40 M ISH PACHA 27 Sivan 5773 | June 5, 2013 M ISH PACHA 41

by Barbara Bensoussanphotos Family Archives

Today’s high school graduates take their year in Eretz Yisrael for granted, but a few decades ago the Jewish Agency could barely fill the spots in the two yeshivos under their auspices. Rabbi Malle Galinsky z”l changed all that. He made sure all young Jews could find their place to learn Torah in the Holy Land, changing the face of Orthodoxy in America

HowStream a trıckle became a

40 M ISH PACHA

42 M ISH PACHA 27 Sivan 5773 | June 5, 2013 M ISH PACHA 43

In addition to his duties to the shul and yeshivah, Rav Yehuda Dov Galinsky did a weekly Friday af-ternoon radio show in Yiddish on WEVD. “WEVD used to call itself ‘the station that speaks your language,’ ” recalls Professor Chaim Waxman, a sociologist and friend of Rabbi Malle Galinsky. “Rabbi Galinsky was one of the pioneers of learn-ing on the radio. He’d talk about the parshah, he’d tell stories. People would send donations to the yeshivah l’illui nishmas and he’d announce each one and personally thank the donors.”

As a bochur, Malle learned in Rabeinu Yaakov Yosef (RJJ) — and he would later earn an MA in Jewish education at Yeshiva University, and con-tinue there for doctoral work. But Rabbi Yehuda Dov Galinsky would not live to see his sons’ adult achievements: in 1956, he suddenly passed away. Malle, the second son, was barely 18. “Over a two-year period, my father prepared to take over the shul,” says Rabbi Ephraim Galinsky of his father’s mission at such a young age. Malle initially shared the leadership with his older brother yblch”t Rab-bi Moshe. But when Moshe Galinsky left to take a position in Providence, Rhode Island, it was young Rabbi Malle — just 20 years old — who assumed leadership of his father’s shul and the yeshivah as well.

Mrs. Reyna Hisiger, whose father was a close friend of the young rabbi, remembers that her family moved next door shortly after Rabbi Ga-linsky married Sonia and the young couple settled in Coney Island, sharing a wall with them during her teenage years. “Coney Island was a small, tight-knit community back then,” she says, “and Rabbi Galinsky had a unique relationship with my father, who eventually served as president of the shul.”

Rabbi Galinsky continued his father’s Yiddish radio show as a means of propagating Torah and bringing in donations for the yeshivah, becoming

Rav Ephraim Zalman Halpern (L) and his son-in-law Rav Yehuda Dov Galinsky, rabbis in the challenging world of Jewish Americana

Rabbi Galinsky, the young rabbi with the booming voice and radiant smile; at his wedding, flanked by RJJ Rosh Yeshivah Rav Mendel Kravitz (to his right) and the Kopycznitzer Rebbe, a beloved father figure; Coney Island’s Sharei Tzedek, before the neighborhood changed

TThere are certain movements that become so much a part of community life we forget they ever had a beginning; we forget the brave, hardworking pioneers who pushed them into common parlance. There was Chedva Sil-verfarb and lashon hara; there was Reb Yaakov Birnbaum and Soviet Jewry; there was ArtScroll and the flourishing of English-language seforim.

And then there’s the phenomenon of the Year in Israel. As I write these words, I myself have two children in Israel, spending the year in yeshivah and seminary respectively. But 40 years ago, hard as it may be to believe, it was a rare individual who went to Eretz Yisrael after high school to learn. How did a small trickle of American students venturing across the ocean turn into a stream? How did the “Israel year” become a sort of life-stage migration as inexorable as salmon swimming upriver to spawn?

Unknown to many in our community, Rabbi Malle (Mallen) Galinsky z”l, who passed away in April at the age of 77, was one of the foremost figures in creating the custom of sending young people for a year of study. Hired by the Jewish Agency in the late 1960s to expand study options for American stu-dents in Israel, he became a sort of master shadchan between American and Israeli yeshivos. Personally unassuming and deeply dedicated to chinuch, he helped create a movement that would profoundly affect generations of Torah youth to come.

In His Father’s Shoes According to Rabbi Galinsky’s son, Rab-bi Ephraim Galinsky, his father’s family history left him well placed to interact with Jews of every stripe. “My grandfather Yehuda Dov Galin-sky came from Lita, from the town of Astryn near Grodno, which was the home of Rav Shimon Shkop,” he says. “But he came as a young child to the US, where he learned under Rav Simcha Soloveitchik (brother of Rav Chaim) at Eitz Chaim Yeshivah.”

