“Mir was an extremely primitive and remote backwater even in the context of inter-bellum Poland. It lacked almost all creature comforts. Medicine was medieval. Indoor plumbing was practically unknown. Hunger and desperate poverty were commonplace. Nonetheless, despite all of these hardships – or perhaps precisely as a consequence of them – inspired students came from all over the world to pursue their rabbinic studies in a yeshiva where there was no ‘modern life’ to distract them from an intense course of religious study which embodied the scholarly and ethical life idealized in the non-chassidic orthodox world.”[ii]
Note: Rabbi Gugenheim, who returned from the Mir to serve as a chaplain in the French army, became a prisoner of war and acted as rabbi in his P.O.W. camp until the war ended. He went on to become the director of the French rabbinical seminary, and a leader of Orthodox Judaism in France.
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[i] Lettres de Mir, a book review of the French edition by Patrick Gordis http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rkimble/Mirweb/LettresdeMirReview.html
[ii] Ibid.