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“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.


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Dr. Yitzchok Levine served as a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey before retiring in 2008. He then taught as an adjunct at Stevens until 2014. Glimpses Into American Jewish History appears the first week of each month. Dr. Levine can be contacted at [email protected].