Lublin: The Jerusalem of Poland

During the war, Lublin becomes the capital city of Poland because of its proximity to Russia. Rabbi Meir Shapiro - who was the rabbi of Lodz decided to build a different kind of yeshiva in Lublin and changed the way yeshivot are run today. Before he built the Yeshiva Chochmei Lublin, yeshivot were generally small, terribly underfunded and had no dormitories for the boys. In fact, they slept in the ezrat nashim on wooden pews.  They were served two meals a day of bread and jam and were farmed out to different families in the kehilla for dinner - often to poor families who couldn't afford to have another mouth to feed at their table.  

Rabbi Meir Shapiro changed all that. He collected money from all over the world in order to start a yeshiva that would give each boy a bed, three square meals a day, a garden to get fresh air and even laundry service. But not every boy could attend this yeshiva.  You had to know 200 pages of Gemara by heart... 

At its height, there were 220 boys that went to this yeshiva and changed the Jewish world.

But the most amazing thing about Reb Meir Shapiro was that he was a forward thinker.  He wanted every boy who COULDN'T get into his yeshiva to have a yeshiva education. So he started the first vocational yeshiva school which shocked Jewry worldwide.  He stayed determined despite the opposition and the controversy and managed to raise millions of dollars and created a school that had learning on the morning and taught a vocation in the afternoon.  

Unfortunately, this gadol of his generation did not have any children and died before the war at the too young age of 44.

I'd like to think that the boys he taught, the boys he cared for and educated were the children he never had and that hopefully some of them survived the Shoah and kept his legacy alive....

Reb Meir Shapiro 

The yeshiva as it looks today...

My dad reading from the Torah in the shul of the yeshiva...