Novardok Yeshiva

[1] The yeshiva was established in Novogrudok, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire in 1896,[1] together with a Kollel for married men, under the direction of Rabbi Yosef Yozel Horwitz, an alumnus of the Kovno Kollel and pupil of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, like whom he was an advocate of the Mussar approach.

Novardok established yeshivas all over the region, in major cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), Saratov, Plogid, and Chernihiv.

[2] Influenced by the Alter, his students also created Yeshivas in Kherson, Mohyliv-Podilskyi, Kamieniec-Podolski, Berdichev, Nikolaev, Bălţi, Odessa, Piotrków Trybunalski[3] and other places.

Like other Mussar schools, Novardok demanded the complete shattering of personal desires, eradicating any vestige of evil habits.

Students of Novardok participated in deliberately humiliating behaviour, such as wearing old, patched clothing, or going to a shop and asking for a product not sold there, such as screws in a bakery.

The training, in fact, promoted the opposite; it gave the students the emotional freedom from the chains of public approval.

The most elite students of the yeshiva would set out on foot to strange communities without money in their pockets, simultaneously abstaining from speech and not asking for a ride or even food.

The extensive Novardok network supplied half of all the students to Eastern Europe's other famous yeshivas.

In time, though, he appointed others to deliver the Gemara shiurim, while he focused on developing the mussar aspect of the yeshiva.

Aside from functioning as a yeshiva, it also served as a safe house for young bochurim, seeking refuge from the war.

Rabbi Avraham Yoffen survived the Holocaust, came to the United States,[1] and settled in Brooklyn, New York where he re-established the yeshiva.

However, the latter is primarily a high level talmudic professor in the Chevron Yeshiva (Knesset Yisrael) of Jerusalem .

A significant, additional network of Novardok Yeshivas was founded after World War II in France by Rabbi Gershon Liebman,[7][8] which in its heyday, had 40 schools and 6,000 students.