Yeshivas in World War II

In Lithuania, the yeshivas were able to function fully for over a year and many of the students survived the Holocaust because of their taking refuge there, either because they managed to escape from there or because they were ultimately deported to other areas of Russia that the Nazis did not reach.

Before the Second World War, there were many yeshivas in Eastern Europe, mostly in what is present-day Belarus and Lithuania as well as Poland, and what was then mostly the Second Polish Republic.

These include the yeshivas of Mir, Slabodka, Telshe, Radin, Lomza, Kaminetz, Kletsk, Grodno, Baranovich, and Bialystok.

However, Grodzinski knew that the Russians and Lithuanians had made an agreement that they would return Vilnius to Lithuania, which had been their capital city for centuries.

[7] Although the Prime Minister of Lithuania treated the Jews well, his government decided after a few weeks that having the capital city packed with refugees was an unsustainable situation, and so the yeshivas were ordered to scatter throughout the nearby towns.

[11] The refugees in Lithuania knew that staying where they were in Europe was not a permanent solution, as they were situated between two warring nations, with Nazi Germany to the west and the Soviet Union to the east.

[13] For many of the students, the visas were insufficient: they needed to cross Russia to Japan on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and tickets cost $170, money which many of them did not have (according to Rabbi Dov Eliach's interview with an alumnus of the Kaminetz Yeshiva).

[14] The nasi (president) of the Mir yeshiva, Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz, went to the United States, understanding that he would be able to help the Jews in Europe much more from there.

Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, who was in Sweden at the time, and Mike Tress from the United States, also helped collect the funds.

In the end, virtually the entire Mir yeshiva was able to escape Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, and from there to Kobe, Japan.

However, Russian soldiers had been commandeering Jewish homes in Lithuania, and when the hosts got wind of the situation, they warned the yeshiva students of the government's plans.

[14] According to the book Tales of Devotion, mere days after the yeshiva students' deportation to the Komi Republic, the Nazis invaded Lithuania.

[20] The members of the Kelm Talmud Torah, also already located in Lithuania since before the outbreak of World War II, were also massacred in the Holocaust, along with the rest of the city's Jewish population.

[27] The Telshe yeshiva was reopened in Cleveland, Ohio, by Rabbis Eliyahu Meir Bloch and Chaim Mordechai Katz.