Rav Yitzchok Feigelstock left an enduring imprint on America’s yeshivah world

Photos: AEGedolimphotos.com, Family archives via COLlive   

There are those who use the eloquence of words to reach others, each phrase and expression hitting with the force of a hammer’s blow.

Others use silence, a quiet, burning intensity creating its own sort of impact.

And there is a third sort, the rare individual who uses both — not silent, but also not a speaker. Words are chosen carefully, taken seriously — tools, perhaps, but not the goal. It’s not the oratory or rhetoric that inspires the listener, but the person himself.

That’s how Rav Yitzchok Feigelstock, who passed away last week at age 95, reached generations of students — stamping them with the unique imprint of a Long Beach talmid.

Back in time to Vienna of the 1930s. Reb Avrohom Feigelstock was a respected figure — a learned businessman who gave regular shiurim and was devoted to the Torah of his sons for whom he hired private melamdim. His wife, Gittel, was a great-granddaughter of the Chasam Sofer, the leading light of Austrian Jewry.

As the Nazi threat increased and it became clear that they would have to escape, the family split up: Yosef Yitzchok, not long after his bar mitzvah, ended up in Uruguay.

The next generation of roshei yeshivah was being cultivated in the yeshivos of Eretz Yisrael or in America, hearing chaburos and arguing in learning, but this bochur was in South America with no rebbi, chavrusa, or friend, utterly alone.

Not just alone, but lonely.

At a different time, Rav Yitzchok would occasionally do something out of character and speak about himself. It was a rarity, but at the Shabbos sheva brachos of his daughter to the son of his dear friend Rav Elya Svei, he allowed himself a brief moment of public introspection.

He reflected on his personal journey and Hakadosh Baruch Hu’s boundless chesed. The talmidim, unused to hearing their rebbi speak about himself, were spellbound. But then Rav Yitzchok did something even more unusual.

“I don’t know if I have any zechusim, but if I have a single zechus, a source of merit that allowed me to experience so many chassadim, it might have been this.”

Rav Yitzchok spoke about those years in Uruguay and said that while he wasn’t the only Jewish teenager there, he was the only one who didn’t join in any of the youth groups. These mixed-gender groups gave the young people a social dynamic, company, acceptance, something to belong to. But the Viennese bochur had a sense that he didn’t belong there, and so he stayed away.

“Perhaps,” he said, “this was the zechus that stood by me.”

He eventually came to America, joining his two brothers. Moshe was already in Beis Medrash Elyon and Hershel was in Lubavitch. (Rav Moshe Feigelstock, who passed away in 2015, would become rosh yeshivah of Yeshiva Tiferes Elimelech, and Rav Hershel, who passed away in 2020, would  become principal of Yeshiva Tomchei Temimim Lubavitch in Montreal, Canada.) Moshe felt that his brother would do well in Torah Vodaath, and though Yitzchok had learned with his father until his bar mitzvah, he didn’t come into the yeshivah as a prodigy.

He had spent years on the run, and hadn’t attended a formal cheder since he’d been a young boy.

But Rav Gedalia Schorr saw something in the young man, and he encouraged him.

They learned together, they walked together, they often spoke — and in time, Rav Schorr paid his talmid the ultimate compliment.

He suggested that Yitzchok Feigelstock go learn under his own rebbi, Rav Aharon Kotler.

“It was a neis that the Rosh Yeshivah accepted me — I wasn’t on the level,” Rav Yitzchok would later say.

Perhaps it was a miracle. Part of that greater miracle called the rebirth of Torah in America and the miracle of the children born on these shores who would themselves take part in that rebirth, so many of them talmidim of this one-time immigrant.