While learning at Valozhyn, his reputation quickly grew, and he was known as an extremely sharp student and a diligent learner.

The particular genre in which Rabbi Bengis chose to couch his novellae was one that very few Talmudic students could explore, much less master, and that essentially caused his entire literary oeuvre to fall into obscurity.

In later years, his grandson-in-law Rabbi Shmuel Vitsick (married to Chaya Perel Bengis) in dedication exerted much effort, travel, time and money engaging seforim experts and printers including Mossad haRav Cook to reorganize and publish three volumes of his thoughts, so as to make the contents more understandable to the general public.

Rabbi Bengis settled in Smolensk, a Russian town where many non-religious Jews lived.

His reputation grew, and he was known as an expert in all areas of Judaism - he knew countless Jewish works, including the entire Tanakh, both the Yerushalmi and Bavli, the Rambam, Shulchan Aruch, backward and forward.

In 1932, after the death of Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, Bengis was asked to become rosh av beit din (Ravad) - Head of Court - of the Edah HaChareidis in Jerusalem.

At that point, however, he declined the offer, since his rival there would be Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook - a fellow student of the Netziv of Volozhin.

Since Rav Kook had died, Rabbi Bengis accepted the offer, and moved from Lithuania to Palestine[1] - shortly before World War II broke out.