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Judaism teaches that God controls, supervises, manipulates and directs Jewish History. While we struggle to understand why the unprecedented genocide of the Holocaust had to happen, we know that God willed it. Of course this raises important and grave questions, which must be examined thoughtfully and sensitively. This class is a recounting of a largely unknown but remarkable story of the renowned Mir Yeshiva ‘s miraculous escape from danger intact; it’s trans-Siberian journey to Japan and China and it’s reestablishment as a dynamic Torah center halfway across the world while European Jewry was being decimated. We follow the story lines of two protagonists, Rabbis Shlomo Wolbe and Aron Florans zt”l – mine and my wife’s paternal grandfathers respectively –  and tell the story of how they participated in and contributed to God’s plan to resuscitate the Torah world from the ashes and despair of the fiery inferno that so brutally consumed it.

Mir Yeshiva Shanghai