Surprisingly, a shidduch was suggested between Yehuda Dov (a Litvack) and the daughter of Rav Ephraim Zalman Halpern, a chassidic rav sent to Den-ver by Rav Yisroel of Tchortkov to serve the city’s chassidic kehillos during and after World War I (and perhaps best-known for establishing the Central Committee for Taharas HaMishpachah after moving to Jerusalem in 1935 and building hundreds of mikvaos all over Eretz Yisrael).

After the couple married, Rabbi Yehuda Dov became the rav in Colchester, Connecticut. He stayed there from 1931 to 1944, whereupon he was offered the rabbinic position at Sharei Tzedek, a large congregation in Coney Island. “My father-in-law was recommended for the position on the condition that he also open a yeshivah,” recalls Mrs. Sonia Galinsky, Rabbi Malle’s wife. But that wasn’t an easy proposition: “It was a time when most people were trying hard to assimilate into American society rather than affirm their Jewishness, and it was a middle-class and poor neighborhood. But he went from door to door begging people for support, and succeeded in opening the yeshivah.”

“He felt that deciding on a

yeshivah is the second-most

important decision a person can

make, he made it his business

to make sure the parents were on board, and that

the child got into the right place for him and thrived”

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How A Trickle Became A Stream

popular in his own right as a polished speaker with an engaging personality. “He was Ameri-can, but he spoke an excellent Yiddish,” his wife Sonia says. “Many people who listened were convinced he was an elderly European rav.”

“Thousands of people at that time would listen to his Friday shows,” says his friend Rabbi Zevulun Charlop, rav of Young Israel of Mosholu Parkway and faculty member of YU. “He was also, by the way, an equally gifted speaker in English, and spoke an exception-ally fine Hebrew.”

Mrs. Hisiger, who used to help type an-nouncements for Rabbi Galinsky’s radio show as a college student, says people used to be so thrilled to hear him announce their names on the radio. “He had a kind of fan club,” she says. “People would call in with their family news, and he’d read it over the air.”

It was in Coney Island that he received his first on-the-job training in running yeshivah dinners and fundraising. Rabbi Galinsky’s famous wide smile, organizational gifts, and winning personality made him well-loved among his congregants and talmidim. “A lot of the people became frum because of Rabbi Galinsky,” Mrs. Hisiger says. “Today, those people have produced generations of frum Jews that give us all a lot of nachas.”

But the Coney Island shul did not endure; the area declined precipitously in the 1970s, as public high-rise housing projects changed the character of the neighborhood. “The shul emptied out almost overnight,” Sonia says. “We tried to hold on, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

Meanwhile, with the reawakening of Jew-ish pride following the 1967 Six Day War, the Torah Department of the Jewish Agency be-gan looking for someone to organize Jewish

study for young people in Israel, someone who could bridge the Jewish Agency and the yeshivah world. Rabbi Joshua Fishman, then executive vice president of Torah Umesorah, recommended Rabbi Malle Galinsky, who was known as an oheiv Eretz Yisrael and oheiv habriyos. As his friend Chaim Waxman puts it, “He was above categorizing people … He hated labels. A Jew was a Jew.”

Save the Children Rabbi Dr. David Eliach, the now-retired principal of Ye-shivah of Flatbush High School, says that the idea of sending young people to Eretz Yisrael after graduation grew out of a concern among himself and other Jewish high school principals that their graduates were dropping away from Judaism after high school.

“Most of the students would go off to college when they finished high school, and 70 to 80 percent of them were not staying religious,” Rabbi Eliach says. “Rabbi Simcha Teitelbaum [from Yeshiva High School of Queens] and myself discussed how we might keep these kids, and we thought a year of study in Israel might help.”

Rabbi Yehoshua Bakst of the Ramaz school joined them, and together they promoted a “Tochnit Yud-Bet” program, in which seniors who didn’t want to go away for an entire year would go to Israel in the second half of their senior year. “It’s funny,” muses Rabbi Eliach, “how the three of us pushing this idea — Rabbi Bakst, Rabbi Teitelbaum, and myself — were all born in Israel ourselves.”

