This incredible story appears in the newly-released bestseller “Sulam Yaakov” by Yedidya and Sivan (Rahav) Meir.
Rav Kahaneman, the Ponovezher Rav, lost his wife and three of his four children in the Shoah. When the Nazis entered Ponovezh in August 1941 they conducted a systematic annihilation of all the Jews in the city. Hundreds of the yeshiva’s students were murdered in a nearby forest as well as the entire staff of the yeshiva.
Rav Kahaneman was saved, and he channeled his tremendous pain into non-stop activity and building. He married a second time, established a family, and became a symbol of rebuilding the world of Torah anew from the ashes.
At the meal celebrating his new marriage, Rav Kahaneman said, “Sometimes people who go through a trauma go crazy, God forbid. They lose their sanity. After what I went through, I should be crazy, somebody who throws rocks in the street. But I chose to be a different kind of crazy, a crazy person who throws rocks, but in an organized way, and constructs a building out of them.”
And Rav Kahaneman did build–orphanages, educational institutions, as well as the Ponovitch Yeshiva, one of the largest yeshivas in the world.
Rav Kahaneman’s students share that when he got older, and Rav Kahaneman would have to climb up the hill to the yeshiva to teach, sometimes he would feel that he had no strength left. He would stop, take a photograph out of his pocket, look at it, and continue climbing. The photograph was of his wife and children who had been murdered. He explained that there are those for whom looking at a photograph like that would crush them, but for him, it gave him the strength to go on.
