הרב קלונימוס קלמיש שפירא

Rav Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira (5649/1889–5 Cheshvan 5704/1943), the Rebbe of Piaseczno, was one of the great masters of chinuch and avodat Hashem in prewar Poland, and the author of the drashot of the Warsaw ghetto published as Esh Kodesh. He was born in Grodzisk Mazowiecki to Rav Elimelech Shapira, the Admor of Grodzisk — a descendant of the Maggid of Kozhnitz and of Rav Elimelech of Lizhensk — and to Chana Bracha, daughter of the Admor Rav Chaim Shmuel of Chentshin, and was named Kalonymus Kalmish after the author of the Maor VaShemesh. Orphaned of his father at three, he was raised by his grandfather and then in the home of Rav Yerachmiel Moshe Hopstein, the Admor of Kozhnitz, whose daughter Rachel Chaya Miriam he married at sixteen in 5665/1905. On his father-in-law’s passing in 5669/1909 he became Admor in Piaseczno, near Warsaw, at the age of twenty, and from 5673/1913 served also as the town’s rav.

After the First World War, when so many of the young were being drawn away from Yiddishkeit, the Rebbe threw himself into the chinuch of the youth. In 5683/1923 he founded Yeshivat Da’at Moshe in Warsaw, named for his father-in-law, which grew into one of the largest chasidic yeshivot in Poland between the wars. His sefarim form a ladder of hadrachah: Chovat HaTalmidim (Warsaw 5692/1932), the only one printed in his lifetime and a standard chinuch text in yeshivot to this day, speaks directly to the young talmid — you are your own educator; Hachsharat HaAvreichim continues for older bnei Torah; Bnei Machshava Tova, given quietly to his closest chasidim, lays out the founding of a chaburah for avodat Hashem; Tzav V’Ziruz is his personal spiritual journal; and Derech HaMelech gathers his Shabbat and Yom Tov torot of the twenties and thirties, with his practice of “hashkatah,” the quieting of the mind to bind it to the Borei through pesukim.

In the bombing of Warsaw in Elul 5699/September 1939 his only son, his daughter-in-law, and his sister-in-law were killed, and his mother died soon after; yet he refused every offer of escape — “I am not a deserter,” he said; “I cannot part from Polish Jewry.” Shut inside the ghetto, he kept a hidden shul, labored to keep a mikveh open, arranged matzot for Pesach, britot, and kosher marriages — and Shabbat after Shabbat, through 5700–5702, continued to say torah to the remnant of his chasidim. His daughter perished in the great deportation to Treblinka in the summer of 5702/1942; he himself, put to work in Schultz’s shoe factory, remained in the ghetto until its end.

The drashot he had written down — he titled them “Chiddushei Torah from the Years of Wrath, 5700–5702” — he placed with the hidden Ringelblum archive, buried in a milk canister; a construction worker uncovered them after the war, and they were printed in Eretz Yisrael in 5720/1960 as Esh Kodesh. After the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising he was deported to the Trawniki camp near Lublin, and on 5 Cheshvan 5704 (3 November 1943) he was murdered there with the last Jews of the camp. Today his great-nephew Rav Kalman Menachem Shapira leads Kehillat Aish Kodesh in Ramat Beit Shemesh as the continuation of Piaseczno, and batei midrash named Aish Kodesh, from Bnei Brak to Woodmere, learn his torah.