But it soon became clear they needed a fa-cilitator, someone who could spearhead the effort and make a broad range of shidduchim between young people and yeshivah programs. For this, they turned to Rabbi Galinsky, now employed as the national associate director of the Torah education department of the Jewish Agency.

Their first attempts were stabs in the dark: they sent some students to religious kibbut-zim like Yavneh, while another bochur went to Yeshivas Chevron. Eventually the Jewish Agency itself opened Beit Midrash L’Torah (BMT) for men and Machon Gold for women.

Rabbi Galinsky accumulated many a fre-quent-flyer mile visiting Israeli yeshivos and working with them to accept American bo-churim. One of his early partners was Rav Nosson Kamenetsky, the son of Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky and the rosh yeshivah of Ye-shivas ITRI. He also worked with Rav Meir Schlesinger of Yeshivat Sha’alvim to create a program especially for Americans, and later brought Yeshivat Har Etzion and Yeshivat Hakotel on board.

Despite the wave of pro-Israel sentiment at the time, the Jewish Agency’s early efforts met with much resistance. “They were all against it — the parents, the principals, even Yeshiva University,” Rabbi Eliach says. But why would YU object? “Because they hoped these young men would go straight to them after high school,” he replies. “But in the end, many of those students came back and continued their studies at YU anyway, and it’s because of those returnees that the beis medrash there grew into a thriving, serious beis medrash.”

Rabbi Galinsky didn’t simply make the arrangements and sit back — he followed up with his unique, personal touch. “He felt that deciding on a yeshivah is the second-most important decision a person can make,” says Rabbi Jay Marcus, who later took over Rabbi Galinksy’s position. “He made it his business to make sure the parents were on board, and that the child got into the right place for him and thrived. He handled any malfunctions that would arise.

“In the early days, the Jewish Agency re-cruited mostly from Modern Orthodox ye-shivah high schools,” he continues. “This was before the baal teshuvah movement, before going to Israel after high school became a rite of passage. In those years, living in Israel required a dramatic adjustment. Although American students back then were used to lower levels of comfort than students today, they still had to get used to Israeli dorms and showers, Israeli food, living away from home.”

In those days, calling home was a rare and expensive enterprise involving hand-fuls of phone tokens. Air conditioning was undreamed of, and security less developed. Some of the yeshivos were still situated near

As professor Chaim Waxman notes in Flipping Out? Myth or Fact: The Impact of the “Year in Israel,” the idea of moving away to learn torah dates as far back as Rabi Nehorai’s injunction to “exile yourself to a place of to-rah” in Pirkei Avos (4:18).

In the late 19th and early 20th century, the main cen-ters of torah learning were still in Europe, and Ameri-can youth who desired the highest levels of yeshivah learning would take themselves there. Among those who famously made the journey were Rav Chaim pin-chas scheinberg, Rabbi Avigdor Miller, and Rav Mor-dechai Gifter. travel to Eretz yisrael was more rare, although Rabbi behr Manischewitz, of matzoh fame, sent his sons to learn in the holy Land, with the first departing at age ten in 1901.

During the time of the hebron massacre in 1929, about two dozen American students were among those learning in hebron yeshivah, slabodka, and sever-al of them were killed. “Until the late 1950s,” professor Waxman writes, “all such activity [learning in Eretz yisrael] was unorganized, on an individual basis, and on a very small scale.”

In 1957, through the initiative of Rabbi Zevi tabory of the Jewish Agency, a small number of American students were sent to yeshivat Kerem b’yavneh (Kby), which later became the first hesder yeshivah. by 1969, close to 50 men and women had signed on for Israel study; the men went to Kby or the newly established beit Midrash L’torah (bMt), and the women went to Ma-chon Gold. It was around that time that Rabbi Galinsky was hired to expand these options.

historical factors obviously increased the facility of going to Eretz yisrael to learn. Despite per-sistent threats of war or terrorism, overall security in the country increased, and in the latter half of the 20th century travel by plane became cheaper and more common. by the 1970s, following the miracles of the six Day War and the attendant burst of pro-Israel feeling, many Americans were inspired to visit.

by the 1980s and ’90s the American Jewish community had become wealthier, and Israel itself built rapidly from a developing nation to a high-tech, First World country that was a more com-fortable place for Americans to stay. Even more importantly, the tremendous postwar growth of the orthodox community and yeshivah/day school system produced thousands of graduates who desired an authentic, intensive yeshivah experience in the holy Land.

