Translated by Rabbi Yair Hoffman

This letter was written on 22 Shevat 5707 (February 12, 1947) by Rabbi Eliezer Yehuda Finkel zt”l, Rosh Yeshiva of the Mir Yeshiva, from Jerusalem to members of his yeshiva community still stranded abroad, most likely in Shanghai or in transit, awaiting immigration certificates to Eretz Yisrael.

The Mir Yeshiva, founded in 1815 in present-day Belarus, had grown to nearly 500 students under Rav Leizer Yudel’s interwar leadership. When the Nazis and Soviets divided Poland in 1939, the yeshiva fled to Lithuania. In 1940, through visas issued by Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk and Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara in Kovno, the bulk of the yeshiva escaped across Siberia to Kobe, Japan, and then to Shanghai — making the Mir the only major European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact. Rav Leizer Yudel himself, due to health issues, traveled separately through Odessa and Turkey to Palestine, where he opened a small branch of the yeshiva in Jerusalem in 1944 with about ten students. The main body — led by his son-in-law Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz and mashgiach Rav Yechezkel Levenstein — remained in Shanghai’s Beth Aharon Synagogue throughout the war. Even after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, transportation difficulties kept most members stranded until late 1946 or early 1947.

The barrier to entering Eretz Yisrael was the British Mandatory government’s stranglehold on Jewish immigration. The White Paper of 1939 had capped Jewish entry at 75,000 over five years. That quota was exhausted by December 1945, but the British continued permitting only 1,500 certificates per month — a pitiful number given that over 250,000 survivors languished in European DP camps and thousands more were stranded in Shanghai. From the summer of 1946 onward, the British began deducting intercepted “illegal” immigrants from this quota, and by December 1946, half the monthly certificates were allocated to detainees in the British internment camps on Cyprus, where over 50,000 Jews were ultimately imprisoned. This left roughly 750 certificates per month for the entire Jewish Agency to distribute worldwide.

Within this impossible reality, Rav Leizer Yudel had been promised up to 30 certificates for his yeshiva members — and then the promise was revoked. As he writes with evident pain, “here they had agreed to give me up to 30 certificates, but they changed their decision and broke their promise.” Such reversals were tragically common. Even the most prominent Torah leaders, he notes, had been unable to secure “even a single certificate.”

His reference to “two months in a place of confinement” alludes to the Atlit detention camp near Haifa, where arriving immigrants were held temporarily before release — not confinement abroad, as the recipients had misunderstood. The letter also mentions a ship departing America around the 20th of Shevat carrying his son-in-law Rav Chaim Shmuelevitz and his son to Eretz Yisrael. Rav Shmuelevitz had left Shanghai for New York with the last contingent of students in early 1947 and was now en route to join his father-in-law at the Mir in Jerusalem, where he would serve as Rosh Yeshiva for decades.

This letter captures a pivotal moment: the great Rosh Yeshiva of Mir straining with every fiber to bring his talmidim home, hampered at every turn by a British policy that, in the aftermath of the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history, continued to bar the gates of the Holy Land to the shattered remnants of European Jewry

                                            —-

Rosh Yeshiva, Yeshivas Mir — Jerusalem, Eretz Yisrael

22 Shevat 5707 (February 12, 1947)

Rabbi L. J. Finkel | Dean of the Rabbinical College | MIR | Jerusalem, Palestine

To my dear and beloved friends, may they live long, with goodness and pleasantness.

After wishes of peace and blessing, with abundant love!

Your letter indeed reached me at its proper time. I read your words, spoken from great pain and anguish. I empathize with you in your suffering — your pain is my pain. My heart mourns for you, on account of the amount of suffering that has fallen upon your lot. Let us hope that after the full measure of suffering has been heaped [upon you], you will have already merited to arrive in Eretz Yisrael, for indeed Chazal have said that Eretz Yisrael is acquired through suffering.

Regarding that which you wrote — that I had promised you to obtain certificates on your behalf — indeed, the fault is not mine. For indeed, here they had agreed to give me up to 30 certificates, but they changed their decision and broke their promise.

It is well known that the situation does not always remain in its place; it changes its face and the times shift, as [they do] from day to day. And if so, your complaints should not be directed at me. For is it not known to you that the entire nation is steeped in distress and finds itself in such a state? And if this destruction has struck us as well, behold, our obligation is to give thanks to Hashem Yisbarach [for His kindnesses] — that He left us alive, through His abundant mercy. And if your grievance and complaints are about the fact that I want you to come to our Holy Land — if about this, then indeed you are right, and you are justified in this complaint!

But know, my dear and beloved ones, that everything that is within our ability — we are doing, truly with mesiras nefesh.

We are exerting ourselves on your behalf so that you should come to the good and desirable Land, with Hashem’s help. But everyone knows the great difficulties that we encounter, and there is no counsel or recourse against the authorities. For have even our great leaders who stand at the helm obtained even a single certificate? I have already mentioned this once, and I mention it again: that perhaps it would be proper for you to turn to Mr. Horowitz for help, and if he can assist in this matter — in obtaining the certificates — then how good [that would be].

This week I received regards from Mr. Breuer, who met with you. In the course of his conversation with me, it became clear to me that you are mistaken regarding what I wrote to you — that you would need to spend two months in a place of confinement. My intention was not that you would need to spend these two months abroad, but rather in the place where Mr. Weinhaus is located — in Eretz Yisrael, in Atlit (an absorption center).

Mr. Breuer also told me that on the 20th of this month, a ship is crossing from America to Eretz Yisrael, and on this ship my son-in-law and my son, may they live long, will be coming. Please be so kind as to convey to my son-in-law, the Gaon Rav Chaim, may his light shine, who will be sailing on this ship — [a message by way of] Brisk to me — informing us on which day the ship departs. And incidentally, it is proper and important that he [Rav Chaim Shmulevitz] should accompany them on their journey to Haifa, and there perhaps I will be able to meet with him for some hours before his [continued] journey to the United States. Perhaps it would also be proper that you too — all of you — should make your way on this ship. And would that it should be that all of you will be able to come on this ship, with Hashem’s help.

I conclude with a blessing from the holy and sanctified place: Strengthen yourselves and be courageous, and let not your spirits fall! With Hashem’s help we shall merit to see each other face to face, here in “the city of our strength” [Yerushalayim]. And through His salvation we shall be saved.

I hereby wish for you good health and “superior light” and all that is good. May you merit to see the return of Hashem with the captivity of His people, and the ingathering of those who were scattered, from the lands of their dispersion, to the land of their forefathers — with the coming of the righteous Redeemer, speedily, Amen.

With the prayer of one who anticipates seeing you,

[Rabbi] Eliezer Yehuda Finkel