הרב אברהם קלמנוביץ

Rav Avraham Kalmanowitz (c. 5651/1891–2 Adar 5724/1964) was the rescuer and rebuilder of the Mir Yeshiva — the rav whose tireless hands carried a whole yeshiva across the world war and planted it again in America. Born in Delyatichi in White Russia to Rav Aharon Aryeh Leib, he learned in Eishishok under Rav Zundel Hutner, in Telz, and in Slabodka, where the Alter set him in chavruta with his own son; his semicha came from Rav Moshe Mordechai Epstein, Rav Refael Shapiro of Volozhin, and Rav Eliyahu Baruch Kamai of Mir.

As rav of Rakov from 5673 he built a talmud torah and a yeshiva, fed the refugee floods of the First World War, and was imprisoned by the Bolsheviks for his aid to Jews in their hands. He became the right hand of Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzensky in the Vaad HaYeshivot, was named honorary president of the Mir yeshiva in 5686 — raising its support in America, where he acquired the citizenship that would later save him — and from 5689 served as rav of Tiktin, sitting as well on the Moetzet Gedolei HaTorah. When the war broke out he fled to Vilna, and with Rav Chaim Ozer’s blessing crossed to New York in 1940 — and turned his rescue into everyone’s. A pillar of the Vaad Hatzalah, he thundered through American Jewry for the trapped yeshivot: it was he above all who sustained the Mir in its Shanghai exile for five years — funds, food packages, even gemarot, routed through South America in the war years — and who obtained the visas and passage that brought the entire yeshiva, talmidim and rabbanim, to America whole. Where the danger to life demanded it, he ruled for himself the halachah of pikuach nefesh and traveled even on Shabbat for the work of rescue; he pressed the Allies, in vain, to bomb the death camp at Auschwitz.

In 5706/1946 he founded the Mir yeshiva of Brooklyn for the hundreds who arrived from Shanghai, and stood at its head until his petirah. After the war he turned to the East: he founded the Otzar HaTorah network of Torah schools across North Africa for the youth of the Sephardi kehillot, and lobbied into law the granting of endangered-refugee status to Jews fleeing Arab lands. He was niftar in 5724 and rests in Sanhedria in Yerushalayim; his son Rav Shraga Moshe and his son-in-law Rav Shmuel Berenbaum led his yeshiva after him.