Rabbi Galinsky was a man who lived his philosophy. With close friend Rabbi Zevulun Charlop (L); at a Russian Melaveh Malka with refusenik Yuli Edelstein (C); with mechutan Rabbi Yehuda Paley z”l

Exile to a Place of Torah

How A Trickle Became A Stream

farmland, and as Rabbi Marcus quips, “If the wind blew the wrong way, you enjoyed the smell of the farm.”

But even today, with modern Israel better supplied with creature comforts, Rabbi Mar-cus maintains that American young people still benefit from witnessing firsthand Israeli levels of mesirus nefesh that outstrip their own. “Whether it’s by serving in the army, or living a lifestyle that doesn’t include a two-car garage and vacations, Israelis still model a higher level of mesirus nefesh,” he says. He adds that these lengthy stays were and remain the best argument in convincing Americans to make aliyah; other experiences like Birthright tours are too short to leave much impact. “Out of ev-erything the Jewish Agency has tried, spending a year studying in Israel is still the best way of persuading people to come live here,” he says.

Rabbi Eliach maintains that the year in Israel experience — skillfully coordinated by Rabbi Galinksy — ultimately changed the entire face of modern Orthodoxy. The participation in Is-raeli yeshivos significantly raised the spiritual level of its participants: “The kids would come back having absorbed that there is such a thing as halachah, that you have to daven three times a day, that learning is valuable,” he says. In his opinion, launching the trend to send to Eretz Yisrael — which was subsequently adopted in more chareidi circles as well — was “the most successful achievement in Jewish education.… Simply providing them with the experience of learning only limudei kodesh all day long was inspiring for these students.”

New Frontiers After some ten years working with the Jewish Agency, opening Torah study options ever wider to Amer-ican students, Rabbi Galinsky received

what was a dream offer to a man who loved the Holy Land: a yeshivah position in Eretz Yisrael, to expand the program for “chutznikim” at Sha’alvim. The family packed up in 1976, and Rabbi Galinsky be-came the head of the American program.

In fact, his efforts were so impressive that the chutznik section of the yeshivah began to outstrip the Israeli section. Always looking for innovation, he initiated, along with Mr. Zev Wolfson z”l, the Sha’al program. “That program trained serious yeshivah students from Israel with a background in English, French, Spanish to go out on shlichut,” Sonia says. “Then they would be sent to communities in places like the US, Portugal, France, Brazil — places where it’s difficult to find rabbanim.” For over 17 years, Sha’al prepared young men for rabbinic posts, providing training in halachah, hashkafah, even public speaking and counseling.

Another program called “Meretz” was in-corporated into Sha’alvim’s five-year Hesder program. It trained talmidim so that they were able to receive recognized degrees through the Ministry of Education and teach in Israe-li schools.

One of Sha’alvim’s staunchest supporters — and a close friend — was Joseph Miller z”l. He was a lawyer, accountant, and OU askan who was one of the passengers on Pan Am Flight 103, blown up in 1989 by terrorists over Lock-erbie, Scotland. “Reb Malle was devastated,” Professor Waxman remembers. “He immedi-ately flew to Scotland with Rabbi Shaya Lebor, staying there for almost an entire week until they were able to bring the kadosh Joseph Miller to kevurah in Eretz Yisrael.”

He showed the same type of dedication to his students. Rabbi Kalman Feder, a former talmid, remembers that once his grandmother

had asked him to go daven at the kever of her great-grandfather before leaving Eretz Yisrael on a trip home to the US. Rabbi Feder, then 18, remembered that Har HaMenuchos wasn’t far from Givat Shaul, where Rabbi Galinsky lived, and asked for his help getting to the kever. “I hadn’t realized Har HaMenuchos is like a city, and I had no idea where to go,” he says. “Rabbi Galinsky drove me back to his house, where we called my uncle, who was a friend of his, and got directions. By the time we returned, it was already dark.”

Rabbi Galinsky was also responsible for the fundraising portion of the yeshivah, a job that wasn’t easy. “My husband used to say he wasn’t good at schnorring,” Sonia says. “He organized functions in cities throughout the US, building a network of supporters, and ran the annual dinner.” Nevertheless, he was successful by dint of his sincerity and enthusiasm, and Sonia says that because of his frequent traveling she never sought to work outside the home. “Some-body had to keep the home fires burning,” she says, referring to raising their seven children.

