetto were deported in Tammuz 5704, he lay in the ghetto hospital; on 27 Tammuz (13 July 1944) the Germans set the hospital ablaze with its patients, and Rav Avraham was burned alive al kiddush Hashem, הי״ד.

Four of his eight children survived the Shoah: his daughters married Rav Shlomo Wolbe, Rav Chaim Kreiswirth and Rav Baruch Rosenberg, and his son Rav Yitzchak headed the Torat Avraham kollel in Bnei Brak. His writings were gathered in Torat Avraham (Yerushalayim, 5723); among his talmidim were Rav Meir Chodosh, the mashgiach of Chevron, and Rav Avigdor Miller.