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Full Description
The present volume, which contains more than one hundred vivid stories
about Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky’s relationship with his students,
entertains as it inspires. With tears and laughter, you will accompany
Rebbe through the tragedies and triumphs of his life as he reaches out
to his students with humor, wisdom and compassion, helping each one
to achieve his full potential as a Jew and a human being.
They Called Him Rebbe also contains new primary source material about
the Holocaust and the Mir Yeshiva’s years in Shanghai.
Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky was born in Vishnevo, Belarus in 1913. Over
a twenty-year period, he learned in Radin, Baranovitz and at the Mir Yeshiva. Together
with the Mir Yeshiva, Rabbi Milikowsky fled to Shanghai during World War II. The Nazis
murdered most of his family.
After the war, Rabbi Milikowsky became a Torah educator and mashgiach at the
Talmudical Academy of Baltimore. There, over the course of forty years, he employed
his unique, God-given talents to help hundreds of boys to remain Jewishly strong
and inspiring many to go on to careers in the rabbinate and in Jewish education. He passed
away in 1990 and is survived by four children and many grandchildren who live in both the
United States and Israel.
About the Author:
Raphael Blumberg, who grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, studied under Rabbi Boruch
Milikowsky in Tenth Grade at the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore. He earned degrees
at the Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent four
years learning in Israeli yeshivas. He is the translator of more than twenty-five books and
hundreds of articles on mostly Torah-related topics. He and his wife Mona and family have
lived in Kiryat Arba, Israel since 1984.
Praise for They Called him Rebbe:
“They Called Him Rebbe demonstrates how a synthesis of wisdom
and love created a force that spanned space and time to bring the
flavor of prewar Lithuania into today’s American classroom. But
only a true Talmid Chacham, as was Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky,
z”l, will know how to utilize the “chochmas lev” (Exodus 35:35)
effectively. A must read for every educator.”
–Rabbi Nathan Kamenetsky, author of Making of a Godol
“This is the true story of a European Rabbi trained in Mir and
Radin who won the hearts and minds of his American students,
inspiring them to become leaders of a post-Holocaust generation
born out of tragedy. It is must reading for any parent or educator
who wants to understand teenage boys and how to motivate them
to be better Jews and menschen.”
–Rabbi Yaakov Spivak, Rav and Rosh Yeshiva, Kollel Ayshel Avraham
A welcome new contribution to the genre of frum biography is scheduled
to appear in Baltimore bookstores in time for the High Holidays.
Written about a Baltimorean, by a Baltimorean, Raphael Blumberg’s They
Called Him Rebbe: The Life and Good Works of Rabbi Boruch Milikowsky
(Urim Publications) brings to life a personality who had a profound
influence on many hundreds of students during his 40-year career at
Talmudical Academy. And, after reading about his kindness and wisdom in
dealing with teenage boys and, of course, his brilliance in Torah and
in teaching Torah, one can only say, “I wish I had known him in
person.” But isn’t that the point of a good biography? Print may be
second best, but Mr. Blumberg does an outstanding job of introducing us
to Rabbi Milikowsky through this inspiring yet credible portrait.
Like other figures who built Baltimore’s institutions of
learning, Rabbi Milikowsky was a direct link to the great pre-War
European yeshivos. He was a “Litvak,” born in 1913 as the oldest child
of a prosperous business family. Although the family was strictly
religious and the children were raised to love Jewish practice, it was
not a family of rabbis and scholars. When Boruch finished the
traditional cheder in town, it was his own decision – influenced by his
talmid chacham great-grandfather – to attend a yeshiva. He studied at
the Chofetz Chaim’s yeshiva in Radin from age 12 to 21, taking off half
a year at age 17 to experience Rav Elchonon Wasserman’s yeshiva in
Baranovitz. In 1934, Rabbi Milikowsky moved on to the elite Mir
Yeshiva, where he was accepted despite his young age.
From this point, Rabbi Milikowsky became part of the miraculous story
of the Mir, and the author of the book describes the fascinating
historical details, including the escape to Shanghai and the life of
the yeshiva students there. Rabbi Milikowsky distinguished himself in
Shanghai not only as a talmid chacham but also as a baal chesed. At the
end of the War, he traveled to the United States with the Yeshiva and
continued learning in the Mir in New York. Altogether, he learned in
yeshiva for 22 years!
Rabbi Milikowsky began teaching at T.A. in 1947. Many of us in
21st century Baltimore don’t know that T.A. sponsored many Torah
scholars who were Holocaust survivors, bringing them to America and
giving them teaching jobs in the elementary school or the
newly-established high school. The language of instruction in limudei
kodesh was Yiddish at that time, so English was not a problem. What was
a problem was handling American children and controlling the classroom.
Some of the men were too scarred from their experiences to teach or
relate to the boys, and soon dropped out. (One T.A. boy recalls his
class going through seven or eight rebbeim in one year.) Adding to the
teaching challenge was the fact that the student population of T.A. was
composed of two very different groups, requiring different approaches:
boys who were highly motivated and accomplished in learning and boys
from nonobservant families whose parents only wanted them to maintain
their Jewish identity.
Rabbi Milikowsky made it. Despite his accented English, he managed to
“get through” to the sometimes brash American teenagers in his charge.
As one boy remembers, “We were not an easy bunch. Of course he was a
European, and he didn’t know the ways of the Americans yet, and we
tried to pull the wool over his eyes. Yet gradually, gradually, he got
us to learn! He learned how to control us! I remember. We saw that he
was very kind. Sometimes he had to shout, but he was very good.”
After teaching the eighth and ninth grades, Rabbi Milikowsky
moved up to the tenth grade, where he remained for the rest of his
career. Gradually, Rabbi Samson, the Rosh Yeshiva, realized that his
warm rapport with the students also made him suitable for the job of
mashgiach for the dormitory boys. In fact, he was already doing aspects
of the job informally. (Interestingly, T.A.’s first dorm mashgiach was
the then-unmarried Rabbi Hirsch Diskind.)
So, Rabbi Milikowsky became the mashgiach, and it was soon clear that
this was his essence, that everything he was and had experienced until
then – including his innate qualities of insight and understanding, his
tragic personal losses in the Holocaust, and his contact with the great
mashgichim of Europe – had prepared him for this task. “More than
anything else, it was his role as mashgiach that earned Rabbi
Milikowsky the title ‘Rebbe.’”
-Elaine Berkowitz
Where, What, When
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