Undercover Rabbis In December 1983, while working at Sha’alvim, Rabbi Galinsky received an offer he couldn’t re-fuse: the chance to visit the Soviet Union to bring support and succor to Jewish refuse-niks, accompanied by his old camp bud-dy Rabbi Sholom Gold, who had recently made aliyah from West Hempstead.

“After the Six Day War, Israel used to send two people to the Soviet Union every six months, to keep in touch with the dissidents,” Rabbi Gold explains. “At the time it wasn’t easy to go. It was all done on the quiet; we were given our instructions by Aryeh Kroll, who nobody even talked about until recently. Kroll was a

man who had never set foot in those cities [he made aliyah from Minsk as a child in 1935], yet he could describe every street and byway as if he’d grown up there, and he knew all the people.”

Rabbis Galinsky and Gold had been ap-proached because the Israeli government needed rabbis with American citizenship who could — unlike Israelis — enter the Sovi-et Union. “They took a plane to London, then changed planes and passports,” Sonia Galinsky remembers. The mission, with its secrecy and potential danger, proceeded like an espionage mission: the two were followed by government surveillance wherever they went. They’d been sent equipped with valuable “gifts” to bring their Jewish friends — items that could be sold to help feed people who’d been cut off from all sources of income.

“It was a fascinating journey,” Rabbi Gold recalls. “I remember a Melaveh Malkah we had with Yudi Edelstein, in which he made a siyum on Perek Chezkas Habatim in Bava Basra.” Edelstein spent two and a half years in the gulag for having taught Hebrew. Today, he lives in Israel and is the Speaker of the Knesset. Another acquaintance from those days, Rabbi Eliyahu Essas, spent his first Pe-sach after leaving the USSR in Shaalvim, and now runs what he claims is the largest online yeshivah in the world, catering to Russian Jews. Many of their fellow refuseniks have since immigrated to Israel and established themselves there.

Rabbi Galinsky returned to Russia several times after that, including trips with friend Joe Miller to recruit talmidim for Sha’alvim. Later, when now-Judge Noach Dear and Shi-mon Kwestel contacted the OU with a request to help the Jews of Kharkov, they called on Rabbi Galinsky to ask for his assistance. “That became his pet project,” Sonia says. “They put one person there in Kharkov year-round, then would send others for six-month stints. It be-gan as a program in which we’d send students from Sha’alvim to give shiurim to university students and eventually opened a high school. Many of the Jews there, who had no exposure to Yiddishkeit, have since come to Eretz Yisrael and are now frum, ehrliche Yidden.”

No Retirement As the years went by, Rabbi Galinsky became the go-to person for people who wanted advice on how to open a yeshivah, how to create programs, and how to fund them. He also contribut-ed his expertise by serving on the Board of Lander College in Israel and on the board of the Conference of Young Israel rabbis in Israel .

Even after he was officially retired, Rabbi Galinsky kept busy. “He was a tremendous talmid chacham who was always learning,” says Rabbi Gold. “We used to say that paper-back Gemaras were invented just for him — he would always have one with him at weddings, so as not to lose any time.”

Rabbi Galinsky would always speak upon request, and often used the daf yomi as a spring-board for his discourse. “He had this booming voice that could make the walls shake,” says his talmid Rabbi Feder. “It might have even seemed funny with someone else, but he was so sincere; he would enunciate each word of his shiur, repeating phrases for dramatic effect. Even when he greeted someone, he would call out their name enunciating every syllable, and this made people feel very special.”

In his last years, the Galinskys moved to the Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem. Most of his neighbors had no idea who he was and or what he’d accomplished; they knew him from shul, as a person who loved to learn and relat-ed easily to everyone. “When they came to the levayah and heard all that he’d accomplished, they were amazed,” Professor Waxman says.

Rabbi Galinsky actually lived his philosophy: the man who encouraged others to try spend-ing time in Eretz Yisrael moved there himself; a master mechanech, many of his children continue in his footsteps as educators. Rabbi Feder remembers that once, in the Shaalvim newsletter he produced regularly for the ye-shivah community and supporters, he traced every instance in Tanach in which the word “hineini” appears, making the point that his students should be ready to respond “Hineini!” in any hour of need. “But that described him,” Rabbi Feder says. “And even his unusual name — Malle — fit his persona: he lifted himself and he uplifted all of us.” —

27 Sivan 5773 | June 5, 2013