30 years later, Rav Simcha Wasserman's legacy endures 

Image sourcing & additional research by Dovi Safier

Rav Simcha Wasserman built communities, one after another, but as soon as he established them on solid footing, he would hand over the reins and move on. He was in the background, which is exactly where he wanted to be. But the cornerstones he laid l’sheim Shamayim grew into solid edifices. Over 30 years after his petirah,  his legacy endures

The flourishing growth of the contemporary frum community would be unthinkable were it not for the seeds planted by great individuals in 20th century America. There were roshei yeshivah of towering stature and legendary mechanchim who founded institutions of lasting importance, klal activists who engaged in lifesaving hatzolah work, and pioneers of kiruv who brought countless Jews back from the spiritual brink.

And then there was Rav Simcha Wasserman.

For nearly three decades, from the 1950s through the 70s, he and his wife, Rebbetzin Faiga Rochel, crisscrossed the American Jewish landscape together — east to west and north to south — teaching Torah, seeding schools, touching lives with love and caring, and drawing distant Jewish souls near. Wherever they went, the influence they wielded was enormous, and endures still. And yet, three decades after his passing, Rav Simcha Wasserman remains a relatively lesser-known American gadol — which is precisely as he would have wanted it.

Reb Simcha’s story spans entire eras and four continents, and capturing his life in all its magnificent fullness requires a very wide lens. He once recalled how in Telshe, in far northern Lithuania, summer nights are extremely short, and while walking one Motzaei Shabbos in the fields on the town’s outskirts he saw a sunset and sunrise at the same time. This struck him as an apt metaphor for his own life, during which he witnessed the sunset of a thousand years of traditional European Jewish life, followed by the blackest of nights during the war years, and the simultaneous rising of the sun of a new Jewish generation in America and Eretz Yisrael.

The Novardok Launch

The eldest son of Rav Elchonon Wasserman, legendary head of Baranovitch’s Yeshiva Ohel Torah, Reb Simcha spent his formative years in the company of prewar Eastern Europe’s most storied Torah leaders. His father was the Chofetz Chaim’s prime disciple, and little Simcha spent time sitting on that renowned tzaddik’s lap. He was also a nephew of Rav Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky, whose second wife, Yacha, was a sister of Reb Simcha’s mother, Rebbetzin Michla Wasserman.

As a young man, Reb Simcha learned in some of the finest yeshivos of the day, spending years in Telshe, where he was a chavrusa of Rav Elya Meir Bloch, and in Grodno as well, learning from Rav Shimon Shkop, who had been his father’s rebbi, too. For five years following his marriage, until age 29, he learned under Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer in Slutsk. And of course, back home in Baranovitch he also spent much time learning privately with his father; many years later, he would go on to publish many of Reb Elchonon’s Torah writings.

But if there was one period more formative for Reb Simcha than any other, it was perhaps the four years he spent under the wing of Reb Yosef Yoizel Horowitz in Novardok, from age 13 to 17. Rabbi Dr. Dovid Fox, a well-known Los Angeles-based psychologist and rav who was a close talmid of Reb Simcha, quotes a leading mussar personality’s observation that wherever Reb Simcha went, “he carried Novardok with him,” embodying its principles and modeling them for every other Jew whose path he crossed.

Alone among Europe’s great Torah academies, Novardok set out to disseminate Torah in unique fashion, sending its talmidim out to found yeshivos throughout the Russian countryside. After launching a school in makeshift quarters, they’d begin combing the nearby villages for young boys whom they could recruit as students. Once the new school was on sound footing, it was on to the next town, to establish yet another makom Torah. Rav Shmuel Berenbaum, rosh yeshivah of Brooklyn’s Mirrer Yeshiva, was one such youngster who owed his entry into the world of Torah to the recruitment efforts of two intrepid Novardoker bochurim.

The Novardok yeshivah system continued expanding in this way until 1922, when the Communists’ viselike grip on the Soviet Union made the future of religious life there impossibly bleak. On the Chofetz Chaim’s say-so, 600 Novardokers made a successful break over the Polish border. Once in Poland, Novardok’s work of spreading Torah resumed, and in the ensuing 18 years until World War II, its educational network came to encompass some 100 yeshivos on both elementary and advanced levels, numbering 4,000 students between them.

Already at the tender age of 15, Reb Simcha was chosen by the Alter of Novardok to join a group of fellow bochurim in creating some of these new yeshivos dotting the Russian landscape. During the war years, the Nazis decimated the ranks of Novardok’s army of marbitzei Torah, and the yeshivah’s glorious legacy was nearly extinguished. But even before the whirlwind of war convulsed the European continent, Reb Simcha and his wife, who possessed her own sterling Novardoker pedigree — her father, Rav Meir Abowitz, a Torah gaon who authored a commentary on all of Talmud Yerushalmi, was the rav of Novardok — had already decided to dedicate their lives to carrying that mission forward.